Tales of Monkey Island: Chapter 1 - Launch of the Screaming Narwhal

The Good
The graphics looks OK for being 3D, much less ugly than Escape from Monkey Island (the fourth game) was (I mean duh, that was not hard to accomplish a decade later). The character desings, while still quirky, look much more appealing than they were in MI4. Personally I would have preferred if the graphics returned to 2D hand drawn animation, but it does the job.

The music is nothing to write home about, it's there in the backround to give that Caribbean flavor.

The gameplay controls are mixed: it's both an evolution of the gamepad/keyboard centric inputs from MI4, while fortunately also re-introducing the classic mouse driven pointing-and-clicking that is so synonymous with the genre and MI series. You move Guybrush with the keyboard, and handle items with the mouse. It's a little clunkier to play the game like that, both compared to the streamlined MI4 and the classic point-and-click mechanics, but it's workable, and maybe necessary for the 3D environment.

The puzzles are pretty easy. Yeah, this is a game for the Internet age, where if getting stuck, most people will just look up the solution, which is available in seconds anyway. Hardcore adventure gamers won't find much challenge here. I am not a hardcore adventure gamer, so it's okay. This is Tales of thing is more like a lite Monkey Island experience than a proper big entry in the series.

LeChuck was everything from ghost to a giant stone statue, but human? That's new!

The Bad
The dialogue is not too good. Every line tries to be rapid-fire instant funny, all the time. The classic MI games had better writing than that, and the humor had more depth. But yeah, what can you do with a franchise as famous and hyped by that point? Trying to dish out instant gratification like it's a fast food chain.

The Bottom Line
Monkey Island 5 was rumored on the fansites back troughout the 2000s for a long time. This is no MI5, but the short episodic nature of Tales of Monkey Island was a fresh and allright way to bring the franchise back to the limelight. It wasn't necessary (I consider the story closure in MI4, as silly as it was, to be definitive), but we all crawed it! I haven't played the other episodes, or the recent one yet.