Manaya Reviews

Small, addictive, fast-paced game. Well worth the money!

great time waster with fun gameplay, lots of upgrades at a great price.

Lit. Can you please add quick restart and dlc Edit: fuck monkey with no defensive mod. eat bullets is so op. make more options? balance

A simple little game. I think I got all I could out of it in 30 minutes.

Manaya is yet another of literally hundreds of lazy amateur 2D retro top-down shooters infesting Steam and lowering the average quality of all video games everywhere. I say top down, but I guess you're seeing this from a side view, except there's no gravity, you just sort of hang in the air. The fact there's no functional difference is a damning enough indictment here. So it's a twin-stick style shooter, I'm pretty sure it's not an asset flip because, well, no asset creator would make such a bad game. The gimmick I guess is that your aim reticle is stuck to the bottom of the screen, I don't know if they thought it would make the game better or something, but I can assure you it doesn't. You shoot stuff and then there's a Slay the Spire type encounter chain where you move from level to level, punctuated by the occasional meaningless upgrade shop. This is bad, it's not fun to play, and it's riddled with technical defects. From a technical perspective, the game doesn't meet basic minimum requirements that most PC gamers expect as standard. There's no option to change the resolution and no useful graphics tweaks. There's no way to ensure this is running at the native resolution of your display. There's no guarantee this game will look right on any PC as a result of this hamfisted design decision. The game assets are fairly mediocre/low quality, in some places they appear mismatched... Ultimately the quality of these assets, and thus the overall visual quality is lower than average, and low quality always makes for a less than optimal gaming experience. Remember, we're looking for the best of the best of 100,000+ games on Steam. The game features somewhat lazy, simplistic "retro" looking 2D graphics, of the type you normally expect to see in low effort Flash/browser games and mobile apps. Considering this is being evaluated as a PC game, having the graphics phoned in like this isn't going to result in a high quality, visually impressive game that PC gamers are used to seeing. The controls can't be customised, which will be an annoyance for many, but it can also render the game unplayable for differently-abled gamers, left handed gamers or gamers using AZERTY or other international keyboard layouts. These technical defects push this game below acceptable standards for any modern PC game. The poor quality of this game is reflected by how many people spent time with it. At the time of this review, SteamDB shows the all-time peak player number was only 6 players. This is a remarkably low number, and now, the only player activity occurs once or twice a month, presumably someone loading it up to see what it is then quickly uninstalling it. Considering there's over 120 million gamers on Steam and well over 100,000 games for gamers to choose from, the overwhelming lack of interest in this low quality game is to be expected. So, should you buy this game? Is this one of the best of the 100,000+ games on Steam? Manaya is relatively cheap at $3 USD, but it's not worth it. Given the defects and quality issues with the game, coupled with the unrealistic price, this is impossible to recommend. This is also competing with over 11,000 free games available on Steam, many of them far better than this paid product.

It's not long, it's not particularly challenging, but it's reminiscent of those quick little flash games. I love going in for little runs here and there if I'm just not sure what to do with my time. It's rougelike enough that I have to think about my upgrades and sometimes build around something I don't really like having. I think this developer really understood what they we're trying to do and I'm glad they didn't try to make the game more complicated than it is, because it plays well being so simple. A few issues now: Wish there was even a simple opening, the games description presents it as if there's a small story, and there's simply no such thing. I had no idea I could go into a menu and see my stats for a while, a simple transparent pop up screen on load that fades over time that just says all the controls could help. Arrows to move, mouse to aim and shoot, and escape for menu. Something that simple would help. Finally some gameplay thoughts: Certain bosses are harder than others, especially the bouncing bullets one. It's always disappointing to face that one on the first area as it's usually a run ender. The final boss can also be disappointingly easy if it's a weaker one. Maybe create a boss tier so the harder ones are the last two. Some upgrades work so well with different characters so that's always fun to mess with, if you ever add more, I'd like to see that you keep keeping that in mind. Some upgrades however I always avoid, the move a certain direction ones in particular, are the lowest tier in my opinion. Maybe if they had different effects, like one was a poison, one was a crit chance, one was still damage, and one made enemies shoot slower. Just some thoughts, not saying I don't like the game as is, but it could use just a touch of polish. (maybe an endless mode as well ;)

This is a great game, however it seems unfinished. There are a few bugs, some of the bosses seem like they need a technical rework and or concept rework, and it overall feels a little bit unfinished. This has great potential though. The upgrades are great, each obstacle has its own merit and degree of challenge depending on the seed, and the sound design is satisfying. However if you want a complete game wait a bit. Although I want to, I can't recommend this game.

This is a fun little game. Playthroughs are quick and fast-paced, giving a great "just one more turn" feel to them. Gameplay is simple, it's essentially a bullet hell game, but it's augmented well by different gameplay modifiers which you can either get from chests or buy from merchants. For $3 this game seems to be easily worth that much, definitely check it out.

Played it for 1.5 hours so far and I'm really enjoying it. I'm satisfied with what I got for what I paid. There is enough enemies, bosses and upgrades to keep you interested and I will definitely continue playing for a bit to fish for some op upgrade combos.