Fan service jokes and obtuse puzzles make this game less fun than its predecessor
The game picks up with you being slightly older, complete with beard and masses of wealth sitting round a camp fire telling some pirates of your travels, and of how you loved and lost your sweet Govenor Elaine. You then proceed to be marooned on the island, shaken down by the local thug for all your money, and the game starts for real.
The graphical style and midi music remain, as did the SCUMM point and click interface. This game really was just a continuation of the story. However, the tone of this game is decidedly more frightening than the last, with LeChuck returning as a bloated zombie corpse. There are some timed puzzles in this game, and while you still can't get killed, there is genuine menace in some sections. The puzzle difficulty increased from the last game, and this one had some really irritating crimes that no adventure game should commit:
1) The pixel sweep. We've all done it, you are missing an item and you can't find it, but you know it is there somewhere. The graphics for the item blend seemlessly in with the background, so there is nothing left to do but sweep your cursor over the screen line by line until you find it. There are several like this: Spade in the Sign, Ash-2-Life on the voodoo lady's shelves to name two.
2) The pune or play on words. Monkey Wrench - now come on! Not funny.
3) "You'll never get this!" - Skeletons WTF?! See also spitting competition! A puzzle so hard I only remeber its completion on Games Master.
Not only that, but the ending made so little sense it is not worth mentioning. The third game did it's best to retcon that, but my best guess is that they were told that they weren't getting another game, so they thought they would do a David Lynch and wrap it up as badly as they could, just to annoy people (he has been quoted admitting that).
One innovation in this game that I noticed was the music. On the first Island (Scabb) you move around the harbor to different ships, and the music on each one is broadly the same. On closer inspection it is a subtly different improvisation on the main theme, which "seamlessly" blend into one another when you move around the harbor. Well, its as seemless as midi music gets, but it was still pretty neat at the time.
In summary, I did like this game, and now there is a sequel (several), it is worth playing just for the continuity, but I feel that combined with the poor move to 3D that was Monkey Island 4, there is a bit of a trend for MI games for the even numbered ones to be crap.