The world’s gone mad. All the neatly-trimmed lawns have turned funny colours, the duck pond has become toxic and bombs are falling out of the sky. Filbert, our yellow blobby here, must bounce around putting every square foot of turf back the way it ought to be – namely green.
The gardens are isometric 3D areas cut up into small screen-sized blocks. You play screen by screen, bouncing on the squares to make them revert one stage closer to normal. Some patches may take multiple bounces to clean up, others take just one.
The tricky bit is controlling the bounce of our Fil’ and working out which of the bits that drop from the sky are of help: cups of tea, for example, make everything seem all right, while both the Ninja and Viking Warrior chaps are an obvious danger.
Manix can be a puzzle game, a two-player competition or an ongoing challenge to clean up the whole garden. There are 128 different screens to clean, plus a variety of soundtracks and a customise option. It’s a diverting game but never really captures that mad addictive hook alluded to in the title, which is a shame – young Filbert certainly has promise, but he doesn’t really shine.