Mega Maze Review - Screenshot 1 of 2

Do you remember that mesmerising screen saver from the '90s? The one that was an endless loop of twists and turns through a red brick maze? Well, Mega Maze is sort of like that, except everything is blue or white and it's just not all that entertaining.

Mega Maze is exactly what its name implies; a game about solving mazes. There's no character to control, or plot to speak of; you're just trying to find your way out of a maze in order to move on to the next one. There's a total of 60 mazes, and while some of them are clever we just didn't find them particularly engaging to play.

By default, the walls of each maze are semi-transparent, allowing you to see what's on the other side of them. This will be your best bet at finding the multicoloured goal of each maze quickly, but sometimes the goals are far off enough that you'll have no idea where they are anyway. For an added challenge you can enable opaque walls in the options menu.

Mega Maze Review - Screenshot 2 of 2

The mazes start out fairly easy and gradually become more difficult through the introduction of features like trap doors and keys, which can be used to open see-through doors that correspond to each key's colour. The GamePad isn't used for much, save for tracking how many of each type of key you may have, as well as displaying a meter showing roughly how many markers you can still lay down. Markers serve to create a path of breadcrumbs to prevent you from unwittingly backtracking.

Mega Maze has some handy online features, to its credit, like leaderboards and level sharing. Other players can publish levels they've created using the game's bespoke level editor; the problem with it, however, is that it's extremely clunky. Starting the level editor takes a while, though the smaller the maze you attempt to create the less time it will take to load. The tools for creating mazes work similarly to those found in Super Mario Maker, in that levels you create must first be completed by you and levels can be made entirely using the GamePad's touch screen. The feature, however, may struggle to take off. At the time of writing only a small number of user-created stages are available.

Conclusion

While the famous Windows screensaver had a certain mesmerizing quality to it, Maze Maker does not. The environments are bland, the mazes themselves feel repetitive and the online features, while well thought out, don't seem like they'll ever generate the kind of community they need to make them worthwhile.

It's a game of good intentions and deserves credit for implementing level creation and online features, but it gets lost when seeking entertainment value.