ManaCollect Reviews

Can't even play the game. Key bindings are all messed up. Even if you try to set key bindings you will get stuck in the key binding screen and you will have to force stop the game in order to get out of the game. Would really like to play this game but I can't get it to work at all :(

First off, allow me to say that this is the MOST fun I've ever had playing minesweeper! The tutorials may be confusing at first but play around a bit and it all falls into place. Not everything is as it seems in this game. The obvious tends not to show itself and thus your opponent wins duel because of that one miss. I have yet to try multiplayer on this but I'd imagine it'd be chaotic, insane, and overall... just really really fun! Minesweeper was a semi-boring game(My opinion), what with its grey colouring and sounds from either a dead cow or from a Michael Bay movie. No ambient music either... This game gives a somewhat cutesy look on that same game while adding some neat original content. The sound effects are just as enthusiastic as the background music. Sure, it is quite hard, just like the minesweeper of old, yet this game is just so addicting in comparison. The music is rather cute in contrast to the fact you're murdering the other mage but hey, gotta win somehow right?

[noparse] Good? : [+?] Minesweeper alike in hexe grid without bomb but with attack and defense gameplay. kinda good at first and then turn ... bad for me cus my brain cannot keepup da pace like enemy is fast at marking that I end up mashing button for special powa ... ugh not good eh... Meh: [=] The head of 2d char avatar.... well, one look like got hammered often or something... [=] When you lose, you must retry from building mana pace, at first was ok, but when I got lose very often this just boring... Bad : [-] Player and enemy AI char model hinder the hint numbers for the bomb (I mean, the mana) so yeah enemy AI stole the mana very often cus I don't want to miss the mark and redo marking. [-] Enemy very fast and 90% very accurate on finding the mana. [-] I was ok with no mouse button on interface or gameplay ... but the game does not show me what button is attacking button? defense button? cancel button? what are these button and the option menu just showing controller symbol no keyboard?... yeah learn the button by pressing all over... that was ... annoying. The button I still remember for keyboard is : Z for selecting menu and marking mana. X for cancel otherwise forgotten... [/noparse]

If you like Minesweeper you'll like this game bottom line. There is a dungeon mode that plays out exactly like Minesweeper but what makes this game unique is it lets you get competitive and play against another human or CPU in a battle mode where you compete for who can find the most mana (mines) the fastest. You then use your acquired mana to attack and ultimately defeat the opponent. There's a decent cast of characters to choose from each with their own special ability that'll either make finding mana easier for you or harder for them. I feel the reason why this game has mixed reviews is because its taking an already complicated game and making things even more complicated. Again if you're a fan of Minesweeper this is game is definitely worth getting otherwise you may be better off passing on this one or waiting for it to go on sale.

Another anime style game from Fruibat Factory. When I saw who was behind this game, it was an insta-buy. The minesweeper-esque gameplay is executed and blended with RPG-ish skills and attacks very well. Each character has a unique skill that you can use to slow down your opponent. I highly recommend the tutorials at first, even if you know how to play Minesweeper. There's actually a lot more to this game then just playing Minesweeper, especially in the 'Match' modes. My major complaint is that the opponents never miss, even on Normal difficulty. If you get to a tile before them, they just go straight to the next one. Story mode is insanely hard even on the easy difficulties (or maybe I'm just bad). The music is fantastic and very fitting for this game. Tournament mode is like a survival thing, where you must face all of the other characters in constant succession. There's also Dungeon mode, which is fun as well. At $6.99, this is a steal. Pick this up, especially if you love Fruitbat Factory.

The premise is excellent on paper - multiplayer competitive minesweeper. Unfortunately, all of the parts put together fail to come together to create a good game. Moreover, the game is technically poorly done - it's clearly unoptimized, and this causes issues. In the following, I do not use the game's terminology. This is because this game is clearly multiplayer competitive minesweeper. The core mechanic is the following: You control a character, you collect mines. Your character moves around a map with hexes. Each hex tells you how many mines are adjacent to it. You see the values on the hexes surrounding your character. You place a marker where there is a mine, and if you're correct, your marker is placed on the mine. Every mine you correctly place adds to your chain, and the higher your chain is the higher your score multiplier is. You can purposefully break your chain, which gives you all of the points. Alternatively, your chain is automatically broken when all of the mines have been found on the level, and a new level begins. If you try to place a marker where there is not a mine, either your chain breaks for you (1P) or you lose all the markers you have placed (2P). You win when you increase the score gap between yourself and your opponent by a certain number. (Those of you reading who have played will have noticed that I've failed to discuss the attacking mechanic. That is because it is superfluous - all you have to do is realize that your attack score is above a certain threshold to win.) The secondary mechanic is that each character has a special attack, which they can use after a cooldown. These special attacks usually restrict the opposing character's movement in some fashion, although some are more interesting. This leads to the question: what is this game really about? The core mechanic suggests that the goal would be "the player who figures out where the mines are first and fastest wins," but the fact that the characters move rather slowly, combined with the fact that the special attacks are designed to make your characters move even slower, suggest that this is not it. It's not a blind game of snatch-em-up either; you have to know where the mines are in order to do well. It's an attempt at a combination of both. This is the flaw, and it is fundamental. The game has technical problems which often lead to the accidental blowing of chains, but even without that problem, the game is bad. The core mechanic and the secondary mechanic lead to a sort of anti-synergy, which makes the game feel like a disjointed and schizophrenic mess of an idea. There are mechanics that could have been completely stripped away leaving the game fundamentally unchanged, and most importantly, the game fails to correctly target any audience well enough for anyone to particularly enjoy it. Everything this game does well is done better elsewhere. If you want to play minesweeper, just play minesweeper.

