User Reviews (111 - 116 of 116)

Show these reviews first:

Highest Rated
Lowest Rated Newest
Oldest Most Helpful
Least Helpful

Arr! ESCAPE FROM MONKEY ISLANDtm shud be yer next purchase!

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 0 / 0
Date: December 28, 2000
Author: Amazon User

I was amazed... stunned... and schocked by this latest installment of Monkey Island. The graphics are terrific (not to mention the cutscenes), and the plot is funny and twisted. Guybrush gets us again with familiar run-on jokes and hundreds of new ones. The first part of the game is dissapointing for a long time fan... mostly because Melee Island has locations omitted and stores and shops moved around... but the puzzles are easy there and you'll soon be whisked off to Lucre Island, Jambalya Island, and Monkey Island, which are totally amazing. LucasArts also takes us back to the insults, we do a little insult armwrestling, insult swordfighting, and insult monkey jibberish! Buy it today and see if you can ESCAPE FROM MONKEY ISLANDtm!

Monkey Island goes Fo(u)rth

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 0 / 0
Date: October 10, 2000
Author: Amazon User

Well, well, well! Elanie and Guybrush have just returned from their honeymoon to find chaos on Monkey Island...

Elaine has been declared dead, a sinister candidate (Charles L. Charles) plans to take over her place as govenour and the entire tri-island county is threatened by the dreaded ULTIMATE INSULT.

This means we get to meet a cast of old aquaintances such as Murray the skull, Stan the realty agent and the voodoo lady.But we'll also meet new ones like Charles L. Charles or Ozzie Mandrill.

Thankfully, this is a classic adventure, the only innovations are its being in 3D and the fact that you steer Guybrush with the keyboard.

All in all, I think that LucasArts have once more proved that adventures are not dead and I can't wait to visit the Carribbean for the fourth time!

Best game in years

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 0 / 0
Date: November 09, 2000
Author: Amazon User

Monkey Island is the fourth installment in the legendary Monkey Island series and I'm glad to say that this game is a joy to play! The graphics are great, the music amazing and the voice acting perfect, but it's the plot that really makes the game shine. EMI has a sarcastic storyline that throws jabs at the tourist traps we're turning our cities into. That the story is told in an ultra funny way doesn't hurt either. Guybrush is his typical self - a dimwit who most likely would make an over-complicated project out of tying his shoes. All in all I would recommend this game to anyone who likes devious puzzles, great humor and wonderful storylines. A must have!

To 3d or not to 3d

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 0 / 0
Date: November 12, 2000
Author: Amazon User

One bug I've found in that when Guybrush goes to the harbor, 2 of the ships don't appear in the water nor does he nor the harbormaster. All 4 items flicker a lot, but when you move close to her all is clear. When she leads you to your ship, the bottom half of all characters on that screen is missing.

This is a great game for MI fans but it might putoff newcomers. Some of the lines and jokes might not be understood by all. Personally I liked the old 2d better but to each his own. Carla and Otis looked different back in MI 1 (but then again so did Guybrush and Elaine)

This is, in my opinion, the last great adventure series now that Kings Quest, Space Quest and Leisure Suit Larry are gone. Buy it and prepare for some terrific offbeat humor. When talking to people, try all of the conversations available. You'll find out a lot and some of it can be hilarious.

No, I haven't finished it yet. There's still a long way to go but I'll enjoy all of it.

Enjoyable but occasionally frustrating adventure game

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 0 / 0
Date: March 16, 2008
Author: Amazon User

I'm old enough to remember the Atari ST in the late 80s early 90s and I was vaguely aware of The Secret Of Monkey Island, but Escape is the only one of the series that I've played, so I'm not going to compare it to any other. With that qualification in mind...

I enjoyed this game. At times, very much. But there were also times when I was thinking. "Euurghh I'm really starting to dislike this" I'll list the things I didn't like firstly, to get the unpleasntness over.

- Control is annoying. Guybrush is controlled much like a 3rd person action game, he can walk run anywhere within the games boundaries. Running however has an annoying tendency to bounce him righ back in the opposite direction when he hits a boundary. When he sees objects of interest, it's name appears at the bottom of the screen, but these have a tendency to appear and disappear rapidly depending on whether Guybrush is exactly in the right zone of detection and moving him in just the slightest direction near a busy item hotspot can make the multiple choice tree flash on and off like disco lights. There are also seperate controls for look, pick up and use items and it's not an easy task to program a controller and remember all the buttons. Even at the end of the game I still hadn't gotten the hang of using items in my inventory.

