A few years, ago I got the pleasure of reviewing Adventure Time: The Secret of the Nameless Kingdom and loved it. So when a new Adventure Time game was announced earlier this year, I was really excited to try it out. Is it as good as I thought it would be? Yes! There are however some drawbacks in this release that I’ll detail in this Adventure Time: Pirates Of The Enchiridion review.
The Land of Ooo is underwater, and it’s up to Finn and Jake to find out why. Join our heroes as they explore dangerous waters, search for clues, interrogate pirates and fight bad guys to solve this wet, wet mystery and save the day!
As you start Adventure Time: Pirates of the Enchiridion, Jake, and Finn learn that the melting of the Ice Kingdom has flooded the world of Ooo. There’s now a lot of water in the world, and the only mean of transportation is by boat. Luckily, the game features a map so that you can see where you are and where you need to go. Along with exploring the semi-open-world by boat the game also features a turn-based battle system that rewards the use of the skills available to the four different party members. I honestly thought the gameplay was a little odd at the beginning (after spending 90 hours playing Dragon Quest XI), but I eventually liked it! The difficulty of the game starts fair, but as you progress through the different quests and side-quests (which are easy to do), you’ll quickly realize that the game difficulty curve is thrown out the window, giving you a sense of being overpowered, which I liked but it is something that won’t please all gamers.
I already mentioned loving exploring and fighting through Adventure Time: Pirates Of The Enchiridion, but this game has sadly a few major issues that must be addressed. The first and smaller one is that even if a side-quest is set as active, it doesn’t show correctly in the navigation bar in the upper part of the screen as only the primary objective is shown, which means that we must open the world map, and cross-reference the data with the directions on the overworld to be able to find the objective.
The first major bug I encountered is that when using Jake to morph into a scooter (which doubles the speed of the painfully slow walking), I fell into the void of the world below the environment more than once, which is inexcusable as the game didn’t realize what was going on, so I had to reset it The biggest issue I encountered is that the game hung on me at least five times while playing the 12 hour campaign. At one point I even became nervous and tried to avoid doing some things to prevent the game from crashing. The game developers seem to be aware of this instability, because the game auto-saves after each fight and each time you move from one location to the other, so at least you’re never going back too far when the game is reloading.
Final Thoughts
All in all, I liked playing through Adventure Time: Pirates Of The Enchiridion, and ended up completing all of the side-quests as took on the main campaign. I also achieved the Platinum Trophy for this game, which is quite easy to do and took me around 12 hours and change to obtain.
I recommend this release for the gameplay, but I really hope the next release from the team will be less buggy than this because even with the latest patch – months after the game’s release – this is still the buggiest game I have played on my PlayStation 4.
