Flight of the Amazon Queen

The Good
This is a typical adventure that bears all the hallmarks of mid-nineties adventure games. It is a third-person, point and click with an Indiana Jones-esque storyline, and humour. It has been caste in the mould of LucasArts' adventures and features the Amazon as its locale, very similar to Amazon: Guardians of Eden.

The developers have focused on game-play a lot, including some strange (though mostly straightforward) puzzles, and no chance of being stuck in a dead end. The game engine is smooth and very easy to use with no strange actions need to progress. In this way the game has been very solidly constructed with clear crisp graphics.

Like all games of the burgeoning CD era, the game came in a 'talkie' version, which added some stereotypically hammy acting that neither adds nor detracts from the game.

The story is completely silly and purposefully so, trying to stop a mad doctor from creating an army of dinosaur people using the legendary powers of the Amazon. The title is a complete misnomer, it should have been called "Crash of the Amazon Queen" as that's all the titular plane does. Instead the player endlessly traipses around the jungle slowly unravelling the plot. Being a silly plot the game clearly focuses on humour and tries to inject a joke into everything, though they frequently don't hit the mark and fall back on bad puns.

The Bad
The plot is a little too throwaway with it's silliness, I felt Beneath a Steel Sky did a better job of providing a combination of humour and thought-provoking drama (for a game). The puzzles are good for not being completely obscure, but the story hardly leaves you guessing what will happen next and I sometimes found myself having to convey an item from one end of the jungle to the other for an obvious goal.

The Bottom Line
Flight of the Amazon Queen is a solid point and click adventure. The game-play and puzzles have been executed perfectly with clear art and good animation. The only disappointment is the 'by the numbers' plot and humour which fails to raise the game to a classic status, or above the LucasArts games it so desperately wants to be.