Flight Of The Amazon Queen

This is truly a stellar game, a cross between Indiana Jones Desktop Adventures and Broken Sword. Set in the 30s / 40s this is American silver screen cheese at its best. The plot of the game is that Joe King (yes, you will hear the "hi, I'm Joe King... no I am not joking" joke quite a bit but the genuinely good humor of the rest of the game more than makes up for this), a pilot, was commissioned to fly Faye Johnson, a Hollywood actress to the Amazon Jungle for a photo shoot.

The game starts with him being foiled by Anderson, his rival, and the game begins with you trying to get out of a hotel room guarded by the Mafia.

Once you break out, you fly Faye to the Amazon jungle (along with Sparky, Joe's comic geek friend) where your plane crashes in the middle of nowhere. Of course, nothing is ever going to be simple in this game, so you find yourself involved with a psychopathic megalomaniac professor, the Amazon tribe and, of course, a magical disappearing gorilla. We all know how many gorillas there are in South America, so of course, this wacky game had to have one. Although the plot can seem drawn out and rather far fetched (then again this is a game) you are nevertheless sad once you complete the game (though the ending is more than satisfactory). It is a very worthwhile adventure game, and solving all the puzzles to get you and your charges out of the Amazon is very rewarding.

If there is anything at fault within the game, it is (as said before) the lengthiness and complexity of the plot. What makes it all the more annoying is having to go back and forth, back and forth, all the while putting up with the tediously slow animation of Joe's walking (there is no way of skipping). Heaven help you if you forget something somewhere. It is literally as painful as walking in the Amazon jungle yourself!

All in all, it is a marvelous game. The graphics are great (with the in between film / story parts being beautifully done) - eerily reminiscent of Revolution software and the voices are your typical comical stereotypes. I would recommend you put the subtitle options on as the voices can sometimes be hard to make out.