Two Brothers Reviews

If you won't truck through an extremely buggy game, then pass on this one. The story is very compelling—and while the game isn't killing you: getting you stuck in walls; blasting your ears with glitched audio; barrading you with typos; not having attacks, which indicate that they've hit, actually hit; or not being allowed to proceed for whatever unknown reasons—it can be veeeery immersive. Hell, I've spent quite a bit of time on this game on my first playthrough, and I still haven't completed it. All the side quests are very engaging, and though the game has very little direction, the main story had me 'pining' to know what will come next. It had that classic, old video game story which deals with many adult themes very well in the context of a child's game. So, if you're willing to pay 15$ for a buggy, seemingly incomplete game for a great story and truck through it, then I recommend this game. Make your assessment, eh?

Two Brothers is a game with a ton of promise. The game feels and plays like a Seiken Densetsu but ditches the tired fantasy setting in favor of a more surreal world. It's hard to assign an existing tag to the world style. I would say that Two Brothers compares most closely to Anodyne or even Zeno Clash in this regard. The presentation contains simple 2D sprites juxtaposed with highly detailed pixel art for large scale creatures. This mixing of styles really left me with a sence of excited uneasiness; that feeling where you are a little disturbed but much more fascinated. The combat is, from my brief experience, somewhat shallow and uninspired. It serve it's purpose but otherwise felt like a chore between story points. You have a basic melee combo and a ranged attack. Hitboxes are unpredictable and so every encounter feels like a clumsy struggle to spam melee attacks before the enemy can hit you. The story is surprisingly detailed and well crafted. It deals with some interesting themes and can get rather philosophical at times. Quite enjoyable but I won't delve into it too much to avoid spoiling anything. It's just unfortuante that the only way it's conveyed is through a painfully slow, two line text crawl. The combat on it's own would not be enough to drag Two Brothers down. Sadly, there is a monumental number of bugs in Two Brothers, a plethora even. These range from innocuous graphical glitches to game breakign bugs that will demand you restart. I was about four hours in and had just finished the first dungeon when I encountered a bug that forced me to reopen the game and then broke sequence such that I could no longer progress. Sadly to say I don't believe I will be able to risk losing another four hours or more to a bug. It is for this reason alone that I cannot reccomend this game is it currently exists. I would be more fogiving if this was early access or beta or something, but this is a shipped product and it is not at all ready. It's truly a shame. Two Brothers is clearly lovingly created by a team with a great vision. Unfortunately, until the nuts and bolts are not solid enough to properly present this vision. I hope a patch comes to rectify at least the most glaring and game breaking issues. You can bet that once it does I'll be back to see the potential of Two Brothers fully realized.

-As an nostalgic I think it's not worth the time really- I played all the great game boy classics so I got this one right off the bat. Graphics and music are great nostalgic tokens. Even the story so far is decent. Sadly technically it's more of a mess. Resolution changes screw around with my desktop icons, there's the need to play as admin, game starts up multiple times on the odd occassion. Combat is plain boring and there's no level or interesting item progression system in sight. The first dungeon which took a long time to get to isn't inspired either. While it's unfair to compare it to say "Link's awakening" or "Final fantasy adventure" which is really "Seiken Densetsu" I'd expected more gameplay like the classical bombs to set or exploration or how about switching to your brother for some riddles or anything original really. But in the end it's the combat really that kills it. Contains nice ideas (color, dying, animal for houses) but in the end not enough to keep me going - also faster text would have been good. A missed opportunity here. Anodyne made a better impression.

A buggy mess plain and simple. I had to fix it so I could play in anything besides a WAY too small resolution, then the intro broke, then after trying to bring the water jug on a girl's head to a fish man and winding up feeding her to him (Or was that just another bug?) I got stuck in an endless loop talking to an NPC.

I've tried to play this several times since I purchased it, but the bugs just make it impossible. The game locks up often in some areas requiring a restart. They made the bizarre decision to have your inventory available only when you have a particular party member with you, but he frequently leaves. Combat is rough to say the least. Controller support is "partial" at best and has to be reselected every time you start up. Dialog/text stays on screen until new dialog comes up. Meaning your conversations stay around long after they're over. This obscures a portion of the world at all times. The whole experience feels unpolished. It's been out for over 2 years so I'd expect these glaring issues to have been patched by now. I don't like reviewing a game that I haven't finished, but I just have to give up on this one. Don't waste your money.

Two Brothers is absolutely one of the most underrated games I have played. I have yet to finish the game, but have played about 18 hours which, to me, is impressive for an RPG with no grinding. It has its share of glitches, which I hope will be ironed out in the future, but that's not to say that I don't love the game in its current form. The story is simple but interesting, the combat is challenging but uncomplicated, and the classically inspired graphics are filled with colour. The story is thought-provoking and touching. As a whole the game is very retro-inspired (what drew me in), yet it plays with and subverts many of the classic aspects of gaming, particularly death. I look forward to the finished product with all of the kinks ironed out.

Pro: -The game design itself was gorgeous -Definite throwback to the games of my youth -The Devs were polite and corteous Con: -Game crashes at start -When it does decide to run, controller or KB+M doesn't want to work -Massive video lag -Texture issues I've had this game for a few years now, paid $20 for what I knew to be an investment that may or may not work out. Devs did what they could to try and help me out. I don't like not hearing much about how they plan to fix it, but if Chromaphore becomes an actual thing and is released, I hope those of us who bought Two Brothers back when it was still being finished will at least get grandfathered in. I will update my review on a later date if things change.

Very, very clever Zelda-like game. Tells a good story while affectionately poking fun at older games and using the pseudo-GB format to do some interesting things. Decent length so far, gameplay is pretty good (if "clunky" much like older games often would be), and the music's great. Unfortunately, it seems to have a fair number of glitches, mostly related to collision detection; just be careful and consider backing up your saves every once in a while. (The game autosaves very frequently, so don't worry about losing progress if you have to restart it.)

There's a lot of bugs, which is sad because I like the story and the world design. The combat system is boring and usually it seems like buttom smashing is more efficient than actual strategy. I've got stuck in moving walls and I've been stuck forever in mid air because some rats were standing under me and I couldn't fall all the way down from a ledge. Some graphics layers are in wrong places. The water animations only work in places where there are splashes, otherwise it's the regular walking animation. There seems to be no other way to get back to main menu than to restart the game. Anyway, I hope they fix all this. Other than the bugs, I really like it. Seems like they forgot to playtest it completely.

I so want to recommend this, but I can't quite do it. This game is a love letter to classic 8-bit gaming, and more specifically, the Game Boy. While the game plays most similar to The Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening, it also has references to Pokemon and Final Fantasy. Since the Game Boy was one of my first gaming loves, and Link's Awakening my favorite title on the system, the game just hit me hard with its nostalgia hammer. The story has some very profound, and dare I say it, vaguely religious themes, at least what I played of it so far. The writing is easily the game's strongest aspect. It's full of refernces to classic games, but it also contains a great deal of pathos and questions about death, science vs faith, and the afterlife. The soundtrack is good as well. But this thing has more bugs than the last two Bethesda games combined, and even compared to the games it tries to emulate, it actually falls short technically. It plays in an extremely tiny window, and pressing the Escape button quits the game entirely instead of pausing it. You have to be very careful when playing this game lest you run into glitches. And that's too bad, because everything about this game shows great promise.