Mana Spark

I really wanted to like this game. The studio is from my city, I love roguelikes and pixel art and I've played nearly all in this genre that I could get my hands on, in the last two years. The title of this review is because for the first hour or so of gameplay, things look promising, you get invested, die and go again and so on, just as every good roguelike out there, and I was happy with that. Until I realized that checkpoints were sadistic - not in a soulslike way, but as plain artificial difficulty - I got lucky in one build and was able to get past the dragon *, which was already far away from the last checkpoint, only to realize that there was none in the next floor, and none in the two others following. By then the difficulty had spiked so much that I was alive only by a really fortunate combination of powerups - there is simply no way for a regular player to be able to get that far based on skill alone. Not mentioning that it would be boring because enemies have so much more health and your damage doesn't scale properly. In its current stage this game is bad precisely because it's promising in the beginning. * BTW, good luck if you got pets by then. They will hit the dragon immediately on its way out of the hole, making it go back in before you can land more than one hit and another stupid fire cycle begins again, resulting in half an hour of tedious fight praying to not fall asleep in the middle. The funny detail is that pets are fairly common (one of the PC even starts the game with one) - makes one wonder if anyone even played this before releasing.

I am usually not into rogue-lite, but this game cought my eye with the narrative "humans just need a mana spark". I am not against rogue-lite either, so I picked it up. And I was very pleasantly surprised! The story is not long and even not much pronounced, but I liked it. It felt like a good short fantasy story. The gameplay itself is good, hard at the beginning, but with experience you find the right combinations of power-ups and moves. In the end you find yourslef flying through the rooms with a very satisfying feeling. Though you can die very fast if you start being reckless - still it is about planning and good excution. The last two bosses are a bit brutal and really souls-like, but thats fine, because it really keeps you on and pushes you to learn, even when the rest of the game feels "easy-ish" The RNG is pretty light-weight, which I like. Overall it is fun, satisfying, not very long, not that hard and kind of relaxing. Definetly worth the money, if you are a casual looking for something light and like the style/setting.

Picked it up for peanuts in the sales and I can't complain at all, I have enjoyed it so far. The game feels polished and the controls are tight. I love the art work, whoever drew the character art and stuff is very talented. Nice one devs! it's a great addition to my rouguelite collection.

All my upgrades so far are from the first two levels who are probably better called the tutorial stage, because there is none after the first boss. So you aren't really getting rewarded for the first boss because the difficulty jumps up after it so at least at the beginning you have to deal with a slow dribble of 2 or 3 units of the upgrade currenzy for some time. The stingyness of the safe room (that secure your currenzy found till then is though the only problem so far. The combat feels impactfull, enemys are varied and interesting and even seem to support one another. Atmosphere and Optics are nice even beautyfull, if simple. Some features are not really bets thought trough (like weakening enemys I like it but loosing all that currenzy all the time is annoying.

Mana Spark has got to be my favorite rogue lite, including Dead Cells and Enter the Gungeon. In fact it's so light on the RNG that I'd call it a rogue lite lite. There's almost no grinding. There are a few things you can unlock in the game, but you really mostly advance by getting better as a player. I don't remember exactly, but I think if you play 3-5 runs you'd have unlocked all or almost all of the items, and from then on it's all on your skill. Every enemy type and boss has very specific attack and defense patterns. Eventually you feel like Neo in the Matrix, you just know what everybody is going to do and can easily dodge. I can now play through the game hardly getting hit a single time. If I'd play more carefully, I'm sure I could make it to the final boss without getting hit. Bosses that seemed impossible the first few times I can now dodge expertly and kill them in record time with the right combination of items. Very cool killing The Knowledge or the Dragon in their very first attack phase. For example, many enemies have a shield: your projectiles cannot penetrate them at all. But if you aim for their heads or sometimes feet, there are 1-2 pixels where you can snipe a shielded enemy. There's nothing like headshotting a shield guy who's running toward you from across the room. You get about 15-20 items in one full play through, and there are about 5 items that are really weak. I've gotten every single bad item and still made it to the final boss, although I died there. Sometimes you get only amazing items and then your run is pretty trivial. The final boss is still challenging. The rooms are carefully hand-crafted and it shows. Unlike the nonsensical random rooms in other rogue lites, you can actually learn and get better at each individual room. They are connected in a random fashion, so no two dungeons are exactly alike. I like this much better than "real" random rooms. You can still die unexpectedly, but I must've played it a thousand times now.