When did moustaches go out of style? This thought popped into my mind as I watched the opening cutscene of Marko: Beyond Brave. The three-headed dragon bit was very interesting, of course, but I was fixated on the moustache. You don’t see many without a beard these days. A full moustache-beard combo is great. But moustache alone? Somewhere along the line it became creepy, or the property of hipsters. Some societal switch was flicked, and we would no longer tolerate another Tom Selleck.
Still, I’ve not seen anyone with as magnificient a moustache as Marko. That thing would tickle the ears of people sitting next to him. Still, the game that the moustache is housed in is a bit less impressive. It’s a lesson in how an otherwise solid core can be dragged down by smaller annoyances. Marko: Beyond Brave is a metroidvania that hesitantly ticks the right boxes, but makes missteps in the fine details. A magnificient moustache, yes, but it’s full of lice.
Moustachevania
Let’s put the moustache to one side for a moment, and talk about that three-headed dragon, Entropy. It opens by trampling over the land of Zagora, including the village that Marko, a woodcutter with the aforementioned fascinating facial hair, lives in. He fights back with his axe, but the only result is the crumbling of the bridge beneath him. Lost down under the village, he finds a mystic sword in a cavern and begins cutting his way back up to the surface. The moustache – and the rest of him – then set out to give Entropy the what-for.
It’s a story that’s slathered in Slavic mythology, and Marko: Beyond Brave presents itself well in that regard. The art style is great, for one. There’s something almost Max Flesicher in the design of Marko, and the hand drawn art fits the fairytale theme well. I rather like the boss designs too. A recurring boss fight involves genie-like women coming out of urns and dancing in the background. It was almost mesmorising, which is a problem as I had to focus on the lightning storms they were summoning. In short, the general design of Marko: Beyond Brave is top dollar.
Gameplay-wise, it has some promising notes. It’s a metroidvania, for one, which is a genre that always puts a smile on my face. It’s a genre that has three main pillars holding it up: exploration, platforming and combat. Exploration puts in the best showing. It’s a reasonably expansive map, with lots of corners to poke into that will net you upgrades. That said, it’s not the best at guidance. The map has no fog-of-war, making it hard to tell where you’ve been. In fact, I’ve only managed to reach the bad ending so far because I have no idea what I’m missing to progress, despite having scoured the map. Some doors are still closed, and one of the merchants is bugged and won’t sell me anything. That’s not good.
Falling Flat
The other two pillars of Marko: Beyond Brave don’t fare too well either. Platforming is probably the worst of the bunch. Being a metroidvania, we have a standard suite of movement upgrades. Problem is, the standard jump doesn’t feel right. It’s something to do with the platform detection. Sometimes jumps cause Marko to suddenly shoot up and on to a platform; other times he’ll smack into it. It makes tough platforming segments feel frustratingly unpredictable. When combined with a finicky teleporting mechanic, it becomes maddening. A shame, because Marko feels quite pleasant to control outside of that, particularly when dashing.
Combat suffers a bit as well. Firstly, I had a few issues with poorly sized hitboxes, as well as a lack of i-frames when hit. However the developer has been diligently working on these, which I do approve of. There are bigger issues, though. The basic melee attack has no real weight to it. Combat feel is a tricky mistress, but dealing and taking damage just doesn’t feel exciting. Boss fights lack the excitement factor too. While interesting in design, their attack patterns are very predictable, making success more an inevitability than a test of skill.
I’m kicking Marko: Beyond Brave a lot, but the overarching issue seems to boil down to this: the game feels unfinished. There’s a whiff of ‘early access’ about it. It’s not just in the fine details either. There’s a ‘Bestiary’ page on the menu, for instance, which is completely empty. There are plenty of strange graphical bugs, too, and one boss fight – with a rat wizard, who I would normally celebrate from the rooftops – which I could keep repeating forever. All these are signs of a game that was pushed out onto the stage long before it was ready.
Marko: Beyond Brave – Metroidvania, Uncooked
It’s a shame, because deep in the core of Marko: Beyond Brave is a decent metroidvania. Slavic myth is a spring that is certainly under-tapped in video games. Combined with the lovely art, this could really have been a winner. Hell, it’s even got a nice variety of environments, enemies and boss designs. It’s unfortunate that the cluster of frustrations that cling to the gameplay serve to drag it down so much. I went in really trying to like it. After ten hours of play, I couldn’t sustain that feeling.
To end on a note of positivity, though, it’s heartening to see the developers work on these issues. A lot of them, like the platforming, are surmountable with time. I write reviews like this with hope that I’ll be eating my words in a few months time. I can only review what’s right in front of me, after all. Meaning, I have to conclude like this: there is a lot of promise in Marko: Beyond Brave, but as things stand, it’s not living up to that promise. Give it longer to cook before you check it out.
