After I was youthful, my buddies and I might play Grand Theft Auto III in a different way than how the builders meant. As an alternative of finishing missions and facet actions, we’d use cheat codes to provide ourselves all of the weapons, automotive, after which save the sport in that state. We might then every take turns loading up that save and attempting to outlast the cops for so long as we may. I do know loads of different individuals who performed GTA like this—as a bizarre, roguelike round-robin sport of carjacking and mayhem—and now, somebody has constructed a whole sport recreating that traditional expertise.
Maniac, out now on Steam, is a brand new sport the writer pitched to me in an e-mail because the “lovechild” of Grand Theft Auto and Vampire Survivors. At first, I wasn’t positive what that really meant. However after enjoying a number of hours of Maniac I spotted that this enjoyable, wacky, and over-the-top crime extravaganza is definitely simply recreating that beforehand talked about, traditional GTA expertise of seeing how lengthy you may survive whereas the cops, FBI, and army chase you round city.
The essential gameplay loop of Maniac is that this: You spawn right into a randomly generated metropolis stuffed with civilians, police, weapons, and different stuff you’d count on in a GTA sport. You then trigger a bunch of mayhem, gather cash, and attempt to survive for 20 minutes. At that time, town is nuked. However making it to that time is hard, as regulation enforcement could be very aggressive and keen to kill dozens of individuals to take you out. So that you’ll have to steal random automobiles and decide up new weapons and randomly spawned upgrades to also have a likelihood at profitable
When you die (and also you will die), you might be then in a position to make use of your ill-gotten money to improve numerous talents between runs. For instance, you may make your character tougher to kill or quicker. You can even make them deadlier or higher at stealing automobiles. You possibly can even get an improve that convinces random NPCs within the metropolis to hitch your trigger and begin killing random cops and civilians, too.
Maniac is foolish, and fortunately not sensible
One concern I had when booting up Maniac was if mowing down and operating over random folks may nonetheless be enjoyable in 2024. It’s an issue GTA hit as its video games grew to become an increasing number of hyper-realistic. Abruptly, it wasn’t a lot enjoyable to go on a capturing spree in GTA V. Fortunately, Maniac sidesteps this downside by utilizing a top-down digicam just like the outdated GTA video games, so every thing feels at a distance and arduous to parse.
Was {that a} girl? A child? A fireplace hydrant? No thought, however I ran it over going 100 MPH in an ice cream truck, so I’ve different issues to fret about.
Maniac additionally makes use of a cartoonish artwork model and doesn’t attempt to be sensible in any respect. It is a world the place random mafia guys stroll round in packs and child carriages spit out money when run over. The primary character you get in Maniac, earlier than unlocking different “heroes,” is a drunk-out-of-his-mind man dressed as Santa Claus.
So yeah, the sport understands that the one strategy to make this work is to have enjoyable with it and ensure all of the gory, felony motion could be very zany and tremendous foolish.
Like Vampire Survivors or Deep Rock Galactic: Survivor, Maniac is difficult to place down. By design, every run lasts not more than 20 minutes and also you get a bit higher with every crime spree, as you study the sport and get higher upgrades. The random map and chaos additionally assist, making no run equivalent. I discovered myself typically going “Wait, yet one more run. I wager now with these new upgrades I can get a nuke!” After which immediately I’d been enjoying for 2 hours.
Should you liked inflicting chaos in older GTA video games, and miss the period when the franchise was much less actual and extra zany, Maniac is an ideal return to that traditional top-down felony motion, however now with roguelike random parts and upgrades. Get some buddies collectively, hook up a controller, and go it round to see who can final the longest towards the police prefer it’s 2002 over again.
Maniac is out now on PC through Steam and prices $5.
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