Will satisfy the fans a lot but on its own it is just not that memorable or very entertaining
The game starts when you as Guybrush just returned from some great adventures and LeChuck is there to kidnap Elaine. You have an enchanted cutlass and with it you are supposed to destroy LeChuck once and for all. Of course it all goes wrong and you land on Flotsome Island and are separated from your Wife. The introduction is pretty rough since the boat is rocking an you are supposed to click items. There is little laughs if any and LeChucks presence feels little to not menacing since he lets you walk around and even talks to you (!?) casually. "I will sacrifice this monkey and take over the world" he say when you stab him with the cutlass.
Why the beginning of the game is still fun? It feels much like CMI. You enter the game just after completing some off-screen adventure. You find Elaine in oppression, you help her but because of your carelessness you get separated. next stop: get a ship. Indeed it is the next stop. It is all ok but you know that if they try to recapture the experience of a past game they can only go so far with it and usually finish a couple of steps behind.
There is a new movement system - to walk you have to click and drag your mouse in a direction. This can give precise movement but is not needed in this episode. It has no advantage over pointing and clicking, sometimes it can lead to clicking an "exit from jungle" button instead moving in a direction. It feels like you you should be able to use controller with ease but the controller input doesn't let you use items - so whats the point?
The graphics are very impressive at times. The overhead view of the Island is beautiful, a really great to look at with all the key location visible. There is a seamless transition from location to map view. The island is surrounded by many of these funny cartoonish fluffy clouds. As for the location and character graphics: what Telltale created is a mix of their normal 3d and flat graphics of CMI. The result is very impressive sometimes so seamless you are hard pressed to tell is it a shaded model or a 2d drawing. Some of the locations lack the detail but other have a lot of different things to click and discover - Voodoo Lady hut is filled with those. The game also uses some modern technique's of rendering like field of view making the scene in focus and very far and very near objects blurred a bit. The characters are what we expect of Telltale which is pretty good but its a wonder why did they make some of the models so "edgy" like a cog that is in fact a octagon (it shows in otherwise smooth world) and character models cheeks or elbow that miss another smoothing iteration. However this hardly detracts from game experience and mostly you will feel very warm and at home.
The gameplay/puzzles are mostly logical but some can irritate. I for one enjoyed the navigational jungle puzzle - you get your usual jungle that looks the same and lead you to seemingly same spot but if you take a order of directions (e. g. right, right, left) you will end up in a completely different spot. The problem is that you cannot find the place unless you have the map because the map has to be used in the first spot to initiate the sequence. This makes no sense and once I went the whole way only to find out that I missed the first step of the directions - use the map. Other sequence allows you to fire the cannon in order to make someone go away so you can steal his stuff. The problem here is that the first time you fire the cannon (I fired twice) and go to him and he is still there. The moment later you have to figure to use cannon again. The rest of the puzzles is pretty straight forward and doesn't feel that special - No blowing up rubber trees, no duel where you choose a banjo over a pistol, no taking the ship from the chimpanzee. It takes defeating one pirate with one object to get the ship and the same pirate becomes your crew. One puzzle makes you match the symbols on the totems and that is more reminiscent of The Longest Journey (which wasn't that long btw) than a Monkey Island game
The Voice acting is pretty solid even if dry on humor. Guybrush have the exact same voice and voodoo Lady sounds the same even if the voice actress changed. Others are ok though I found Elaine voice a little to deep.
I don't think I laughted during chapter 1. I can't really say that there was a good joke in it. I had a good experience interrupted twice when I got stuck. It does get a little tiresome becuse you can't skip to the target location (this is also an advantage as the flow of the game remains the same with no blitzing through it)
Apart from (lack of) humor problem there is also the thing that none of the pirates is memorable. Maybe the glassblower pirate is ok but they all pretty much look the same with long cheekbone lines going down on their faces. In CMI we had Goodsoup that looked like that but there also was a Scottish pirate, short and grumpy Cutthroat Bill and a guitarist Van Helen like pirate. Well, maybe its to early to tell but the new chapter didn't introduce anyone worth of interest.
Overall I'm rating the game 7.5. Its a solid game that lives up to the challenge of looking and feeling like Monkey Island (or specifically CMI) but lacks in content to provide as much fun other games in the series did. It also tries to be as similar as possible to The Curse of Monkey Island and while it is not a bad thing it doesn't have the ambition of surpassing the original. Having said that it still looks fabulous (or close to) and for a fan of adventure game its a must