Mana Spark

you grow stronger with each death by unlocking items permanently for your next run if you like the genre, enter the gungeon, you will like this one,

I was greeted by an intro that was heavy on Amiga "retroness" and short on creative writing skills. The text tells of a world where humans are screwed because they don't have mana energy, but all other races do and thus must commit to the life of slaves. It feels very much like an allegory to the indentured servitude of the lower classes in a modern day capitalistic society, but all that seems coincidental when the next few screens reveal how humans are killed "whenever" their villages are discovered in the wild (as if it's a random occurrence rather than a conscious effort by the dictators to quell rebellion) and only decide to fight back when, after a particularly perculiar raid, "particular" villagers are kidnapped rather than the entire village ransacked and murdered. I assume it's hard to find good writers or translators in Brazil, so with that in mind I continued into the game. You're tossed into a world that looks like the combination of 80's game resolutions with 90's game color depth, capturing (or just chasing) the same art style of games like Dead Cells or Kingdom. The animations are smooth, the silhouettes of enemies clearly delineate their type and they all cleverly telegraph their attacks and I was looking forward to the vaunted skill-based combat. Apparently, "skill-based combat" simply means "we didn't use random numbers when calculating damage", as you're essentially confined to a Binding of Isaac-esque control scheme with the addition of a dodge button. Hardly a read, dodge, parry and punish style you'd see when other developers haughtily profess their combat system. They combine it with a random dungeon generator that is rife with dead ends (because those dead ends might be passsages in *other* run-throughs!) and rooms full of the *same* enemy configurations each time (this is what they call the "handcrafted room" experience). It very much feels like a game straight out of a game jam with a few months of "polish", unremarkable and overpriced.

I wanted to like this game but there are issues which just make it feel bad. The biggest sin of this game is the sadistic checkpoint placement. There are none either before or after a boss level, which means lots of runes get thrown away constantly. I could probably get past the dragon, but at this point of treading the same rooms and enemies over and over, I have no desire to bother. Control of many of the characters feels bad too, as little delays are deliberately added to attacks and stuff to try and differentiate the characters, but this ends up just making them feel laggy and unresponsive. The only fun character to move (crossbow guard?) has no health and damage. The melee character moves forward when he attacks, which is also a horrible thing. Combined, this game quickly loses it's magic and just becomes frustrating.

First Roguelite I ever played, and I've thoroughly enjoyed it. It was extremely difficult on my first run, but quickly got easier. Even then, it was hard at the later levels. So punishing where if you die you reset and it takes an hour to get back to where you were. The graphics are beautiful as well.

Good small game.....................