Mana Spark

i´m positively surprised, that this rogue lite doesn´t require grinding and "dying yourself up" in order to get strong enough to have a good chance to beat the game. you can get allmost all upgrades during a run and you can even pick one of the upgrades as permanent upgrade, which is something i miss in other rogue likes/lites. once you know how the enemies behave, and how good the upgrades are, you can get through the game pretty quickly, even if you haven´t bought any permanent bonuses. my complains about the game are, that the archer is too slow without any upgrades and that he can´t walk while aiming, which is especially annoying during the last boss. i also think the last boss has just too much health and is too fast for 2 of the 3 available characters and that it´s unproportionally hard compared to the rest of the game. the game is pretty forgiving and not really hard most of the time, so it´s good to be played casually every now and then.

Gameplay dynamic and good mechanics but a bit too short.

I really like this game... it plays a lot like Dead Cells as far as progression goes where you grow stronger with each death by unlocking items permanently for your next run... there's a lot of interesting tools to experiment with to find what tactic fits your play style, but there's always an element of randomness to it in that when you reach the safe rooms you get randomized upgrades so it keeps every run feeling unique... there are some balancing issues, some tools you can really break the game (poison web pad that slows down the enemies can make in-dungeon boss fights super easy to exploit), but that's also part of the fun finding out how to get the upper hand as the dungeons get progressively harder... all in all, it's quite a fun game that will be right at home with fans of Dead Cells, Wizard of Legend, Enter the Gungeon, etc. My biggest gripe wich knocked off a whole star is the fact that there's no Cloud Saves while the Steam version has them... the GOG version keeps the game save in the Windows registry which makes it super tedious and unreliable to play on more than one machine... makes me wish I would've bought it on Steam for this reason alone

The epitome of a 2 and a half star game. There's nothing wrong with it, so long as the 8 bit visuals don't put you off. Sadly, there's not a whole lot to recommend it for either. Mana Spark references Binding of Isaac with one of it's pick-ups and plays like a slower, less-fun and just generally all-round worse version of that game.