Escape from Monkey Island

Discount Price: $13.90

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PC Gamer (1-year)

Customer Reviews:

has it's flaws but it continues the Monkey island legacy [Posted on 2003-11-04]
I loved the original monkey island games when they were 2-d and voiceless, the recent updates including the curse of monkey island, which was amazing, now comes the 4th escape from monkey island. Its enjoyable from every aspect, now with a dandy new, 3D format, Monkey island 4 is a wonderful gaming expierience. The basic story brings the loveable yet goofy Guybrush Threepwood and his newly wed wife Elaine, they return from their honeymoon to find a new governer set to run against Elaine in the upcoming election, and this puts elaine to work on her new campaign (...), yet bluntly, this opposing governer turns out to be the dreaded ghost pirate Le'chuck, who is planning to take over the seven seas with the ultimate insult. So in light of the return of Le'chuck, Guybrush sets out on another journey to find the ultimate insult and finally put le'chuck to his demise. The only drawback of this game, is the monkey combat, it gets really annoying after a while and i admit I took a break from the game for almost a month because of it, yet I returned to it and realized the simplicity of it. You have to remember that ,this game takes a bit of time to conquer if you do not have the strategy guide, but other than the monkey combat aspect, this game kicks major ass! its an essential for any Monkey island fan.

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November 3, 2003

Long time MI fan [Posted on 2005-09-06]
As a long time player of Lucas Arts Monkey Island games, I'm not disappointed with this one. The in-jokes are excellent.

My only beef with the game is the lack of click and go playability that was so easy and straight-forward with the previous three games. Playing using only the keyboard made things a little fiddly.

Other than that small issue, the graphics were excellent, the puzzles kept me busy for ages, and the reintroduction of some old and familiar characters, definitely enjoyable

The Great Escape [Posted on 2006-06-02]
Ahoy there, monkey-island buccaneers and landlubbers alike! Lucas Arts is back with its much-adored 'Pirates of the Caribbean' franchise, and are they back with a bang! Though not quite as absorbing as its 3 predecessors, it's definitely a rollicking adventure, and best of all, far exceeds what many thought would be a final tying up episode.
At the end of the Curse of Monkey Island, we had our wannabe pirate hero Guybrush Threepwood finally marrying Elaine Marley, the Governor of Melée Island. So we begin with her returning to her own mansion, only to find that her extended absence has misled people into believing she's dead. The search for the required documents leads Guybrush to Lucre Island, and from here unravels a whole new plot. Events force Guybrush to set sail in search of the Ultimate Insult, a terrifyingly powerful Voodoo weapon. Worse, he has on his trail the slimy Ozzie Mandrill. He's a bent old Australian developer bent on converting the pirate paradise into a wholesome tourist attraction. On his quest, Guybrush must accomplish Herculean tasks and ultimately make the eponymous Escape from Monkey Island.

You've got to hand it to these guys. They've convincingly managed to construct a whole new plot from what seemed to be the ashes of a completed trilogy. What's better is that they draw from the previous games' unanswered questions, bring in old characters, and huge revelations are made. All this while maintaining its freshness. Old islands like Melée and Monkey Island are accurately revamped , while new ones like Jambalaya and Lucre dazzle with their imaginativeness. The result is a coherent narrative.

Most prominently, the entire game now unfolds in 3d, leading to gorgeous graphics without destroying the cartoony appeal. The game runs on the Grim Fandango Engine, and therein lies the problem. It is a major ordeal to maneouvre your character by keyboard, and remember which key does what. Using inventory is a major headache and you can only interact with an object if its name appears. Getting your character to the right spot is sometimes more challenging than the puzzles. What a stark contrast to the simple CMI interface! This is a definite downside of the game.
Thanks to this hitch, one doesn't get to soak in completely the luscious backgrounds. The sea is stunning, the clouds and topiaries are as surreal as before. As for characters, I do admit I liked the lanky Guybrush of the previous game better, but his outfit makes up for it. We get to enjoy the amusing Guybrush- Elaine relationship, shown more tenderly than in all 3 previous games. Old characters like LeChuck (yes!), Carla and Otis, Murray, Stan, the Voodoo Lady and Herman Toothrot return. There aren't too many new ones- but Dead-Eye Dave, Admiral (Whatever) Casaba and Father Rasputin are quite fun.
Music too, is good, though not fantastic. Agreed, it can't match CMI and there is a lot of recycling and déjà vu. However, it is every bit foot-tapping and the scores of Lua Bar and Planet Threepwood are flashes of genius. Backgrounds, characters, music: when these three come together, we have a feast for the senses. Scumm Bar and Knuttin Atoll are textbooks in atmosphere building! Atmosphere, after all, is the pièce de resistance of the series.
Last of all, but probably most importantly, the puzzles are a pleasant surprise. Some like in Act 1 are a piece of cake, while others like Monkey Kombat and Mysts of Tyme are devilishly subtle. We still have the inventive use of inventory...like prosthetic skin as a trampoline and a dunce hat used to improve your diving score. You get most of it if you try hard enough (and conquer the keyboard interface). But I'm glad to say there's no repetition of puzzles from the previous games. There's a fair deal of real treasure-hunting, Matrimonial Lava Rides, boulder hurling, Insult Arm Wrestling and freeing yourself after being framed. The pirate world gets increasingly modern thanks to Mandrill- we now have banks, perfumes, Sushi-bars, theme restaurants, lawyers, groggeries and Star Buccaneers Coffee- things we couldn't even dream of in the prequels (unless you count the Carnival of the Dead). In short, they haven't limited their imaginations. All in all, the puzzles are just right- neither too tough or too easy. Some are outright silly, (like knocking an amnesiac's head in various ways) but all in all, the puzzles make a refreshingly novel cocktail.
In totality, this game is a joyride of clean, roll-on-floor fun from start to finish! It's especially so if you have the patience to get past the taxing `what-do-I-do-now' parts and the blasted keyboard. Another hitch is the boringly slow pace in the Monkey Island Act, the only place I lost interest. Overall storyline may be weak in places, but you hardly notice. But clever and witty dialogues, amazing cutscenes, absorbing characters and atmosphere and innovative puzzles, more than make up for that.
Some may love it, some may hate it, but surely no one can forget it.
Since every secret is unveiled here, there doesn't seem to be much chance of making a sequel without looking like a dragged soap opera. Thus, though it has its imperfections, Escape from Monkey Island makes a fitting conclusion- thoroughly satisfying for the discerning game-geek. This is one sea any parrot worth its pieces-of-eight will advise you to set sail in. It raaaaaaks.

Enjoyable but occasionally frustrating adventure game [Posted on 2008-03-16]
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 [Posted on 2008-07-23]
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.

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