I'm an avid point and click gamer, and have been since I was a kid. Monkey Island 2 was my first game, so I have been a bit biased (and critical) about the genre ever since. I usually rank them in my mind based on a few criteria, such as: art direction, charm, puzzle ingenuity, and dialogue. Out of 10, I would rank them accordingly as: 7, 6, 2, and 4.

The charm and art direction is what powered me through this game, as the dialogue and puzzle ingenuity are lacking. There are times where the solution to a puzzle is so far removed from what makes sense, that it just doesn't hit right. Such as a time where Voodoo claims that a golden toilet handle you've stolen looks "good enough to eat" (What? Who would say that...), with zero context or inside humor, and the solution is to eat it; and the only reason that makes any sense at all is because you need to hide it, and he wants to eat it. , and plenty of the points of progression come from places that don't really blend with the story or dialogue, but feel like filler. You may even find the detective asking questions he isn't supposed to KNOW he's supposed to ask yet.

The dialogue is a noir-style, snappy come-back, witty-banter type, with some solid one-liners from time to time. However, the substance of the dialogue is lacking charm (which may be a side effect of the noir style), and more importantly: the dialogue trees are infuriating, making the conversations inadvertently seems stiff and forced. A good example of this is when you are trying to leave a conversation, but first have to crawl back OUT of the tree to get there. It basically ends with something like: "Enough about so-and-so --> I have another question for you --> Ok, be seein' ya". This was an artifact of old point and click that was quickly replaced with more fluid convo trees back in the late 90's. It shouldn't be this bad in a modern point and click.

TL;DR: VD is a beautiful game, with stunted potential in dialogue, and out-of-context puzzle solutions.

P.S. I used hints ONCE for a particularly egregious out-of-context puzzle.