Marlow Briggs

Marlow Briggs is campiness in video game form. It, by all accounts, shouldn’t succeed. It is a blatant rip-off of traditional hack n’ slash games that were everywhere in the late 00’s and early 10’s. It’s combat is alright, but nothing to write home about, and most of the camera refuses to cooperate most of the time. So why am I writing about it? Because its so aware of how bad it is and plays it to full effect.

Take the main character. He is a firefighter coming to see his girlfriend at an archaeological dig. The company is cartoonishly evil and he ends up with a magical spear in his chest. A floating mask of vengeance comes around and resurrects him for revenge. If it sounds boring and cliche, thats the point. It’s trying it’s hardest to be tongue-in-cheek and it works so well. The commentary between Marlow and the character is hilarious, and many scenes have 4th wall breaking segments.

Combat is almost unapologetic in ripping off God of War and its mechanics, and lacks a lot depth to it. Once you find a combo that serves to your liking, your good to go, and it can carry for the majority of the game. What it succeeds in is it’s set pieces and visuals. While the graphics were just ok for its time, it makes up for it by covering any bad textures with an absurd amount of explosions. The setting and areas that you explore is great as well. The first level you start on is a huge industrial mining machine that you tear apart over the course of the level. Sometimes you are forced into turret sections (that Marlow is aware of and makes mention of it often), and the game throws a silly amount of helicopters at you. The developers made up budget restraints by cleverly doing most of the cutscenes in a rotoscope fashion, that ends up being a lot more memorable than many of its other actual animated scenes.

The game is far from perfect, but that adds to its charm. It’s characters are as shallow as a kiddie pool, and its combat would get hit with plagiarism if it were a paper. However its aware of how bad it is, which is enough for me to enjoy. The game is dirt cheap, only five bucks on Steam at the moment. If your like me and feel like you need to get your money’s worth out of games, this is not a hard bar to cross with this very rough gem.