Jolly Rover

The Best Way to sum up Jolly Rover is to say it's Monkey Island starring dogs. You can call me a lazy reviewer if you like, but it's a 2D point-and-click adventure game, revolving around pirates, laced with dry humour, self-referential jokes and eccentric puzzles that tickle your grey matter. It even features a monkey in the game. As I said, Monkey Island starring dogs.

This comparison is by no means derogatory. Many adventure games might seem a poor man's Monkey Island, but Jolly Rover is curiously a better game because of its batls-out copycatting rather than in spite of it.

The story is centred on cocksure, dryly witty privateer Gaius James Rover, who through misadventures involving a voodoo recipe book, a riddlespouting parrot, and a corrupt island governor, ends up joining a crew of canine pirates. The characters are all colourful and the dialogue is fully voiced and well acted, although James comes across as more irritating than Guybrush ever did.

Despite this, the humour is much more hit than miss. The first puzzle sees you attempting to escape from the pirate ship's brig, which contains a crate of skeleton keys, an escape kit with half the label missing and another crate full of crowbars, but no crowbar to open the crate. The puzzles themselves are well-balanced difficulty wise, but this is spoiled by your parrot giving you highly unsubtle hints when you feed him crackers, which are in abundance.

Jolly Rover proudly stands on the shoulders of a giant, and unlike other adventure games that imitate LucasArts' greats, it keeps its balance.