Max: The Curse of Brotherhood Review - Curse of Mediocrity

Amidst all of the more mature titles pouring out of today’s gaming world, it’s nice to sit back and kick it with something on the lighter side of the video game spectrum.

This is where Xbox Live downloadable title Max: The Curse of Brotherhood comes in. This short, albeit entertaining – for the most part – title is quite the light-hearted adventure.

Max begins with, well, Max trolleying along to his home and up to his bedroom. When he discovers his little brother, Felix, irritatingly playing with his toys, Max searches the internet on how to get rid of little brothers. With the chanting of a rhyming spell, a portal opens where Felix is then taken away by a giant monster and taken to Lord Mustachio, an old man planning to conquer the world by putting his soul into a newer, younger body: Felix’s. It’s up to Max to rescue Felix from Mustachio.

With the power of a literal magic marker, Max must draw shapes in a variety of environments to solve puzzles and platform closer to the rescue of his little brother.

Although the game is played in a 2.5D manner, Max is a puzzler first and a platformer second. The magic marker allows you to draw shapes in the environments from wooden planks to vines, water slides and more in order to progress through levels. These environmental usages are acquired as “new powers” as you undergo the game’s seven chapters, but they can hardly be classified as such because they’re all used in the exact same manner: pulling out your marker to draw a shape. It never once seemed like I gained a new ability.

With a game that has a major emphasis on drawing shapes to solve puzzles, it seems like a wasted opportunity to not include Kinect functionality, especially in certain segments when you have draw specific shapes.

While the puzzles can be quite clever, none of them ever challenged me, and I’m not exactly the sharpest tool in the shed – not that I’m dull either. I wasn’t completely bored the entire time, as some of the sequences where Max runs for his life whether it’s from Mustachio’s big bad monster or a pool of rising lava are quite enthralling, but the puzzles do nothing to innovate the genre. They definitely won’t challenge the more experienced gamer either.

With that said, I can see Max being a fantastic stepping stone into more challenging puzzlers such as Portal for the less experienced gamers. While the platforming isn’t anything remotely special either, it’s just enough to welcome a casual crowd into the genre with open arms.

Outside the four to four-and-a-half-hour story, there are 75 Evil Eyes to find and 18 pieces of the Lost Amulet to collect. The majority of these extra commodities are not particularly challenging to acquire, but some are trickily hidden and manage to breathe some extended life into the game.

What might be the best part of Max, however, were the feelings of nostalgia I felt as I played through it. For whatever reason, it felt like I was taking a trip down nostalgia lane despite the game being a new IP. It could be the simple plot, the dialogue of the characters; whatever. It reminded me of the games I used to play as a child where I was not fixated on the next achievement or deciphering an inevitable plot twist. Instead, it was a game where I was simply having good ol’ fashioned fun without focusing on too much.

What undoubtedly aided the nostalgic feelings were Max’s visuals. It looks just like something Pixar or DreamWorks Animations would conjure. It displays great color details on the Xbox One, but strangely enough, playing the actual game is when it looks best. Cutscenes and cinematics receive a slight downgrade, but it’s the framerate that takes a major beating. The animations look as if they are running on older hardware trying to do its best, which makes little to no sense. Even the opening and closing cutscenes, which look gorgeous and resemble a short animated feature, nonsensically take a dip in the framerate department.