Max: The Curse of Brotherhood is the latest creation by Press Play, an award-winning games development company in Copenhagen, a subsidiary of Microsoft Studios. The game itself is a fun 2D platformer with beautifully rendered graphics whose cut-scenes are reminiscent of a Pixar film. It’s graphics are beautiful and smooth, it makes the game flow and seems to paper over most of the cracks in this game.
Don’t let it’s cutesy graphics fool however, this is anything but a simple puzzle/platformer, you will die, a lot. The game is very much trial-and-error, similar to the award winning Limbo, although not as dark.
It’s difficult to like Max as a protagonist, he comes across as a whiny, cocky brat who banished his brother to another realm for playing with his toys. His younger brother, Felix, is quickly captured by an evil wizard called Moustacho who looks to use him to live forever. Lucky for Max he comes across an old woman who puts her soul inside a magic marker which the player uses to solve puzzles.
The game starts off very easily with the magic marker only being able to move the earth upwards into a pillar, this makes solving the resulting puzzles quite simple though this doesn’t last long. As the game progresses Max is also able to create vines, fireball arcs and finally high-pressure water flumes. These all become an integral part of the puzzles with all of them needing to be used to solve the increasingly difficult tasks.
Whilst a fun game, Max: Curse of Brotherhood has the feel of an enhanced PC/Mobile game, as the magic marker could be a lot easier to control through the use of a mouse or finger, rather than the Xbox’s analogue stick. If it wasn’t made in-house at Microsoft this is a game that could easily fit into the Wii/WiiU games catalogue. Though that is a minor quibble in what is overall a solid game on this new console.
The game’s music does the job – it’s nothing special, but it does enough to bring the player into the game and add a subtle dimension to the gamers experience. The creators had the foresight to fade the music in just the right places to affect the player in just the right way, especially during the boss battles.
A truly great game has something that sets it apart from the pack, Max Payne creating bullet-time for example, Gears of War and it’s cover mechanism. Max doesn’t have anything that is truly unique, though due to the platform it’s on it could claim to be unique. There are no games like it on the Xbox One at the minute and there doesn’t appear to be any other platformers similar to this on the horizon.
If you’re a fan of beautiful puzzle platformers then this game is certainly for you, however it does have a few disappointing mechanics and is certainly not for everybody.
Trailer:
