Many reviews, both online and in print, rate Zak McKracken as among the best adventure games ever made, but others disagree. A review in "Computer Gaming World" described "Zak McKracken" as a good game, but "it simply could have been better." The magazine described the game's central flaw in the game's environments, limited to a relatively small number of screens per location, giving each town a movie-set feel compared to the size and detail of "Maniac Mansion". "Compute!" favorably reviewed "Zak McKracken", but wished that Lucasfilm would next produce a game that did not depend on jokes and puzzles to tell its story. The large number of mazes in the game was also a source of criticism, but David Fox felt it was the best way to maximize the game's size and still have it fit on a single Commodore 64 floppy disk. Other critics complained about the need to enter copy protection codes not once, but multiple times whenever the player flew out of the US.