If you don’t mind excessive violence and a few input glitches, this game is an absolute gem
Maniac by Transhuman Design immediately reminded me of a conversation with my friend Murray about the GTAIII-era games back in the early aughts. He described one of the GTA games as his ‘favorite murder simulator’. Seeing how violent many games have gotten in the last few decades, Maniac may not actually stand out all that much of its level of blood ‘n guts, especially with its top-down perspective and cartoony graphics. What does stand out is how much fun it is, even with in the first minute of firing it up.
[Minor spoilers for post-game unlocks below]
Premise
The premise is simple. Take one of six characters with various abilities, and go nuts on everything in the (procedurally generated) city. Kick, shoot, run over, or detonate everything in sight! Stay alive for 20 minutes, and the city will go so far as to launch a nuke to try and stop you! This game is all the best parts of blowing off steam in GTA: destroy stuff and try and outpace the escalating forces trying to stop you: police to military to the aforementioned nuke.
Each character has their own (very brief) backstory, and before selecting one you can see their stats on things like how much damage they can take, etc. Once you complete the game, you unlock an alternate avatar for that character (e.g. Hot Dog Guy below).
Gameplay
Gameplay is pretty straightforward: the camera pans over to your characters, and you can start causing chaos immediately! Usually the easiest way to do this is to grab a nearby car (hold Y or triangle) and run over people, hot dog stands, and whatever else is nearby. Vehicles generally only have so much ‘health’ (represented by its own life bar) and you’ll know you need to bail out as there will be a flashing button above it. It’s relatively easy to hijack a new car, especially as characters with a lot of damage absorbing potential, but of course the stronger the vehicle is (e.g. tanks), the longer it takes to hijack it while on foot. The good news is tanks also move fairly slowly, so there’s less risk of them driving away before you can hijack them.
There are a lot of upgrades you can grab over the course of a run; a vendor will show up on the map, and a big blue arrow will point out their direction and distance. Especially early on in the game, you absolutely want to locate the vendor and grab some upgrades, including weapon accuracy upgrades (by default most characters are pretty bad shots), as well as some fun secondary weapons like a mine, very handy as you’ll often be getting tailed by several cops or tanks.
Even more fun is the C4, as unlike the mines they can be detonated by hitting the same button as deploy whenever you want (RB/R2 on controller) instead of hoping your pursuers drive close enough to the mines to detonate them. But the downside is that you can only have one deployed at a time. For the mines, and things like the stationary turret (pictured below), you seem to be able to have at least 3 or 4 at the same time.
What keeps it from being perfect
So as I said, this game is nearly perfect. Actually, if you play on keyboard and mouse, you might not encounter any issues whatsoever. On PC using controller, however, I experienced a few issues navigating the menus; frequently after playing and trying to go back to the main menu, the game would also throw up another options screen (the one where you select auto-aim and auto-fire) which I couldn’t close without breaking out the keyboard and hitting Esc a few times. However, I’ve since tried this on other (handheld) PC systems, and this bug never seems to happen. So…¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Also, the default camera made me a little motion sick after awhile: it’s a hybrid of a fixed camera and top down, where it will ‘stick’ in position until it needs to scroll over. Switching it to ‘Top Down’, where the camera always follows your character completely eliminated my queasiness. In addition, I wish I could make the default camera choice ‘stick’ across restarts of the game.
These are fairly minor issues, which is why I still call the game nearly perfect.
Extras
I had not realized that this game actually has a very cool build mode; I haven’t really dived into it yet, but honestly the default random map has kept me playing for many hours already. Perhaps if you want to have a bit more fun ramps to jump your vehicle over this could be really fun to shove in liberally; by default ramps are usually fairly sparsely sprinkled through the level.
Final verdict
For a five dollar game on Steam, the amount of enjoyment that one can get here is off the charts. Especially with extras like an in-game map builder, extra character unlocks and difficulties, this is probably the most fun I’ve had all year. I regularly fire this game up to blow off steam, and it’s a blast every time. If you don’t mind some gratuitous violence, you owe it to yourself to give this game a try!
Disclaimers
I purchased this game with my own money, and have no affiliation with any of the developers or publisher. These are just my opinions. Parental supervision of a game like this is always recommended.