Escape from Monkey Island

Monkey Kombat is the thing everyone remembers, and not fondly. In place of the insult swordfighting that made the series famous, the fourth Guybrush Threepwood adventure asks you to learn a fighting language of simian grunts - oop, chee, ack, eek - and work out by brute experiment which combination beats which. It is a puzzle built on note-taking and repetition, dropped into a game otherwise powered by wordplay. The joke lands once. The grind after it does not.

That sour patch sits inside an adventure that is, for long stretches, genuinely funny. Guybrush returns from honeymoon to find Melee Island's governorship contested, Elaine's mansion condemned, and a smarmy Australian land developer named Ozzie Mandrill pushing a scheme to turn the Caribbean into a tourist strip. LeChuck is involved, because he always is. The writing has the LucasArts house touch: patient setups, deadpan deliveries, a willingness to let a gag run three screens longer than it should.

The technical story is the GrimE engine, inherited from Grim Fandango - fully 3D characters walking around prerendered backdrops, controlled with keyboard-style tank steering rather than a mouse pointer. On PlayStation 2 that scheme at least suits a controller better than it ever suited a PC, and the analogue stick takes some of the sting out. What it cannot fix is the camera, which regularly frames a scene so that the interactive object you need sits half out of view, or the way hunting for hotspots becomes a matter of walking into furniture until the verb coin lights up.

The PS2 conversion arrived in 2001, a year after the computer release, and it is a faithful rather than reworked port: same art, same voice cast, same structure, with loading pauses between areas and a slightly softened image. Dominic Armato is still Guybrush, and his performance carries scenes the engine cannot.

It is the weakest of the four classic Monkey Island games and the last before the series went dormant for most of a decade, which has coloured its reputation more than its actual content deserves. Taken on its own terms it is a mid-tier comedy adventure with maybe three hours of excellent jokes and one puzzle system that actively punishes you for engaging with it. Worth playing for the Caribbean and the dialogue, as long as you keep a pen nearby for the monkeys.