It’s hard not to love Adventure Time. Thanks to its unique melding of cutesy characters, hilarious dialogue (and surprisingly dark themes), Pendleton Ward ’s seminal Cartoon Network series is one of those rare shows that appeals to both kids and grow-ups. Despite the cartoon running strong for eight years, it’s still yet to get a truly great videogame adaptation. Now, Bandai Namco is hoping to finally change that with Adventure Time: Pirates of The Enchiridion.
Moving away from the more basic 3DS style of games we’ve seen previously, this upcoming console adventure will be the first time fans can play an open world Adventure Time game.
And based on what we’ve seen so far – it’s actually looking pretty promising.
Announced last December, this new digital adventure sees Finn, Jake, BMO and Marceline sailing across the suddenly flooded Land of Ooo on their pirate ship -Jeff. With The Ice King accidentally melting the Ice Kingdom, the entire kingdom of Ooo is suddenly submerged under water. But it turns out, there’s an even greater mystery that needs to be solved.
We spent some time journey with Finn and Jake and sailed around their newly flooded homeland. Interestingly, despite the open-world exploration, the combat here is actually turn-based. While this may be disappointing to some fans, it actually works fairly well here. Like in South Park The Stick Of Truth and its sequel, Pirates features the original voice cast from the show and packs in some pretty authentic feeling dialogue, too.
While we expected a lot of it to be phoned in, the writing was surprisingly self-referential and felt true to the show, keeping us grinning during our hour’s play time. The minute to minute gameplay felt fairly varied too, from turn-based battles to basic map exploring and even L.A Noire-lite style interrogation mini-games.
Still, whether the game remains fun for 20+ hours remains to be seen, but for fans of the series, this definitely looks like an Adventure worth keeping an eye on.
Adventure Time: Pirates of the Enchiridion will release on PC, PS4, Switch and Xbox One on July 17th in the U.S and July 20 in Europe.
