[h1]TL;DR[/h1]
Monkeys & Dragons tries to be a point & click adventure game like the classics, but fails in pretty much every aspect. Don't buy this.
[h1]Summary[/h1]
You assume the role of Lana. At the start of the game, you and your husband arrive on a tropical island, where your husband is taken away by an "evil powerful sorcerer". You then embark on a quest to free your husband.
Visually, the graphics are very mediocre, or even bad. The game features pixel-style art, but not in a pretty nor a consistent way. Perspective is wrong, there's no color-grading, graphics when you enter a building or room are very "in your face" (i.e., sprites are way too large) and there are many graphical glitches, such as the main character passing through other characters or appearing to be floating around (in the throne rome scene near the end of the game). Everything feels very unpolished, litterally rough around the edges, where even old adventure games often had a way of "smoothing things over".
The UI is very annoying; a large part at the bottom of the screen is reserved for buttons and your inventory. The inventory features two rows, even though at no point in the game will you be carrying more items than you could fit in the top row, so the second row is completely useless and only takes up screen space. The buttons could also be handled differently. There's only a few action-options (examine, pick up, use and talk), which could easily have been put behind the mouse wheel or in a pop-up menu accessed with the right mouse button, like many other games do. The buttons on the right could equally easily be handled differently, like in a bar at the top of the screen that would pop up when you move your mouse pointer to the top of the screen.
In the sound department, there's not much to talk about; the game completely lacks voice acting, and only has music and sound effects. This is pretty much the only part of the game that I'm somewhat ok with, as both the music and sound effects are non-intrusive and just above average.
Which brings us to game play, story and the puzzles. Which IMHO is also pretty bad. At the start of the game, there's something that somewhat resembles an intro, where the story is explained to you (or rather, dropped on you, as the relation between your husband and the sorcerer is never really explained). The main character doesn't really have any personality to her; she doesn't come across as a bad-ass, someone with a razor-sharp wit, a gullible but likeable idiot or anything. The same goes for pretty much all the NPC's in the game. None of them have a personality and none of them are memorable.
Dialogue options are very limited and only go one or two levels deep, and choices don't really matter. Frustratingly, dialogue lines cannot be skipped with the click of a mouse button when you're done reading that line. Instead, the entire conversation is cancelled, and you have to do the entire thing all over from the start. Several of the lines also feature some spelling and grammar errors. The overarcing story is incredibly thin; your only motivation is to "save your husband", but there's no real build-up of the story, there's no real arcs / chapters (even though the game periodically tells you that you have finished a chapter and started with the next), it's all just a big pile of "here are some new areas to explore and do stuff in". It lacks cohesion between the areas, the characters, the puzzles and the story.
The puzzles are very mediocre. Most are very, very obvious "use A with B" kind of things. Others are rather illogical, forcing you to combine three items that are only loosely related to one another. [spoiler]For instance, to defeat the spearmaster, you have to use an invisibility T-shirt with a bucket of termites with a spear rack. This causes the character to use the T-shirt to become invisible, and then walk to the spear rack to use the termites on the spears. It would have been way more logical for the player to first have to "use the t-shirt" on the main character, then walk up to the spear rack while invisible, and then "use bucket of termites on spear rack".[/spoiler] Other puzzles within this game are just lazy; at one point, you have to solve a sudoku, a mirrors & beams puzzle, and a tangram (Google it if you don't know what it is) style puzzle in succession.
And when, after about 2-3 hours at best (including time needed to restart the game after some random crash back to your desktop), you reach the end, the face-off with the bad guy is extremely unrewarding. Afterwards, you still have to free your husband from a cage, which also requires some completely trivial stuff. After that, you are reunited with him at the same location where the game starts, but there's no ending. No final cutscene, no credits rolling, just... nothing... all in all, very disappointing.
[h1]Pros and cons[/h1]
+ sound and music is ok
- random game crashes
- illogical item combinations to solve puzzles
- lazy puzzle variants, like sudoku, mirrors &laser beams, and tangram
- very mediocre graphics and UI
- bland characters, non-immersive story
- very disappointing end-game
- no voice acting
- over-the-top references
- dialogue lines cannot be skipped
- spelling and grammar errors
- too expensive for its length
[h1]Verdict[/h1]
I wouldn't recommend this game; even on a sale, save your money for other, better games like "Darkestville Castle", "Detective Gallo", "The Inner World", various Daedalic games, or even "Chronicle of Innsmouth" (all a bit more expensive, but far more rewarding), or "Yet Another Hero Story". Or try out the "golden oldies", like Day of the Tentacle, Full Throttle, Grim Fandango or the classic Monkey Island series if you haven't played those yet.
