Platform(s): PC
Genre: Metroidvania, Search Action, Platformer

Metroidvania or Search Action is a popular genre these days, especially amongst indie developers. The best of them are usually attributed to their smooth and precise controls, as well as polished and challenging gameplay.

Unfortunately, Marko Beyond Brave is not one of those.

Slavic Hero

Marko Beyond Brave is a pretty standard Metroidvania or Search Action game with the usual mechanics you’d often get in these games. As the protagonist Marko, you’ll have to attack, jump and navigate your way through a non-linear map, defeating bosses and unlocking new abilities to progress to the next location.

The game doesn’t really offer anything new or innovative, it’s just like any other Metroidvania game. The highlight and best aspect of Marko Beyond Brave is its visuals. The game employs hand-drawn 2D visuals akin to those classic old Disney games, which gives the game a fairy tale-esque vibe. That, along with its elements of Slavic mythology, makes the game stand out amongst other Metroidvania games. Well, at least in terms of how the game looks, at least.

I had to get that out of the way first because that’s probably the only good thing I have to say about Marko Beyond Brave. The game fails in its gameplay and I had a horrible experience with the game; it’s perhaps even one of the worst games I’ve played in 2024 so far. Metroidvania games are often very challenging and hard. However, with good gameplay mechanics, you can learn to master and overcome a game’s high difficulty. It doesn’t even have to be Metroidvania games, I’ve beaten and completed games like Armored Core 6 Fires Of Rubicon and Nioh 2 because those games have well-balanced and expertly implemented mechanics. What’s my point? Marko Beyond Brave does not.

I understand that Marko Beyond Brave is an indie game, but that doesn’t excuse it from featuring clunky-as-hell gameplay. The worst aspect of the game is its hit detection or collision detection. It’s easy to get damaged by enemies and/or the environment due to how janky and imprecise it is. It’s difficult to articulate how bad the hit/collision detection is in words but it’s so bad. The enemy attack animations in this game can be confusing because even when you’ve dodged it, the effects of that attack can linger even after the animation is over. That means that I would often still get hit by enemy attacks despite having dodged it. This loops around to my earlier point about difficulty; how can I improve and ‘get good’ when I’m wrestling and struggling with the game’s mechanics, which seem to be against me at every turn? What’s the point of learning an enemy boss’ attack patterns if I get hit anyway because of the poor hit/collision detection?

The combat isn’t the only problem. You’ll be doing a lot of jumping and platforming in Marko Beyond Brave. Unfortunately, this can be just as frustrating as the combat. The easiest way to describe it is that the jumps somehow just never have enough ‘reach’. I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve died just because my jump didn’t have enough ‘reach’ to get where I was supposed to. These platforming sections aren’t even challenging, it’s only because of the wonky jumps that make them so irritating to navigate. This makes even the easiest or simplest platforming sections feel like an annoying chore. This becomes even more of a glaring problem considering I’m fresh off playing something like Astro Bot, where the platforming and jumping feel like heaven compared to this game’s hell.

Other issues include the map being too small to function properly as a reference in the game (you can’t zoom in), but Marko Beyond Brave also has tons of glitches and bugs. Throughout the time I was given to play the game for review, there were multiple patches. I even encountered a game-breaking bug. Two hours into my initial playthrough, I used one of the game’s mechanics to transport somewhere new, and the game broke. I couldn’t go anywhere else to progress and when I tried accessing the map, it was just a white screen.

After one of those patches, the devs fixed the map but I was still stuck and couldn’t go anywhere else. This forced me to start a new game from scratch, and I lost all that progress because the game only allows one save game at a given time (there aren’t save slots or anything, which even other indie games like Hades 2 earlier this year had the decency to add).

Jankiness Is Your Worst Enemy

If I had high blood pressure, I would probably pop a blood vessel playing this game. Unless you like grappling with some of the wonkiest, jankiest, and clunkiest gameplay around, there are loads of better Metroidvania games out there.

PROS

• The hand-drawn 2D animation visual style.

CONS

• Wonky, clunky and janky gameplay due to terrible hit/collision detection and a jump that doesn’t seem to have enough reach.
• Game-breaking bugs and glitches.

FINAL SCORE: 30/100

Review copy provided by the publisher. Marko Beyond Brave launches for PC on 18 September 2024.