A Jolly Adventure
Jolly Rover is a fun little adventure game, that despite its own humour and charm, leaves for a hollow gaming experience.
The game follows the pirate dog, Gaius James Rover, who ends up in puzzle after puzzle after encountering a grizzly group of pirates. The story of the game is hardly the selling point, but is surprisingly engaging and witty with an interesting group of characters. Though many are hardly memorable, they benefit from strong voice acting that helps carry their individual personalities. The game's humour thankfully also avoids from any direct comparisons to other notable pirate games in the 'adventure' genre, and manages to be quite original rather than reverting to simply referencing "Monkey Island" jokes.
Additionally, Jolly Rover introduces several interesting gameplay innovations to the genre, such as a well implemented 'hint' system through the usage of your parrot. However, this also uses up your supply of crackers, giving you only a limited number of them. At the same time though, I never found myself running out of crackers and about half-way through the game, I had so many that I didn't need to go out of my way to find more. VooDoo is another gameplay mechanic that the game utilises, forcing you to use VooDoo to help you solve puzzles. Though I found these sections rather tedious as they require you to constantly switch back and forth to memorise the VooDoo sequences. The game also has a scoring system and numerous collectibles, though you won't find yourself compelled to find them all.
All in all, Jolly Rover is a short and funny point-and-click game that fans of the genre will most likely enjoy, but to others it will hardly be as memorable.
