Over the weekend I bought Mana Spark on my Nintendo Switch. I wanted a straightforward game that I could just hop into and play for a while without having to spend a lot of time learning the ins and outs of it. After seeing Mana Spark on sale in the eShop, I watched the gameplay trailer and decided the game was what I was looking for.
Mana Spark is a dungeon crawler set in a fantasy world where “mana” is controlled by evil forces. A rogue group of humans has found themselves grouped together and are able to slowly whittle away at the oppressive mana-wielding antagonists. Players take control of a bow-wielding boy who is tasked with venturing out into the wild and into dungeons in search of mana. That’s the basis of the roguelike experience.
Eventually, the boy is slain and returns to the human encampment with whatever amount of mana stones he was able to salvage from his exploration. Rinse and repeat. Eventually, after defeating the first boss, a new character is unlocked and players can choose to switch between the two characters each time they return to the camp. Further into the game, more characters are unlocked, but I can’t speak to how they’re unlocked because I haven’t gotten that far into Mana Spark — and I doubt I ever will.
The framerate in Mana Spark is atrocious. For a game with such simplistic pixel graphics, there is no excuse for why Mana Spark performed the way it did. I’d enter into a new dungeon room and find my character taking damage before I could even react because a few crucial frames dropped and I didn’t see the enemy moving toward me until it was already done whacking me with a sword.
The framerate fluctuates wildly and I noticed it seemed to get worse the further into the dungeons I went. At first, I thought it was an issue with playing the game in handheld mode. To be fair, I expect every game to run well in handheld mode and in docked mode (that’s the main selling point of the Switch) but from a technical standpoint, I understand why some games perform better while they’re docked. So I plugged my Switch in, booted up the game, and watched Mana Spark smear across my screen yet again.
The gameplay, as much as I could stomach it, wasn’t terrible, which added to my disappointment that I couldn’t enjoy it. I found the game’s systems easy to understand and interesting. Mana Spark keeps the dungeon-crawling mechanics simple and straightforward. If it wasn’t for the dropped frames I bet I could have easily relaxed into a trance — much how I felt playing the ultra-chill space strategy game, Crying Suns, recently.
Instead, I was gritting my teeth and trying to blink away the eyestrain that crept up on me after dealing with the stuttering visuals for so long.
I can’t recommend Mana Spark. The developers need to work on ironing out that lag, it really keeps the game from being enjoyable.
A retail copy of Mana Spark was purchased by Epic Brew.
