izigame.me

Maybe this will be a better experience for new players, but having played all MIs, this is my least favorite for the overall story, characters, and puzzles. The art is great, the controls are much better than 4 and 5, but it was lacking in humor, the characters felt devoid of personality, and the gameplay itself felt lacking - less about learning the mechanics of a fight (as with insult fighting and monkey kombat) or how to combine objects to further the story and more like generic fetch quests that had me running all over the map, but very infrequently finding myself stumped as I did on 4 and 5 (which I only played very recently as an adult, so this isn't an adult complaining the puzzles weren't as hard as when I was a kid playing Curse in 1997). The mazes and treasure maps offered little of the challenge, confusion, or frustration that I was accustomed to from other games.
I have not played the challenge mode yet, but I will say that I believe the puzzles in the basic version of Curse were complicated enough without turning on Mega Monkey (that IS filtered through the lenses of nostalgia and being a child the first time I played Curse, however, a cousin who was in his 20s at the time was also stumped a few times and upon replaying recently, I did have a few times where I legitimately could not think of what to do next, so idk). Maybe playing the suped version will help, but I think the base playthrough should feel rewarding in itself, and it just doesn't. The prospect of playing through again on hard mode doesn't excite me, even to see if I can't find more trivia cards or figure out what in the Toastmasters is going on with the Chum guys.
I appreciated the return to the controls and mechanics of MI3, the return of the original layout of High St, Low St, and the docks, and the art style. However, I didn't feel that I actually had much fun playing the game at any point, which is why I felt compelled to review. I was very excited to boot it up, but can't really express the disappointment I felt when I got to the end and realized it was really the end - there would be none of the fun mechanics I had been hoping for and must be coming up before the final, climactic battle that I was surely working toward.
I went in expecting to have the same amount of fun I had with all 5 other games, and maybe that was the problem. Go in with low - no expectations, and you might have a blast?