Monkey Island Tales 3 HD - Lair of the Leviathan

We've only hit the halfway point for this collection of modern-day Monkey Islands, and things couldn't be going much worse for the mighty pirate Guybrush Threepwood.

His hand, and half the pirates in the Caribbean, are plagued by a voodoo pox, his wife is chilling out with his mortal enemy, he's being chased by a mercenary, and, in the cliffhanger to Episode 2, he's been swallowed by a colossal manatee.

Bad news for our half-witted hero, then, but good news for us gamers. The tightly constrained nature of Lair of the Leviathan (there are only so many places to go in the belly of a sea cow, after all) lends itself to some sharp puzzles, lots of great dialogue, and an utterly relentless pace.

Because you'll spend almost no time faffing about with aimless navigation and island exploration, Episode 3 lets you concentrate on getting the game's hefty collection of puzzles solved, meaning the story moves along on a noticeably faster clip.

That story is the ongoing adventure of Guybrush, who's hunting down a fabled sea sponge to cure his hand and get him back to his wife. In the meantime the cosy environment of a manatee's stomach lets the burgeoning relationship between Guybrush and guns-for-hire vixen Morgan LeFlay finally flourish.

Episode 3 doesn't spend too much time with tired old Monkey Island references and in-jokes (although there's a welcome cameo from a certain demonic skull). The structure and puzzles, though, are certainly a blast from the series' past.

We see another outing the franchise's infamous 'Three Trials' structure, where Guybrush is tasked with solving three different puzzles at the same time - for Lair of the Leviathan it's convincing a trio of recently swallowed pirates to let our hero into the fold.

There's also a new take on Insult Swordfighting, but in the guise of a face-contorting gurn-off. You'll have to make up new, ultra-ugly expressions by finding and mimicking different eye, brow, and mouth shapes, like the 'Hooded, Crosseyed Geezer' or the 'Nasty, Tweaking Monkey'.

They're old ideas and concepts, but make for good puzzles. The simultaneous trials mean you've always got something to get on with even if you're a bit stuck, and the face-pulling compo is ripe for laughs.

Leviathan generally has some of the sharpest and smartest head-scratchers in the series, with puzzles tough enough to challenge, but logical enough to silence the tempting call of GameFAQs.

Unfortunately, this iPad port feels like the excellent PC and Wii game was gobbled up by a manatee, thoroughly digested and spewed onto the tablet via the 'service entrance'. Maddening issues from Episode 2 rear their ugly heads once again.

The controls suck, the loading times go beyond a joke, and the performance seems to be even worse than before. The framerate stutters, new scenes freeze before loading, and, almost amusingly, characters randomly garble their next few minutes of dialogue at 1,000x speed, leaving you to watch them silently mime the words. It would be funny if you weren't missing out on funny dialogue or essential clues.

The game should run fine on the high-powered iPad 2, but if you own an iPad 1 you should expect a bumpy ride.

Read our review of Monkey Island Tales 1 HD - Launch of the Screaming Narwhal. [Buy it.]
Read our review of Monkey Island Tales 2 HD - The Siege of Spinner Cay. [Buy it.]
Read our review of Monkey Island Tales 4 HD - The Trial and Execution of Guybrush Threepwood. [Buy it.]
Read our review of Monkey Island Tales 5 HD - The Rise of the Pirate God. [Buy it.]