Genre: Adventure
Developer: LucasArts
Publisher: LucasArts

Monkey Island 4 uses the Grim Fandango engine, which utilizes hand-drawn backgrounds for the stages, and polygonal, texture-mapped characters, to go along with pre-rendered cut-scenes. While this title has beautifully-rendered backdrops to each board, the character textures and models are not very detailed, and not as expressive as the sprites that were used in the other Monkey Island games.

Every line of dialogue in this game is voice acted. The wide variety of characters is met with a wide variety of voice acting styles, each of which fits the personality of the game and the character. The orchestrated music melodically throws one back to the glory days of the adventure game, and, again, fits the humor of the game well.

Adventure games are made or broken by their puzzles, clever uses of mise-en-scene, and a nice range of items for the player to manipulate that mise-en-scene with. This game certainly forces the player to think creatively about everything he/she sees on the screen and in the inventory, but some of the "puzzles", such as the obnoxious "Monkey Kombat", involve nothing more than monotonous memorization and tedious trial and error.

Of the dozens of adventure games I've played, Monkey Island 4 is somewhere slightly below average. The game had me laughing at its humor and admiring its characters, but many of this game's puzzles were lacking either because they were tedious, or because they required a tremendous leap of logic or a completely random and arbitrary use of an object to pass. The game's overtly anti-capitalist political message could cause some eye-rolling also if it's taken too seriously.