Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade: The Graphic Adventure

The Good
Yet another title that cemented LucasArts (LucasFilm Games at the time) reputation as one of the best graphic adventure makers out there. And this time with a movie tie-in!!

The game casts you as the legendary Indiana Jones and places you on the same settings and situations as in the classic third movie of it's saga, only some areas are reworked for gameplay reasons, and you get to change the outcome of some actions as you see fit. You'll have to contend with some pretty challenging inventory puzzles as well as some other brain challenges in your quest for the Grail. That would take you to all sorts of locations to explore and investigate. New to the genre would be the implementation of dungeon-like sections, that combined the puzzle solving aspects with a more bare-knuckle approach that would let you take a swing at your enemies instead of having just to think your way around them. Now, while this fighting mini-game was pretty arkward and un-appealing it provided a great change of pace and you also had a phletora of dialogue options (at least when compared to other games of the time), with which you could smart-out guards and other NPCs in order to proceed. The game used that to add a little variation since you could fool your enemies by carefully selecting what you said, or make use of some inventory puzzle, or just beat the crap out of them. Pretty novel wouldn't you say?

Graphically speaking this was the first Lucas game with a real beauty to it. Gone are the waaay retro flat graphics from Maniac Mansion or Zack McKracken. Now we get sharper graphics with much more detail, beautiful backgrounds not to mention more and better animations, things still look way to pixelated for today, but they for the first time would get that "Lucas-Look" that made their games seem lovingly crafted and lavishly detailed. The sound department is polished as usual, tough of course the game doesn't get to flesh those muscles too much due to the limitations of the time.

The Bad
As I mention earlier, the fighting mini-game didn't hold a candle to any action game out there, and it could prove a very tedious affair to get over with, other than that there's the fact that some puzzles were pretty hard.

The Bottom Line
Classic Lucas. Takes one of the fantastic Indiana Jones movies and manages to churn out an equally fantastic game. Don't miss it if you even remotely care about adventure games!!