Max Gentlemen Review

Humor is a tough thing to translate to a game - mostly because humor often relies on being quick and knowing when to move on, rather than sit around desperate to soak up the laughs. That's an issue when it comes to Max Gentlemen. It's an entertaining idea initially, but it's a joke that soon runs out of steam.

Set in a Victorian style era, you control a man who's keen to own many hats. There's a choice of two modes to play but the principle remains the same - stack as many hats on your head as possible. Uneven and inaccurate controls ensure that this isn't as much fun as it could be, plus stacking hats was only ever going to be enjoyable for a limited amount of time.

The Score Attack mode is kind of like an auto-runner in that your gentleman travels under his own steam with you only able to control the hats. Holding down on the screen causes a white line to appear and you move that up or down to choose a hat. Tap on the screen and the location of the hat is where you jump. You're dodging birds flying towards you, so the trick here is to adjust which hat you're leaping from accordingly. The problem here is that moving to a new hat takes time. It's not a substantial problem early on, but when you're balancing a huge pile of hats that time often makes all the difference. It's frustrating trying to get to the right hat in time, with Max Gentlemen rarely leaving you sufficient time to feel that skill would help in this scenario.

Things worsen when you try the drinking stages of the game. These are located within a bar with the gentleman having to pick up a pint from the barman in order to acquire a hat, while dodging flying drinks. Controls for the hats are the same as before but you also have to move from left to right. In this situation it's too easy to mistap and move a hat instead of move along.

Max Gentlemen is also the kind of idea that works well for a few minutes, but then you start noticing just how basic it is. The visuals are quite charming at first but then you realize that nothing really changes. There are new hats to unlock, which is briefly cool and funny, but it's still pretty shallow stuff. Many other unlocks are also dependent on in-app purchases, and Max Gentlemen just isn't worth the investment.

As a brief and funny idea Max Gentlemen seems promising, but it's really quite limited and lacking in staying power.