Hands-on with Max Adventure from Imangi Studios

Keith Shepherd and Natalia Luckynova are the husband-and-wife team that make up iPhone developer Imangi Studios, creators of the popular Harbor Master iPhone game and its iPad cousin. I got to meet them both at the 360iDev conference a few weeks ago, and they kindly showed me an as-yet-unnamed game that was still in the early stages of development. They said it would be a little while until they unveiled a trailer for it, and then this week they sent out the trailer above. The game has been named Max Adventure, and Imangi Studios tells us they hope to release it a few more months from now.

The version I played at 360iDev was very early -- the menus were still in bits and pieces, and there were no real missions or text yet implemented. But the story was told to me: the protagonist (Max, apparently) is a kid who lives in the suburbs, and when all of the parents get ported off of the planet, it's up to him to save his friends (and eventually, you'd assume, the world).
The game is a dual-stick shooter (you use one virtual stick to move and one to shoot in various directions), but it's definitely family-friendly, and there's a nice emphasis on exploration. Max has to make his way around the houses and fences in the suburbs to find and rescue his friends, and on the way, he'll have to look all over the place for powerups, keys, and whatever else he can find to use against the alien threat.

There will be both story and side missions spread across what Imangi guessed might be around 30 levels total. In my short travels around Max's suburb, I saw some ammo pickups, and was also told that there would be a spread gun pickup available, or a powerup that granted Max invincibility for a short time.

Imangi also told us that they were thinking about including a few other modes in the game, maybe even a survival mode that had Max holding down a map or a series of maps for as long as possible. But just this week, they confirmed that there's still a lot of work to be done on the game, so the full featurelist is still being planned out.

Still, even with just the short hands-on at 360iDev, the game seemed like a lot of fun. We'll keep an eye out for it, and let you know when it arrives on the App Store.
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