Review: Jules Verne's Return to Mysterious Island
by Matt Fox
July 2, 2009
Overview
Inspired by the Jules Verne novel, this game puts you in the shoes of a shipwrecked survivor named Mina. You soon realize that you're not alone on the island as you encounter many strange twists and turns throughout your adventure.
The game is basically a point and click adventure. You scan around your surroundings in first person mode as you attempt to solve numerous puzzles by collecting and combining different items found around the island. You even get some help from the local wildlife.
Features
The game comes with the usual features you'd expect from an adventure game like this: stunning 3D graphics, ambient sounds effects as well as creepy music to enhance the mood and feel, numerous puzzles and items to collect and combine to solve said puzzles.
The only other notable feature is the walkthrough link that has been added to the game. Click on the link and you are directed to a Safari page with an entire walkthrough for the iPhone version of the game. Perfect for when you get stuck, which you will.
The Breakdown
The Good:
The game is big, really big. You'll definitely get your money's worth out of this one. There is a lot of gameplay here and the puzzles and storyline will take you a while to get through (hence the walkthrough link which you probably will need).
The graphics look really good here as well. The cut scenes look amazing and when you finish an achievement, like getting a going fire going to eat, you are treated to a fun little 2D drawing of what you've accomplished. As in the photo show here...
The Bad
The game has some very noticeable glitches in it. The ones that bothered me the most are the lag and the music that skips every now and again. The 1.1 update fixed some of these, but not all of them. Overall it's a little annoying and for such a long game, they do get old really fast.
It's also hard, but not because you can't get past something or whatever. It's because you just plain have no idea what to do. The item combination feature just doesn't work very well at all. It's really a crap shoot and will frustrate you as you try and figure out what items work with each other.
The controls are terrible here. The don't respond well at all and generally do a poor job of hurting more than helping the gameplay. As I said above, the item combo feature gets the worst treatment from the controls. Overall they are just frustrating and it makes the game a lot less fun because of it.
You will need the walkthrough on a couple of parts because you just run out of things to do. Sometimes what you need to do isn't highlighted and searching the screen isn't really a very good option. I don't like having to resort to a walkthrough, but I had no choice here and that was disappointing.
