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| | Genre: Adventure & RPG | | Min OS X: 10.4  CPU: G4 @ 800 MHz RAM: 256 MB |
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Somewhat a resurrection of a dying breed, Brawsome's Jolly Rover is an adventure game like those that were prominent on computers in the late 80s to mid 90s. There are many screens, each with some part of interconnected puzzles, and almost every item is significant somehow. Your little guy wanders around the screen, poking and prodding until he solves the problem and goes on to the next one.Jolly Rover isn't a bad example of the genre. It's puzzles are sufficiently annoying and nitpicky to be among the better adventure games, with solutions that, while occassionally bizarre, actually make sense. Unfortunately for Jolly Rover, it is, in characters, theme, difficulty, and humor aping one of the best adventure games - Lucasart's Secret of Monkey Island - which would be fine if Monkey Island hadn't just been rereleased. As such, it suffers in comparison. In fact, it is amazingly reminiscent of the Monkey Island series, Jolly Rover is a story of a young man (*ahem*, schnauzer) who wishes to become a pirate and ends up having to rescue the governor (niece of the governor) from the clutches of a dastardly villain with the help of voodoo (magic) and host of goofy, ambivalent pirates. Gameplay Jolly Rover hews to the standard point-and-click adventure gameplay. This is perfectly fine, as the genre is one of the oldest in computer gaming and has refined itself extensively. There is only one deviation from the norm, and it is a welcome one. If you hold down the spacebar, the interactive parts of the screen highlight with a white overlay, which solves the problem endemic with adventure games - not knowing what is usable and what is merely background. Graphics At first I thought the graphics in Jolly Rover were atrocious. They were big and ill-proportioned and annoying... Speaking of annoying, every so often, the hint device (a parrot you carry with you) would pop up (like this) and ask you if you needed help. The thought was nice, but in an adventure game, you inspect everything, so you could be interrupted in finding the solution by the parrot designed to help you solve it. ...but it turns out that the game is simply in a rather low resolution (800x600) and was being stretched from its natural 3:2 ratio to fill my 16:9 screen. In actuality, the graphics, in windowed mode, are somewhat nice. The reason the score is lower than it could be is that they are smaller than is really useful - in multiple cases, I couldn't distinguish between objects. Also, Jolly Rover is a wiener dog and looks absolutely awful upright and in pants.
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