Monkey Island 2: LeChuck's Revenge

The Good
Unfortunately, it's difficult to speak highly of this game, without comparing it to numerous other games.

The graphics, sound, and gameplay of this game were all top-notch. The same LucasArts humor is here, but as an "adventure game", it's far above all of their other products.

Nearly every other LucasArts adventure game (Secret of Monkey Island, and Curse of Monkey Island, and Full Throttle, and Sam and Max, and so on) suffered from what I consider to be one huge flaw -- all of these games had a lot of unnecessary "filler" material, that detracted from the actual adventure. For example, in the other two Monkey Island games, you had to spend a large amount of time dicking around with "insult sword-fighting". While it was amusing, at first, it would get old very quickly.

In Full Throttle, you had to spend a bunch of time driving around mountain roads, fighting other bikers. I can't even remember what the purpose of that exercise was, aside from stretching out playtime.

More often than not, I found myself wanting these non-game sequences to be over with, so I could continue following the game's main story.

Monkey Island 2 has none of this kind of "filler" material - it's all story, baby!. Sure, it has its share of inventory puzzles, but for the most part, they all made sense.

The game world also seemed a lot "bigger" than the other games in the Monkey Island series, and it was fairly non-linear. If you're stuck on one particular island, for example, you could take a break and go to another island and fiddle around with the puzzles there for a while.

The Bad
Well... there were one or two maze puzzles that seemed a bit haphazard and slapped together... but those could've been a lot worse.

The Bottom Line
This is, in my opinion, one of the best adventure games ever to be released by LucasArts (and certainly much better than most Sierra games). It's even good as a stand-alone game. While it's certainly not required to play Monkey Island 1 first to understand what's going on in this game, you'll only miss out on a few in-jokes.