Maniac

Written by Jason Dailey on 5/27/2025 for PS5  

Recently, I’ve taken an interest in smaller, bite-sized indie games that won’t break the bank but still present good entertainment value. Something called “bang for your buck.” Maniac fits the bill, costing a mere $5 here in these United States for potentially hours upon hours of roguelite blow-everything-up mayhem. Imagine an entire video game about having a five-star wanted level in Grand Theft Auto – that’s Maniac, but with more chaos, and much darker humor.

The premise is simple: shoot, beat, or explode everything in sight and survive until a nuclear bomb can be dropped on the city. It is incredibly easy to pick up, and surprisingly difficult to put down.

Maniac can be either a twin-stick shooter or an auto battler, or even a blend of the two, by turning on or off auto aim and auto shooting in the settings. I’m not a big auto battler guy, so I preferred the twin-stick experience, though I must say that there is something a little off about the way it handles.

Maniac wants to be an auto battler so bad that it makes shooting controls feel a little wonky when doing it manually. Regardless, I found its gameplay loop compelling and refreshing, in a totally non-sadistic sort of way.

At the start of each run, you’ll choose from one of six unlockable characters. The only character available by default is a drunk Santa, and a very deranged one at that. There is also Iggy the Clown, a little girl, a drug-addicted stockbroker, a Russian cosmonaut, and a hot dog. Yeah, this game is unhinged.

How unhinged? Well, to unlock the little girl character, you must kill a certain number of stroller-bound babies. I know – it’s okay. Afterall, it’s just a video game, and we’ve been fine committing mass-murder in video games for decades now. It’s all in good fun, and that’s precisely what Maniac provides – cheap, mindless, chaotic fun.

Each character has different stat ratings for health, speed, and so on, as well as different unlockable gear. Some upgrades are unique to each character – Santa has exploding presents – but other upgrades, like body armor, are ubiquitous across characters. These are purchases made between runs with cash that you pick up around the map after laying waste to anything and everything in your path.

Whatever upgrades you purchase are permanent and specific to each character, which gives a nice sense of progression. You can also acquire temporary upgrades mid-run by running over a vendor that gives you three to choose from.

I’ll be honest, there was only one instance where I didn’t survive until the almighty nuke could drop on my head, and that’s because I went AFK to attend to my infant when, unbeknownst to me, I had not paused the game. I mostly stuck to driving around vehicles (the driving physics are nice), shooting and bulldozing people over, and it felt like a cheat code. Which is to say that on foot you are far more vulnerable to an untimely end.

If you are successful on a run, subsequent runs with whichever character you used will have an increased time limit, so the difficulty does ramp up a little, even if it is just challenging your stamina to run around shooting stuff for 20 hectic minutes or more.

No matter which character you gravitate towards, you can punch, shoot, explode, and run over anyone and nearly anything in your path. Buildings are not destructible, but fencing, trees, and humans are cleared for deletion in Maniac. In the early minutes of a run, simple patrol cops will be responding to your felonies, which increase by orders of magnitude as the clock ticks down from 20 minutes. My highest wanted level was 21 stars, which I think is the maximum.

Along the way, I graduated from murdering beat cops to FBI agents, then the military, and then (somehow) UFOs. I would hop between vehicles when one was near the end of its life, occasionally getting brave enough to purloin a tank. Writing this review, it dawned on me that I never tried to steal one of the helicopters, fighter jets, or UFOs that were hunting me down – dagnabbit.

Maniac isn’t doing anything you haven’t seen before, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t a place for its irreverent brand of twin-stick shooting chaos. It scratched an itch (I promise I’m fine) for the price of a delicious Wendy’s Biggie Bag and is perfect to play while listening to a podcast.

If at the end of long hard day, you just feel like blasting the hell out of police, military, men, women, children, and infants in strollers, Maniac is your game to unwind with. I won’t judge if you don’t.