Animated adventure games used to be the height of cool, thanks to LucasArts in particular, with great storylines like The Dig and more than a dash of humour in games like Full Throttle and the still much-loved Monkey Island trilogy. In more recent times there have only been sporadic highlights in the genre, like the excellent The Longest Journey and the bizarre Grim Fandango.

Then along came German developer Deck 13, which did a more than passable homage to the old-style point ‘n' clickers with its Egyptian-based yarn, Ankh. Now the same people have tried an even more ambitious tribute to the Monkey Island series with Jack Keane, and the result is a hit-and-miss affair.

There are so many nudging references to other games and movies here, with the hero Jack as an inept sea captain with a wry sense of humour (Swallow, anyone?) who takes the offer of a sea journey to mysterious Tooth Island to escape his villainous London debt collectors.

On board is Montgomery, a ridiculous British secret agent, and American ingénue Amanda who's taking a job with the evil Doctor T. His dastardly plan - this being the era of Victorian England - is to destroy the source of British tea using carnivorous plants and intelligent monkeys and.... You get the picture.

Apart from a brief opening sequence in London, most of the action takes place in a Cape Town dock and the Island itself. Those familiar with the ‘pick up item then combine with another one or two in your inventory' system will feel right at home and the developers even provide a handy asterisk to mark the hotspots for you.

Although the story will take several hours to spin out, you'll find it relatively easy to solve most of the problems by chatting extensively to every character and using common sense.

The action is strictly linear and the humour varies from quietly amusing to completely baffling, as there are clearly some serious translation problems from the original German. Apart from Jack (who's supposed to be English yet seems to speak with an American timbre), the other characters talk in clichéd accents, including the embarrassingly sent-up Indians.

Some of the puzzles are worth scratching your head over for a while and there's a Dark Secret about Jack's past and fear of heights that comes out later, which snags your interest for a while. But when you discover that one of the unlocked bonus levels is just a waxwork parade of all the principal characters, you realise how much more could have been achieved.

If you're nostalgic for the early days of point ‘n' click adventures then this will make a diverting few hours down memory lane without taxing your intelligence too far.