Jack Keane - Point and Click Adventure Returns

I’ve sort of have been dying to see more point-and-click adventure games on the horizon, and folks who’ve grown up on games like Day of the Tentacle, Monkey Island and Sam and Max should probably know that the adventure genre for PC gaming has been a dying breed for the past decade.

Jack Keane has been the closest thing to a light-hearted point and click adventure game in a long time. While there have been a few good point-and-clicks in the past years, Culpa Innata, Indigo Prophecy and the Blackwell Legacy, just to name a few, there’s still been a drought of the Monkey Island style adventure game that coupled snarky humor with item-puzzles

Jack Keane is a fairly ambitious return to this type of game, and while it sort of gets the humor down, unfortunately, the random puzzles and awkward dialog trees make it a bit of a letdown.

Graphics

The graphics are at least up to par to the 3d Monkey Island series and a smidgen behind Sam and Max. Environments are lush and plentiful, with over thirteen chapters in the game, and the character designs are fun and playful. The only real pain and suffering is that it looks like they didn’t hire a competent animator, and though the game cues itself up for some seemingly funny animation sequences, the fade to black whenever something comical is about to happen just goes to show how tight on budget Strategy First was when they were producing it. Sadly enough with the lack of press on the game, sales are only going to pick up by word of mouth.

Storyline

It’s not nearly as fun as Monkey Island and more than a touch random, but you play as the snarky Jack Keane, a pirate captain adventurer in search of his lost past. On the way you’ll tag-team with Amanda, a sharpshooter from America as you discover Doctor T’s plan to unleash carnivorous plants all over the world.

Storytelling starts off great with a really well-animated sequence in the first chapter and some excellent character development, but as the game glides along near the halfway point, things begin to get a bit rushed, and the dialog doesn’t flow as smoothly, and sometimes is painfully repetitious and choppy. As a whole I’d say it was bearable, but again it just seemed like the game was half-finished before being rushed out the door for a release.

Puzzles

Point-and-click inventory puzzles are the meat of what Jack Keane tries to resurrect and it’s kind of a combination of good and bad. At times the puzzles make completely no sense and are an awkward and extremely convoluted sequence of item combinations that can only be solved by brute force. The game also doesn’t offer nearly enough flexibility to compensate for its sort of illogical item usage, and a lot of times you’ll wonder why you just did what you did. An example of these leaps of logic is when Amanda chooses to shoot a clay pigeon statue off a pedestal when she easily could have just knocked it off or picked it up. You then proceed to put a chest on the pedestal, so you can shoot it off, and open it.

Thankfully not all the puzzles are nearly that random, and at least half of them have some iota of sense. Still the lack of foresight in design is at core the biggest detriment to this game, and half the time you’ll feel like ripping your hair out. Thankfully walkthroughs on the internet will at least keep some of the agony at bay.

Fun Factor

The real crucial “X factor” to an adventure game is ultimately if it’s just fun enough to play through. That’s where Jack Keane takes a bit of time to warm up to but as a whole isn’t half bad. The voice acting sounds a bit cheesy at first, but at times it hits the spot and the game is actually laugh out loud funny. Humor is a mixed bag like most of the game though, and occasionally Jack Keane is just plain corny. Whether the humor rubs with you though is a fairly important part to whether you’ll like this game or not, so the best way to scope that out is to try the demo on the website. Keep in mind though the demo is the very “best representation” of the game, and as I’ve mentioned expect the quality to degrade as you move further along near the end with even a few buggy sequences in the later chapters (nothing that breaks the game though).

Conclusion

I had high hopes for Jack Keane after reading a few warm reviews, but after playing the game to see for myself, it looks kind of like a partially completed game that was rushed out the door due to budget constraints. The game is fun, but it lacks the polish to make it truly quality. Still though, it is a surprisingly long and robust adventure and probably better suited for the younger teen crowd or older adventure gamers. I’d wish that I could recommend it for kids, but the sudden “Jack running around naked scene after hooking up with a certain someone” near the end of the game undoes that recommendation entirely. The Teen rating is really too bad because I’d say younger kids might have more of the attention span to hack through the occasionally absurd puzzles. In the end though, I’d still easily recommend Sam and Max as the best point-and-click adventure games on the market, and Jack Keane only if you’ve really run out of things to play.