MAZEMAN Reviews

I really liked the game for the first 86 floors. Beyond that, things fell apart to the extent that the game would be better if they declared floor 94 the end, added a bit of text to wrap it up, and completely deleted the final six floors. 94 floors or even 86 is plenty enough content to justify the $5 price tag--and $5 really does get you everything in the game, as there are no microtransactions or other such monetization junk later. There are 24 playable characters, or 22 if we ignore floors 95+, each of which has exactly one skill. The characters split into eight groups of three, with the three in each group having similar skills. But trying to clear a given level with a very different skill makes for a significantly different challenge, which offers quite a bit of replay value. Every floor up through 86 can be beaten with any character and while collecting all gems, with only the possible exception of floor 58. The game is difficult in the sense that you should expect to die a lot more often than you complete a level. Even so, when you die, you just restart the level, and losing 10 or 30 seconds of progress isn't a big deal. The floors tend to get longer as they go along, but even near the end of the game, it's only a few minutes per floor at a leisurely pace. That said, you're not likely to get completely stuck until very late in the game, as it's common to die the first 10 or so times that you try a floor as you figure it out, then beat it and move on. There is an online leaderboard to compare your fastest time for each floor to that of others. Speed running the game is optional, however, and there's no time limit that stops you from taking 5 minutes on a floor if you want to. With only one skill plus four directions, the game is very controller friendly when inside of a level. The menus to either check leaderboards or abandon an attempt at completing a floor largely demand that you use a mouse, however. There are two notable drawbacks that you should be aware of. One is that the game is rendered at a resolution of approximately 384x216, and then upscaled to fill your monitor, which makes it look very pixellated. It must be run maximized and cannot be run windowed. You can alt+tab in and out of the game, which largely works as you'd hope, other than that the game completely stops when you tab out. I don't just mean that it pauses. If you tell the game to shut down, then alt+tab out, it stops the shutdown procedure until you tab back to the game to finish it and close. The other drawback is that the controls are a little wonky. You have to get the hang of tapping in the direction that you want to go and then letting go. You'll keep traveling in that direction until you press a different direction or hit something that stops you. If you hold down the key for the direction you want to travel, then pressing a different direction won't take effect as quickly as you'd hope. Apart from that, when you nick the corner of a wall, the game feels inconsistent on when it has you stick to the wall versus sliding a bit to the side to keep going. The game is pretty polished with very few outright bugs. The boss of floor 55 occasionally stays invulnerable for a lot longer than it should, certain methods of killing monsters will get double-counted or worse in the tracker of how many monsters you've killed, and that's about it.