Colt: 9
I was giddy to play the new chapter of Monkey Island from the moment the opening credits rolled. The Mighty Pirate™ is back, along with the sharp writing and clever puzzles the series is known for, along with a fresh graphical renewal and contemporary puzzles: combining breath mints and root beer for maximum fizz? Someone’s been watching Youtube. The vivid locales and character models look great, and the keyboard-driven movement is welcome as a laptop user, but the intro sequence with an incessantly rocking ship, along with a shifting cursor, is unnecessary. Really this is just quibbling; the voice-acting is great, the writing still punchy. Now how about some Day of the Tentacle Episodes?

Ben: 9
Tales of Monkey Island’s greatest strength is still its fantastic writing. The short introduction’s puzzles aren’t particularly challenging, especially with the overly generous hint system (which can be turned off), but the jokes come frequently, and some of them are real knee slappers. The polygon count isn’t very high, but Tales makes up for it with some stellar art direction and clever camera angles. On that note, Telltale Games’ approach to moving Guybrush in a fully three-dimensional space is innovative, although occasionally clumsy; clicking and dragging Guybrush makes him move, but he usually weaves left and right drunkenly. Actually, if the demo has one great flaw, it is interface. The pitching ship is a nice effect, but it makes clicking on objects near impossible. Included in the demo is a treasure hunting minigame separate from the main game, in which players find maps scattered across the internet, and use clues to find treasure in a large maze, which unlocks fun bonuses like wallpapers.

Mike: 8
Telltale Games is the king of point and click adventures and they continue their fine tradition of humorous episodic adventures with the continuation of the beloved Monkey Island franchise. My computer is a little on the low-end of things, but still ran the game fluidly after lowering the graphics quality. Even at the lowest quality, the graphics and animation in Tales of Monkey Island (TOMI) look great. The voice acting, music, and presentation are all top-notch with stellar production values. The worst thing about TOMI Episode 1 is that the demo is over in less than 20 minutes after downloading almost 200MB….c’mon!

Andrew: 8
Tales of Monkey Island is a revival of the classic series that does everything in its power to return as a faithful addition to the long-revered adventure classic. It succeeds in just about every way possible, providing fans of the genre the classic experience they’ve loved for years. However, if you’re not already a fan of adventure games, Monkey Island will do little to indoctrinate you. If you don’t like point-and-clickers then the snappy dialogue and solid voice acting will do little to assuage your boredom.

Average: 8.50

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