Masky Review

Wanna dance without having to get up? Or infect others with the rhythm? Masky brings it in with being a balance dancing game as you collect more and mor people to bring up your score.

Gameplay

Although Masky describes it as a dancing game, I’d take it as more of a balancing game. With the simple balancing mechanics that anyone can easily pick up without a tutorial. However, with it being advertised as a dancing game, it can easily be misinterpreted to a dancing game rather than what the gameplay actually is.

Each round starts with your character in the middle with two other figures on each side of you. All you have to do is walk towards them to join hands, continuing till you lose your balance. As you play more, and try to take a shortcut, you see the balance is connected to the people you have. Go grab people from the same side and it’ll become difficult to stay upright as it drifts to that side. So adjusting to have somewhat the same amount of people on each side is advisable to stay on your feet. Of course as the line gets bigger and bigger it will also become difficult to stay upright.

To balance this out the game will spawn doors, both to bring you to another theme and to lighten your load. The kicker is the special masks that activates certain effects that can either be helpful or not. Ranging from it cutting off some people to putting your screen upside down. This is characterized early by a red arrow and later by what mask the don once you add them to your line.

Single vs Multi-Player

With the basic gameplay out of the way let’s see how playing by yourself and playing with others is the same or differs. A leveling system is integrated to give you more mask designs, coming with it’s own music (guaranteed starter music if you’re in single player) that shows up in the game. It also shows feet, which increases the more levels you go up, which I believe gives you more workaround with your balancing. And while you can try to achieve this in single player by just trying to get as many dancers to join you, multiplayer is much more enjoyable.

Leveling up with playing online is actually pretty fun. Especially if you happen along someone that is leveling up just like you. Instead of getting the most dancers, multiplayer focuses on a race between three others (bots will fill in for the missing spots) to get a chain of 25. Winning 3 rounds declares you the winner. Depending if you win or lose, skill points and your rank will either go down or up. The split-screen nature doesn’t really help you but others to tempt you into looking, but you can guess where they are by the sounds each thing makes that you can hear. The bots is really difficult to beat, seeming to mostly do better than what you do.

Sound

The music that goes along with each theme is catchy and great. It doesn’t call you attention but lightly pats you as you try to balance. The tempo goes along with how you are doing rather than it being set. The sound effects for the special masks or going through doors stands out from the music easily. So if you are in multiplayer, you can sneakily track the others.

Visuals

You can’t just look at the screenshots but look at the gameplay. As it keeps moving rather than standing still most of the time. Everything, except the masks, are outlined in a specific color based on the theme giving a basic representation of the body type. The background also uses this, but it has moving parts. It is very eye catching which is great but can distract you from the task in hand.

Performance

Do not worry about performance with Masky! It doesn’t lag or have any major problems with connecting to others. Everything is really easy to manage and go through. If you want to quickly launch it and go in, it is very easy.

Replayability

It only lasts as long as you want to play. You can easily stop at the max level. If there was more of an online presence it would hold more replayabiltity. But after you max out you can try to beat your high score chain.

Overall

+ Art
+ Music
+ Integrating mask abilities and how many people with the balancing aspect
+ Cheap price

+/- Multiplayer only achievements

– Bots adding up the difficulty