Max & the Magic Marker is a platformer that uses bitmap-like art with a marker and teaches some basic shape drawing and physics. To get from one side to the other, you have to draw something to reach your goals. You can build all kinds of things, such as bridges, boulders and stuff to keep Max dry from the rain, to get some secret black dots hidden everywhere. The black dots are in hard-to-find places difficult to get to. Collecting ink pods helps you create even bigger drawings to get to hard-to-get-to places in the game. Max & the Magic Marker is fun but also challenging.
The game is very hard to play at times when drawing boxes or bridges. It gets frustrating when you accidentally suck ink back into the marker or didn’t draw the boxes straight and start to fall. When you are drawing a bridge, steps or anything else, you can use the pause function in the game to draw it if you want a better chance to get it right. Also, there are other secrets in the game that get more complicated as you go along.
I’m not an artsy person, but I like artistic work in things, including games. I thought the graphics in Max & the Magic Marker were very cartoonish in a way. The 3-D graphics give it a storybook feel. For an E-rated game, it was a lot of fun for me and my boys to play. The gameplay is all about being an art builder for Max. The graphics were smooth and did not glitch at all. I have to say the developers succeeded in their idea for the graphics.
There isn’t much of a story in Max & the Magic Marker, but it really doesn’t need one for the kids. Max creates a bad thing and goes into the storybook after realizing his creation is alive. The bad thing is an evil, purple blob wreaking havoc in the storybook. Max grabs his marker and goes into the book. He is now the little hero that needs your help building stuff to get rid of the purple menace. There aren’t very many details for the plot. It didn’t make much sense from a storyline perspective. Although it didn’t have a good storyline, it did give off a cool dreamy feeling, and the story that is there doesn’t bore you to death. Max & the Magic Marker really doesn’t need a great story to keep it upbeat and interesting. The gameplay itself does the trick.
The sound effects in the game are average for a kid’s game. The dying sound was to me funny at first because I thought something else good was going on at the time. Of course, I was wrong; Max was a dead duck falling into the water. When getting to the level marker or save point, you hear a laugh from the Evil Eggplant. The laugh is a wicked sound for a laugh but worked well for the eggplant-shaped villain. The sounds for the jumps and magic marker were very well-designed and brought some realness to the game. The sounds were pleasant and worked well but seemed at times repetitive, and there was a lack of assortment for the background music.
My sons and I have come up with these conclusions to all the problems this game had and what elements we enjoyed. We like the fact you get to draw like a beginning artist; the game teaches you some basic shape-making skills. I love that you have to find the hidden black dots, but it seemed very difficult to find or get to them. Drawing objects like stairs and the like was hard at times and made Max & the Magic Marker harder to play. Also, I had to help my sons in most of the game, and they are at an intermediate game level with most games rated from E for everyone to T for teen. I also had some difficulty finding black dots or building better structures for Max to get to his goals. The game is at or a little over the intermediate level. People with little knowledge of games may have some trouble playing this title.
Overall, Max & the Magic Marker was fun for all of us and kept our interest. The graphics give off a storybook and cartoonish feel, the sound effects are good for the most part, and using the marker is a cool gameplay element we all enjoyed. Using the marker for Max’s adventure is a great design concept that could be used again in other games. Thinking up what you have to create at times was hard, but you felt rewarded when you created something that worked. So, we liked Max & the Magic Marker very much and will play it over and over again. If you are looking for a complicated game with some artistic skills for your kid, this is it.
Tommy started playing with the Atari 2600 when he was about 8 years old. Two years after that, his father bought him a brand new Nintendo, and since, Tommy has been addicted to games. Tommy is a full-time student at Full Sail University working toward a bachelor's degree in video game design. He's more into gameplay than story, but he does think that story creates flow in a game and makes the game more interesting. Tommy doesn't like games that have too much story, though. He likes games that have three-fourths gameplay to one-fourth story. To him, gameplay makes the game fun and interesting. Tommy also believes if you are a designer, you have to have that gift to let yourself see all sides of the spectrum of the industry. Games have choices that make the game interesting to the player and those choices need to be logical not irrational. With making games, everything is essential to the creation of the game as a whole. A movie without sound is like a game without gameplay. Everything is accentual to the game as a whole — that is how games create the fun within them.
