If you’ve ever felt your wrist and hand cramp up from clicking too much in a casual game, you might want to try System Mania. Its innovative use of mouse gestures will make you rethink what a click-management game is supposed to be like. Top it off with cute art and wacky levels and we’ve got ourselves a winner!

In System Mania, you are disgruntled employee Fiona, who quits her job to start her own Fix-It Shop. Cityfolk start calling you up to have their machinery fixed. Fixing here doesn’t require any engineering knowledge - you simply watch for any red lights and extinguish them as soon as you see them.

The brilliance lies in HOW you extinguish these lights. You click buttons, pull cords, flip switches, spin wheels, crank cranks, and more. Each of these requires you to do the actual motion required - think Nintendo DS or Wii but using your mouse. You’ll need some more space on your desk to wave and move your mouse around, but you don’t need big gestures - small ones work just fine. It’s not that hard, too. What makes the game challenging is the fast pace that you need to do these, otherwise the machinery explodes!

The game uses cute art in muted colors, with wacky equipment like animal massage machines. Sometimes this unique streak can get confusing - for instance, upgrades (one-time-use power-ups) are displayed in a different place each time, and you might accidentally click on them since you’re dragging your mouse everywhere. And these upgrades cost money each time, so setting them off by accident is a drag. Later levels can get difficult even in the non-Tricky mode; the “conveyor belt” action minigames, for example, are just plain tough and can’t be skipped.

But there’s a lot of love put into this game and we haven’t seen something this fresh in a long time. If you like click-management games but want to try something new, definitely download this now. Even with its flaws, we simply can’t find a good reason for you not to play it.

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(2 votes, average: 5 out of 5)

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