Galaxy Mania

Genre: Puzzle

Players: 1-2 Competitive (Local)

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Review:

(Note: This game is included in 18 in 1: Family Games Giga Pack, along with Animal Puzzle Cats, Animal Puzzle World, Bubble Fresh Fruits, Bubble Puzzler, Bubble Shoot Farm, Christmas Bubble Puzzle, Christmas Puzzle Story, Dino Puzzler World, Fantasy Saga Frenzy, Fashion Friends, Fashion Girls, Fashion Princess, Fruity Puzzler, Nature Puzzle, Princess Bubble Story, Princess Puzzle Adventure, and Space Lines: A Puzzle Arcade Game.)

Galaxy Mania is a family-friendly physics-based Puzzle game released on Nintendo Switch in 2024 where players drop planets into a well, trying to make two planets of the same kind touch, causing them to combine and transform into a larger planets. If this sounds familiar, it is because this is the exact same premise and gameplay formula as Fruity Puzzler but with planets instead of fruit, which itself was a shameless copy of Suika Game. So Galaxy Mania is a copy of a copy. As such, I’m copying over most of the text of my review of Fruity Puzzler for this review – if they didn’t put in the effort to make an entirely new game, why should I write an entirely new review?

Galaxy Mania features colorful 2D visuals of various cartoony planets in front of a 2D spacey background. This is backed by plunky public domain music that I’ve heard in at least a half dozen other games by this point. There’s nothing impressive or memorable going on with the presentation, but I suppose it’s not outright bad either.

The gameplay is… well, pretty much what I said above. Players must drop the planets into the gameplay space, with the goal being to try to get planets of the same type to touch, whereupon they will combine to transform into a bigger planets. Players must repeat the process, trying to combine as many planets as they can, until the area gets too full and the game is over.

The gameplay is simple and accessible, but there’s an Arcade-like compelling element here to trying to get your pile of fruit to move juuust right to get the two fruit you want to touch to do so, and start a chain reaction that ripples through other fruit in the jar. The problem is, it’s hard to predict how your fruit drop will bounce, how it will make the pile shift, and trying to delicately create one of those chain reactions can easily cause everything to shift the wrong way and create an irreparable mess.

There’s another problem here too. Galaxy Mania is completely lacking any sort of game modes or options. There’s no timed mode, no puzzle mode, no anything except the main game. It is a step above Suika Game in that it has a 2-player competitive mode at least, but it’s still pretty bare.

I should note that Galaxy Mania’s $5 price tag makes it a few bucks more than the price of Suika Game, but this is one of those cases where the game’s price has clearly been inflated to make it seem like a better deal when the game drops to $2, as it does on a frequent basis. And then of course there’s the 18 in 1: Family Games Giga Pack to consider, which includes this game plus seventeen others, and it’s pulling the same sort of trick, normally priced at an absurd $50 but then dropping to $2 for sales.

In the end… well, honestly, I think Galaxy Mania actually manages to improve on the game it’s copying, albeit only marginally. It does a decent job copying the gameplay of Suika game, but has better visuals and a multiplayer mode. It also has many of Suika game’s problems – its unpredictable gameplay and lack of options and gameplay modes. Then there’s the question of how to judge its value – do I grade it less because its normal price of $5 is higher than Suika Game’s price? More because it regularly sells for $2? Less because it’s included in a bundle that goes on sale for $2? I suppose on balance I’m going to end up giving it the same grade as Suika Game, because it’s not a major improvement on the game it’s copying, and whether it’s a better value is pretty subjective.

tl;dr – Galaxy Mania is a family-friendly physics-based Puzzle game where players drop planets into a well hoping to get planets of the same kind to touch each other, combining into bigger planets. This game is clearly copying Suika Game’s formula, but it does so well, with slightly better visuals and added multiplayer. And like Suika Game, there’s some compelling gameplay here, but the physics are frustratingly hard to predict, and the game is severely lacking in content and features. In the end, this may make for a decent time-waster, but not much more than that.

Grade: C+

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