Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons is an innovative game. An innovative game that I really, really wanted to enjoy. Yet I couldn’t. Confusing controls and repetitive puzzles simply took me to the point of no return. Why do I say wanted to? Let’s talk about that.
Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons is a game that puts you in control of two brothers, two sons, actually, that set out on a quest to find magical water that will heal their dying father. The story is told solely through actions, with dialogue coming in an unknown language best related to simlish. The lack of dialogue makes all the actions very powerful, and their presentation even more important. Over the course of the game you’ll meet many new friends, many of which who will help you, and an equal amount trying to hinder you.
Story isn’t the biggest piece of Brothers, that would be the puzzle gameplay that the game is made of. The puzzles of the game are all fun and challenging to some extent, but a good portion of them seem to be repeats of the previous ones, and many are simple climbing puzzles. While the puzzle mechanics have great potential, they are hindered by the games challenging and confusing control. You see, in Brothers, you control each son individually using each control stick for each brother, and each trigger for each brother. This proves to be fun and innovative at first, but eventually just causes more confusion then fun. You’ll end up forgetting which son is controlled by which stick, and have them both walking the wrong way, or even revert back to muscle memory and try to use both sticks to move one of them.
The visuals in Brothers are some of the most beautiful I’ve ever seen, even to the point of looking as good as some next gen games. Light dives 
through trees in a mystical forest just as you’d expect it would, and bright colors pop beautifully, giving the world a real sense of depth and mystique not seen in many other titles. The art style is very cartoonish, but not to the point of being a joke. This is one aspect that Brothers deserves to be heralded for, if nothing.
[easyreview title=”Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons – 5/10″ cat1title=”Gameplay – 2/10″ cat1detail=”The confusing control scheme left me unimpressed, annoyed, and completely de-immersed. ” cat1rating=”2/10″ cat2title=”Visuals – 9/10″ cat2detail=”Brothers is a beautiful game, looking as next-gen to me as Ryse did this past E3.” cat2rating=”9/10″ cat3title=”Overall – 5/10″ cat3detail=”As beautiful as Brothers was, it’s poor controls completely ruined the experience for me.” cat3rating=”5/10″ summary=”ignore”]
The Tale of Two Sons is unfortunately not a game I could find myself coming to enjoy. As innovative, creative, and beautiful the game is, it’s controls simply make it too challenging to play, and by that respect, not fun, and I couldn’t recommend it to anyone. While I see where the team was going with the game and how much potential it had, the controls simply made the game overly challenging and removed any sense of immersion I wanted to experience.
[Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons is available on Xbox Live for $14.99 USD]
Shame. This one looked interesting to me. The controls sounded neat when I first watched the trailer. But, I guess they tried something new and it just didn’t pan out too well.
I’m sure someone will enjoy it, I’m just not that guy.