Maniac may be the best Vampire Survivors-like you’ve never heard of (and is one of the best Steam Deck games of 2024)

I don’t believe we’ve ever covered Maniac here on VG247. In fact, I don’t think I’ve seen much coverage for it elsewhere, either. Maniac is not the sort of game that generates headlines, even if its entire gimmick is one I can’t believe no one thought of sooner.

If you haven’t already started Googling, Maniac is what happens when you create a Vampire Survivors-alike and dress it up in GTA 2 attire. So, if you ever wondered what a GTA-coded one of these games would look like and how it would play, Maniac has the answer.

Maniac is one of few actually good Vampire Survivors-likes released in 2024, and certainly one of the many that came out this year. And no, I refuse to call that genre ‘bullet heaven’. If anything, we should default to the far superior (and more descriptive) genre label: ASS, auto-shooting-surival. As such, Maniac is a good-ASS game.

What makes Maniac particularly good at pulling off the gag is its commitment to the fusion of the two games its chiefly inspired by. The Vampire Survivor influences find a new home here, first when you start off entirely reliant on melee, and later when you upgrade to a firearm (or a rocket launcher).

The GTA 2 blood is responsible for some of the most devastating action in any one of those, and a large part of that is the physics engine underneath. Even early on, when the chaos and mayhem are kept to a minimum, simply watching your character interact with the world, and the inhabitants of that world itself, is a joy. It captures the best parts of the One Wanted Star feel we all remember from classic GTA games, before things get too hectic. And just like those games, Maniac does not hold back when you keep pushing its limits, it welcomes it, in fact.

The more your power grows – with character upgrades, pickups and truly powerful weapons – the more the screen gets painted with blood and car wreckage. I am especially fond of how the game manages to implement cars/driving into the flow, which would otherwise break the careful balance of speed and power ASS games work so hard to achieve.

Driving physics are tuned to achieve that feel, with forgiving handling that tempts (and rewards you) for pulling off last-second swerves, and drifts into blockades to grab a powerup. It is genuinely impressive how well Maniac’s systems come together, especially considering a competent product sold on that premise alone would’ve done just fine.

Maniac runs great on Steam Deck, too. You don’t need a handheld to play it, of course, but I’m willing to bet it’s going to quickly become your ASS game of choice when you do. Failing that, just load up a video of someone at max Wanted Level and just watch utter mayhem unfold. Grab it on Steam, or wishlist it for when the (already cheap) price goes down.