"The New Adventures of Zak McKracken" is a game which starts out with a lot of potential, but sadly falls short of it in every way possible. The game is a fan-made sequel to the excellent game "Zak McKracken and the Alien Mindbenders," published by LucasArts (then LucasFilm Games) in the late 1980s.
Fans of the original "Zak 1" will be gratified when playing this game, until they get far enough to realize what a let down it is to the memory of the original.
"The New Adventures of Zak McKracken" is a game which starts out with a lot of potential, but sadly falls short of it in every way possible. The game is a fan-made sequel to the excellent game "Zak McKracken and the Alien Mindbenders," published by LucasArts (then LucasFilm Games) in the late 1980s.
Fans of the original "Zak 1" will be gratified when playing this game, until they get far enough to realize what a let down it is to the memory of the original. For instance, the makers of this game did an excellent job of imitating the look and feel of traditional LucasArts games. The game play is almost identical to that of "The Secret of Monkey Island." Many of the game's rooms and
characters are simply retouched, VGA versions of the same rooms from the original "Zak 1," which gives fans a nice feeling of nostalgia. In order to finish writing the game in record time, LucasFan Games also stole other background scenes from tournament style games. Surprisingly, this flows nicely with the feel of the game and does not make for an awkward feel for players. LucasFan Games also did an excellent job of imitating the original LucasArts sense of humor and "Monkey Island 2" style of writing sequels. For instance, many of the characters from the original "Zak 1" reappear and divulge funny little quirks about their lives.
While many of the puzzles of this game are logical, hardly any hints are given about how to solve them, and the player is left to essentially try random actions with various objects, in the hopes that one of them will work. Even when she is on the right track, the game still gives the standard "That doesn't seem to work," answer, misleading the player into thinking she wasn't on the right track after all. The game's storyline is also too short and not complex enough to match up to the original. This also has the effect of throwing the player into difficult puzzles more quickly than the original "Zak 1" did.
In spite of this, this would make a very good adventure game if it had been released as a stand alone game and not as a sequel to a well known game still beloved to millions of fans worldwide. The game is a good starting point to writing a sequel for "Zak 1," but the writers have taken too many liberties and diverged from the original "Zak 1" game in too many ways. For instance, one would expect that in the sequel to "Zak 1," the player would again be able to change characters many times in the game, as that was a central theme in the original. Instead, the entire game is seen from Zak's point of view. Even when Annie is kidnapped, one would expect for Zak to at least use his dream sharing abilities to make sure she is okay, but he cannot even do that. No explanation for this is provided in the game, and the player is left to conveniently ignore this hole in logic.
Worse than this, however, is the way in which the game ends? Where is the original "Zak 1" game left players with a "happily ever after" ending, and a feeling of happiness for the characters, "The New Adventures of Zak McKracken" ends with Zak and Annie chained up in the Ghost Pirate LeChuck's dungeon from "Monkey Island 2," with apparently no means of escape. The ending screen shows the words "The End", giving the impression that this is simply the end of the story. LucasFan Games has since ambiguously disappeared, leaving no forwarding information as to whether they intend to come back, and the last known news from them prior to their disappearance was that they turned down an opportunity to write a "Zak 3" game in favor of writing a "Raiders of the Lost Ark" game. Essentially, fans who were left feeling gratified for the characters they fell in love with in "Zak 1" are now left feeling "So that's it? They just die like that? What a rip off!"
Some of this game's supporters have argued that fan-made sequels are unfairly held to a higher standard than "legitimate" sequels and that it is therefore harder for them to succeed. While this may be true, it is also true that writing a sequel to any story that is beloved by so many people worldwide, should ever be taken lightly, and every attempt should be made to respect the wishes of the original authors, and honor the memory of the original game. "The New Adventures of Zak McKracken" simply fails to do that. The writers take too many liberties with the story, too much is left unexplained, too few hints are given, the storyline is not complex enough, and the game itself is too short, for it to ever live up to the original game.
This game is the greatest in the world! I love it and I highly recommend it to anyone! You’ll be exciting, addictive and impressed! You need downloading it immediately!