- Some puzzles are just too obscure. Although few seem totally inconprehensible in retrospect I don't see many people completing this without a walktrough. I'll give just one to illustrate.....*Spoiler warning*........... To win a diving competition you need a dunce cap, to reduce your splash, and you need to put some half chewed salmon bagle in your opponents seal oil which will attract seagulls and disturb his dive. Although in hindsight they may make some obscure sense, in the game you'd have a hard job figuring out that the dunce cap in the school is actually wearable and would reduce splashing when diving. And you would also have to know that lox is salmon and making the connection between the bagle and the seal oil is just too much for the average gamer. *end of spoiler*

- I found the superfluous items a bit annoying after a while. 2 hours into the game you *know* that looking at most item will merely produce a mildly amusing remark from Guybrush, so the search for items becomes slightly annoying.

- There is a combat mini game which requires you to a make a note of winning move combinations. It's different every game so you can't consult a walkthrough. I enjoyed it, but it's fairly hard work and might drive off the casual gamer

-The in joke references to previous characters from the series went over my head as I didn't know who they were.

-And maybe it was just me but the game was just too short. I completed it in 3 days of intense play (admittedly with a walkthrough at about a third of the puzzles) but I'd read that it was a huge game.

However despite all that I'm glad I played to the end. Regardless of the annoyances the Monkey Island world is often tremendous fun to be in. The look is somewhat cartoony with odd angled buildings and curly moonlit clouds. The voice acting is uniformly convincing, and the soundtrack is excellent. Some of the puzzles are quite clever and very satisfying when you solve them. And isn't the fact that I wanted to see more after I finished proof enough that the game world is enticing? Above all the Monkey Island world is charmingly silly and is, in the end, great "escapist" entertainment.

not as amusing as the writers thought

2 Rating: 2, Useful: 0 / 0
Date: July 23, 2008
Author: Amazon User

This is the fourth installment in LucasArts' "Monkey Island" series. Producers of the game have stated in on-line interviews that there would indeed be a fifth installment, but as of my writing it's apparently not under production.

I bought and played this one essentially on the strength of the third item in the series, "Escape from Monkey Island," which I adjudge to be far better.

They seemed to have a winning recipe in that installment: why did they completely overhaul the concept?

Well, okay, not everything was overhauled. The voice actors, atmosphere, and quirky sense of humor are all intact, but the game designers saw fit to completely revamp the way Guybrush moves around the screen. And whether you set his movement to "character-relative" or "screen-relative," it never seems to work right.

Nor do the gamemakers think anything of including a lot of puzzles that rely on a timer, so you've got to manuever this difficult to control character around before a certain door closes, etc. I don't think they had the right to do that, so to speak, while the character movement was so wonky.

But the thing that really gets my goat is that they took the unique, beautiful cartoony look of Monkey Island 3 and replaced it with CGI drawn characters, which effectively robs this series of its central charm: superior visuals.

The look of the islands, the sky, the clouds, and even the characters in Monkey 3 was so well-done and charming that I stuck with that game just to enjoy the game's eye-candy. I thought it was the game's greatest strength. And that's precisely what they've monkeyed with -- pardon the pun.

In fact, with the stunning visuals gone, the character of the gameplay rises to the fore, and the idiocy and frustration of many of the puzzles becomes unbdeniably apparent.

In fact, I got so frustrated with Monkey 4 that, after getting about halfway through the game, I just sat there with a walkthrough trying to get through the rest of it. Even with the walkthrough, though, it was still a slog! The entire time I was cheating, I kept thinking, "Sheesh. I'm glad I didn't waste precious hours of my life agonizing over that puzzle. I would simply never have guessed the solution, since THE SOLUTION DOESN'T MAKE ANY FLIPPIN' SENSE!"

. . . which means if you'd like to go through this game straight, you've basically got to try to pick up every object, try every object you have on every other object in every possible screen.

If you find this kind of thing fun, then knock yourself out.

Review Page: Previous 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 

Actions