Max The Curse of Brotherhood Switch NSP Free Download Free Download GAMESPACK.NET

Max The Curse of Brotherhood Switch NSP Free Download Free Download GAMESPACK.NET 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. TOP/BEST ADULT VIDEO GAMES IN UNITED STATES OF AMERICA (USA)

Max The Curse of Brotherhood Switch NSP Free Download Free Download GAMESPACK.NET

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.

Shape the elements to your will with the power of the Magic Marker.

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. Max: The Curse of Brotherhood is a puzzle-platformer that is actually just over four years old now; it originally released in 2013 on other consoles as a sequel to Max & The Magic Marker (a Wiiware and Nintendo DS title). Harmony’s Odyssey Switch NSP

Max The Curse of Brotherhood Switch NSP Free Download Free Download GAMESPACK.NET

Now the game has made it onto the Switch, no doubt hoping to sit amongst the numerous success stories we’ve been seeing for indie developers on the eShop. Can it perch itself proudly amongst the stars of the show, then, or have these last few years been unkind to it? Let’s have a look. The game opens with a beautifully animated (almost Pixar standard) cutscene where Max becomes exasperated at his younger brother, Felix. Using the search engine ‘Giggle’ for some advice, Max stumbles across a chant of sorts that he reads aloud, accidentally getting his brother stolen through a magical portal in the process. Jumping straight in to save him, Max finds himself in a strange world full of platforms, puzzles and enemies to fight his way through. Split across several chapters, you’ll be facing all of these gameplay elements within themed worlds; the usual forest and lava-type levels are all present here, as well some occasional, less commonly used ideas that really shine when encountered. As well as the standard jumping up and over platforms, you’ll also come across a number of chase sequences throughout your adventure.

Explore a stunningly beautiful world with handcrafted levels.

The difficulty of these moments never becomes a mighty, daunting challenge, but they will definitely cause several deaths and introduce a welcome bit of intensity when they arrive. The best part by far, however, and the mechanic that the entire game revolves around, is the way in which you must use a magic marker pen to solve puzzles. The pen will unlock various abilities as you reach new chapters, essentially allowing you to interact with scenery in a new (but similar) way each time. Starting from specific points on the screen indicated by set colours, you can use the marker to draw shapes with branches or vines for travelling, or even raise platforms and create gushes of water to propel yourself or objects around. The creativity isn’t fully free – you can’t just draw any shape anywhere – but the puzzles allow enough wiggle room for them to be a lot of fun. Despite being limited to a just a handful of abilities, the puzzles are always a little different to before; you’ll never see the same piece of scenery or puzzle layout twice. Each one arrives at just the right time, too; just as you are in danger of getting slightly bored, a new way to solve puzzles will unlock. Live by the Sword Tactics Switch NSP

Max The Curse of Brotherhood Switch NSP Free Download Free Download GAMESPACK.NET

This welcome pacing remains throughout, and with a very generous frequency of save points the supposedly dramatic action can actually feel quite calm and relaxed. It may not have been the developer’s intention, but we actually enjoyed this gentler approach – the puzzles, and taking the time to figure them out, work much better when you know you won’t have to keep repeating things if you mess up. Max makes a mistake by reading an incantation aloud after being frustrated with his brother, Felix, and accidentally opens a portal, allowing one of the gruesome creatures controlled by an evil lord, Mustacho, to claim his sibling, dragging him through for whatever nefarious plans he has. Thus begins what is a rather non-stop romp through seven chapters filled with increasingly difficult challenges and, thankfully, plenty of auto-checkpoints within close proximity of each other. Filled with thrills and spills, Max: Curse of the Brotherhood does cause a bit of frustration in the latter stages, but never to the point where players will want to give up.

A heartwarming story of monsters, magic, and brotherly love.

Instead, that ‘frustration’ is the healthy kind, and stems from how after hand-holding gamers in the early levels, breezing through with ease, witnessing the many ‘wow’ moments thanks to the ingenuity of stage creation, it then goes on to prove to be a source of great challenge when the difficulty of tasks ramps up, and the complexity of combination moves are upped. Some more casual gamers may grow tired of needing to learn the layout of some sections in order to survive – especially the chase situations that are present and will see deaths galore – but most hardened platform fans will likely not give up until they crack the nut, thriving under the pressure. Flashbulb / Press Play has taken the creativity of Max & the Magic Marker and refined it to remove some of the drawing issues people may have faced when attempting to scribble free-style with the Wii Remote in the past. What is left is more of a honed experience, with key indicators on the screen for where drawing can take place, and what type of feature can be sketched to aide Max’s progression.

Max’s Magic Marker receives upgrades along the way, so after initially being able to merely raise platforms to reach new areas and block off monsters, he soon gains the ability to grow branches to clamber onto and use as weights for switches, extend vines to swing from or connect to other structures and shuffle across, control the flow of water to carry objects along or launch Max to new heights, and even shoot fireballs – later on using various combinations of all these, whilst also dealing with oncoming enemies, collapsing platforms, and overcoming treacherous death-filled voids. It is highly inventive throughout, and works very well with the touch screen when navigating the levels, out-witting enemies, and finding the various hidden extras carefully dotted around. There are certain times where the touch screen does not register as quickly as hoped, and the delay causes untimely falls or enemies to crush Max, but the majority of the time it is very good indeed, working exactly how it should. For those that prefer to play on the big screen, as mentioned in the PlayStation 4 review, the pad controls of the Magic Marker are a little more clunky, but this is a hangover from when Press Play was acquired to be part of Microsoft Game Studios and The Curse of Brotherhood was an Xbox exclusive, forcing the team to make the most of the control system available.

Max The Curse of Brotherhood Switch NSP Free Download Free Download GAMESPACK.NET

As some will know now, Microsoft closed the innovative developer, but thankfully the core team re-formed as Flashbulb Games, and seemingly re-acquired the license. Could it spell a return for Max and the Magic Marker further down the line? Hopefully! Thanks to the nature of the Switch, if you choose to play the game in Handheld mode you will be able to use the touchscreen to draw with your finger. Or, if you prefer, you can use a combination of the left stick, right trigger and face buttons on any controller setup you like. Both methods work just fine, although we’d argue that playing with a controller in your hands feels slightly more precise. Dragging the marker around the screen with a control stick isn’t really any slower than using your finger and, in fact, using your finger means that your hand will sometimes be in the way of where you are drawing. We’d also recommend playing on a TV if you can as there are times when the camera pans out to particularly wide shots – it isn’t awful in Handheld mode, but this was a game designed for traditional home consoles and that becomes particular apparent in times like this. Irresistible Mistakes Switch NSP

ADD ONS/PATCHES AND DLC’S: Max The Curse of Brotherhood Switch NSP Free Download