YouGamers.com

Reviews

Tales of Monkey Island

Graphics and Sound

The graphics are cartoon-style 3D graphics that fit the game well. The caricature appearance of the characters is appropriate, even if some of the diehard fans dislike the "new" Guybrush. I had no such qualms, even if he is sporting a funky little beard. The animations feel smooth and there seems to be a lot of them - at least I did not get bored looking at the same character going through the same animation over and over again. The facial animations during dialogue work great. The only one to gripe about is Guybrush himself, though this is mostly due to the fact that you spend the entire game looking at him. Sometimes his eyes look outright creepy, and I do wish he would blink every now and then while walking. Just watch his face while walking back to the dock from the Marquees house - shivers me timbers.

Dialogue has always been the mainstay of the Monkey Island games. For those who appreciate its style of humor going through the dialogue sections is a reward in itself. While Tales of Monkey Island does not quite reach the heights of the first two installments, it does hold its own. I admit to laughing out loud more than a few times. Voice acting is topnotch, with Dominic Armato reprising his role as Guybrush and (again) doing a stellar job, with the supporting cast keeping up their end just as well. For some bizarre reason the first few dialogue scenes in the game give you a variety of options, but regardless of what you choose Guybrush delivers the same line, giving veteran players a few moments of horror. A bit more into the game and everything again works as intended.

The music, composed by the original series composer Michael Land fits beautifully into the game and transitions smoothly as your travel from one location to the other. You won't find yourself turning off the music even if you sit in one location for a long time trying to figure something out - rather, you'll likely be humming along. The sound effects are cartoonish as is required and work great in context, though I have to say with the default settings they are too loud. I had to tone them down to about 50% - especially the sound of the blowing wind got on my nerves.

Performance

Tales of Monkey Island offers a simple quality level setting between 1 and 9. Lowest setting levels run on almost any hardware that includes a dedicated video card from this century (requirement: DirectX 8.1 support, 64MB RAM) while higher quality levels offer some extra detail for systems that include something more modern. The YouGamers recommended system will run then game fine with the detail set to 6 or 7 and higher settings add very little to the visuals - they stay universally functional at all quality level settings.

Quality level set to 1 - runs on almost any system.	Quality level set to 3 - runs fine on the YouGamers minimum system.
Quality level 5.	Quality level 7 - runs fine on the YouGamers recommended system.

You should have at least a somewhat fast single core CPU if you want to keep the framerate solid. You'd imagine that you would be able to play an adventure game regardless of the frame rate. Not this time. The mouse pointer movement is somehow tied to the frame rate, and if your computer is sluggish the mouse point will be trailing behind your movement all the time. Since some sections of the game require you to click on a (slowly) moving target this is very annoying. Fortunately, the game does run smooth on most systems. I ran into this while trying to play the game on my laptop with CPU throttling activated (to save battery).

Page 1: IntroductionPage 2: GameplayPage 3: Presentation, PerformancePage 4: Summary, Scoring

Related Stuff

Tags