This is kind of a rough game to play. It´s essentially Minesweeper - you have to walk your character over a hex field trying to find mana sources based on minesweeper-esque clues. You can chain them together for more points and then attack your opponent with it who also tries to get those mana sources. Now, I am not great at minesweeper, but even on normal I got utterly destroyed in chapter 2 already. It is kind of hard to play Minesweeper while the opponent "sweeps" across the floor, claiming one source after the other. They barely ever make mistakes even on normal, while you struggle to find sources and do the minesweeper logic in your head. I am terrible at this, I know, but "Normal" shouldn´t be this hard. Aside from that, it´s just generally not very fun. The music is somewhat generic, the graphics are rough, the story is dumb; the worst part are probably the controls, though. The hex cells are tiny and you need to position your character exactly on the right cells, else you miss and can essentially restart the battle because your chain gets broken and you get set behind massively. The controls are a bit touchy, though, so you often over- or undershoot the cells, causing you to miss - which is silly, because you are already massively pressured by the AI being too good, so you just try to be as fast as possible, which is rough with these controls. It isn´t a terrible game, but it´s very rough around the edges and the gameplay is just not very fun and very repetitive. Based on the speed I was going, the main story also seems to be barely 3 hours long - but I didn´t have enough patience to finish it.

This is Hexcells, but rather repetitive, and occasionally you "fight" someone else for the mines on the board until you magic them to death. Buy Hexcells instead for puzzle gaming, or any of the myriad visual novels on Steam for anime ladies of various levels of (thing you want), because as an anime game with cutscenes the story is bland, the gameplay is lame, and it really isn't amazing on any level that it tries to play on. It's so repetitive and not worth fussing with when better games for all the things it tries exist.

Manacollect is competitive Minesweeper in an Anime setting. While the setting doesn't exactly execute that well and the story is meh, the puzzle battle element is done well, and is good for local multiplayer games. The minesweeper element is actually interesting, and against a human opponent, there's strategy in when to press for more points and when not to. It's tense and works pretty well. Overall, a good battler puzzle game. +: -Good puzzle action, simple yet strategy. -Good risk versus reward gameplay in battle sections. -Still has a single player minesweeper game for those who don't want to battle. -: -Story is weak. -Characters skills are imbalanced in my opinion. For more information and gameplay: http://youtu.be/cENLiQ5nCEM

So, right off the bat I'll say a few things people might like to hear. First of all, I felt this game was SIGNIFICANTLY better using a controller. Second: I am a huge minesweeper fan. I play it a lot to kill the time and I'm pretty good at it. Also, bought this at -10%. So this is like minesweeper. Except you are marking the mines and then killing them whenever you like (if ever: you can complete a 'floor' without clearing and it's basically exactly like minesweeper. In the multiplayer (or vs bots) mode: There's like 8 characters. Each one has exactly one special ability. If you've played Puyo Pop: it's sort of like that. You guys are both contesting the same mapand you both want to mark and collect as many mines as possible whilst retaining your combo of selecting mines without clearing or selecting an incorrect tile. I'll be honest: the story is really bad and very stupid. The AI is not horrible and will sometimes make mistakes (this is good). The art direction is OK. It's an anime-style game. The Dungeon Mode (ie, endless mode) is very fun and I enjoy playing it. It relinquishes the fighting bit and you're basically just playing nearly endless minesweeper. The long and short of it is, if you like Puzzle Quest or Puzzle Fighter and games like that: you will like this game most certainly. If you like minesweeper: you will probably like this game. If you like little moe anime girls running around and clicking mines: you will probably like this game. I recommend this game, especially at its tiny and honest pricepoint.