Review of Monkey Island 2: LeChuck's Revenge - Special Edition by emric

i’m so glad LucasArts continued on from their successful remake of the first Monkey Island game to re-make Monkey Island 2. i had even fonder memories of this game from my childhood. and i thought their last re-make was near-perfect. well this re-make is even nearer-perfect!

you can still switch to the classic version at ANY point in the game, which is fully awesome, there’s outstanding voice acting and brilliantly re-recorded music and awesome new hi-res art, but this time around they’ve added the ability to keep the new voices when you switch to classic mode and also the new version has a stylish hotspot soft-highlight function so that you don’t miss any interactive areas. the new 2D backgrounds are gorgeous! and the characters are all done in 2D animation also, which is rare these days, but they look GREAT and basically copy the classic movements from the original game

As a direct remake, it does suffer from the less-developed game design of the time, like having its share of illogical puzzles and an oversized inventory (which you can fill even further with items that are never used for anything, making already tricky puzzle-solving even more frustrating). but LucasArts have largely offset these problems by including a mostly-sturdy hint system so that you won’t be frustrated for long.

In terms of pure fun-ness to play, it didn’t quite match up to my childhood memories, and i did prefer the recent addition to the series “Tales of Monkey Island” which i only just finished before playing this, but as an updated trip down memory lane, this was all class. i wonder what LucasArts will re-make next…

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Time Played: 10-20 hours