Manual across pink surfaces, nose manual across the green, jump over obstacles and across gaps. If only skateboarding in real life was as simple as in Manuel, eh? Three buttons, that’s all you’ll need to be a bad-ass skateboarder. Actually, three buttons and a lot of skill, as the difficulty quickly reaches crazy heights. Oh, and you only get one shot, one… opportunity.
Now, needless to say, this isn’t exactly an overly complex game, but there’s still plenty of fun to be had with it. Especially for score-chasers, as every obstacle (or colour change, if you will) is bridged by collectable wheels. These are picked up automatically as you go along, serving as the only means by which to increase your score – which is pretty much what the game boils down to. Shame about the complete lack of leaderboards, offline or not, though. But hey, your top score is saved locally, so there’s that.
While easy early on, tasking you with simply maintaining the right move across the right colour surface, it’s not long before you’ll have to deal with gaps, split-second switches, transfers from one colour to another, and other equally troublesome things. That’s also where the fun – and competitive nature of the game – begins, however.
I mean, most can manage to press ‘w’ and ‘s’ as required, with a jump here and there for good measure, ya know? But nailing that stuff several times in a row with less than a second to make each call… now that’s what’ll separate those truly skilled from the rest. It may sound easy, but believe me, it most certainly isn’t. Plenty fun though, once you get over the initial learning curve. Who knows, maybe you’ll even beat my less-than-impressive score (as shown above)?
Only one way to find out: fire up your browser and take Manuel for a spin!
