Developed by: Telltale games
ESRB Rating: pending
Available on: PC, Wii
Single Player
pros: funny adventure, likable characters
cons: short game play, crude humor System Requirements:
Operating system: Windows XP / Vista
Processor: 2.0 GHz + (3 GHz Pentium 4 or equivalent rec.)
Memory: 512MB (1GB rec.)
Sound: DirectX 8.1 sound device
Video: 64MB DirectX 8.1-compliant video card (128MB rec.)
DirectX®: Version 9.0c or better Thanks to Tell Tale Games for giving us this game to review! Tales of Monkey Island: Rise of the Pirate God is the fifth and last installment of the series. In order to truly understand this chapter you have to play the ones before it. The price tag for the complete series is a reasonable $35. If you haven’t played chapter four I’m going to be revealing some spoilers in this paragraph. This chapter starts off with Guybrush wandering the afterlife since he was killed by Le Chuck. Guybrush obviously doesn’t want to stay dead so his spirit must find a way out of the “cross roads” and rescue his wife Elaine from Le Chuck. This is an adventure style game where you have to examine your surroundings, grab and manipulate objects, talk to people, and solve some tricky puzzles. To move around you use your standard WASD keys and the mouse is used for everything else. To explore the different islands of the afterlife, just hop on the ship and point to your desired location on a map. Later in the game you’ll be able to pass back and forth through the real world but you cannot grab anything physical in your spiritual state. There\'s a lot of character development in this installment. Guybrush will meet some new friends like a handless thief and some familiar faces have been sent to the afterlife thanks to Le Chuck. Morgan LaFlay will have a chance to redeem herself for betraying Guybrush a couple of chapters back. She’ll need some encouragement since she’s pretty upset with herself. This chapter isn’t as colorful since it’s a bit more dreary and depressing, but the cartoon feel gets my kids attention if they catch me playing it. There\'s a lot of detail and you can usually spot which objects you can take or manipulate in some fashion. The user interface is pretty easy to navigate and the inventory management system is easy to use. The funny face generator is back and is still easy and fun to use. Some of the puzzles are easy to solve and there are some tricky ones too. Fortunately there are walkthroughs available online that got me out of a couple of stumpers. This chapter was on the shorter side but it took me a couple of sittings to beat it. It does have a happy ending and it seems like Le Chuck may be gone for good…time will tell. The voice acting is top notch and the background music is fitting too. The sound effects are pretty good as well. Overall this game is well polished and will not disappoint. From an appropriateness standpoint there is some violence but Guybrush tries to avoid it as much as possible. There are some voodoo and magic references. The whole afterlife thing is bizarre and definitely not Biblical. *Spolier* Guybrush does get to use his body again but he’s in a zombie form. For adventure gamers that love funny adventure games be sure to check out this series. It looks pretty promising and you\'ll get a few laughs for sure. The humor may be a bit off key at times, so please take that into consideration. This adventure is available on the PC and Nintendo Wii.