Max: The Curse of Brotherhood Review

Drawn out. 

Using a giant marker to color your way through the puzzles of Max: The Curse of Brotherhood offers a great-looking and clever twist to the platforming genre. Well, it would if it weren’t so frustrating half the time. Once the novelty of drawing wears off, the curse we’re left with isn’t brotherhood, but awkward controls.

I generally like the idea that I can make drawings to help solve platforming puzzles, even though it’s not as freeform as the concept implies. You get the marker early on, but before you do, climbing ladders and jumping over endless gaps as Max in the beautiful 2.5D environment gives you your first taste of the floaty controls. Cruelly, our little hero is a complete platforming pansy who can't even double-jump; one long-ish fall or hit from just about anything and he'll go down faster than that kid in Limbo. And he went down a lot. This game isn't as cuddly as it appears.

Once Max obtains the marker, don't expect to learn much more about the mustached freak who stole his kid brother or the mysterious land where you've both ended up for

this seven-hour game. What seems like the start of a rich Disney-esque story about learning to love a bothersome sibling quickly fades away as though it was never there.

At first the puzzles seem simple, since you can only use certain powers in specific ways, like raising an earth pillar to get up a cliff or making a vine to swing to a new platform. Even these early puzzles were a bit exhausting though, as my pillars weren’t always tall enough for shrimpy Max to reach the next area. But I couldn’t just extend a pillar – instead I’d have to destroy it and build an entirely new one, which was a bit cumbersome, especially in the heat of a chase.

New marker powers come at a nice pace though, and each one has its own vibrant chapter full of briefly interesting ways to use the mechanic. The water temple is dripping with clever puzzles that had me drawing spouts of water to create paths and making boats out of vines. The fire temple, on the other hand, is more of a thrilling race, where the marker helped me to quickly find an escape route from a fiery lava beast. Discovering new ways to utilize the power of the marker is entertaining, and each area offers some fun surprises.

Unfortunately, getting through the well-thought out puzzles in each section means dealing with the inaccuracies of the thumbstick-driven marker. (The fact that this is an Xbox One game that doesn’t even attempt to use the Kinect or Smartglass for a feature like this is extremely odd.) It’s not so much that their solutions are hard to figure out, but rather that I couldn’t draw where I wanted to and I could only use a small amount of ink. When I could draw, my vines, water spouts, or fireballs didn’t always show up as I intended. The marker feels as fat as it looks on screen.

When I could get the marker working, successfully navigating Max through areas using vines, branches, and water spouts together to create a sort of mousetrap sequence was seriously satisfying. Some high-pressure levels towards the end where you’re outrunning lava are particularly epic as well.

Later on the challenge becomes more about figuring out which powers to use in what order, then drawing them perfectly in real-time, while running from something. If one piece of the puzzle doesn't fit quite right, you have to redo the whole thing. That quickly grows old.

I assumed that having a stronger marker with extra powers would be more enjoyable as I went along, but it turned out that trying to string multiple imprecise powers together is much more annoying than challenging. Meanwhile, the collectable eyeballs stashed around the levels require a bit of extra puzzle-solving skill to find, but without any mention of what finding them all does, I wasn’t really motivated to track down the rest.