One of the big problems with peace is that it doesn’t come with an expiration date. One moment everything is lovely in the village, the next a forgotten evil from the past has torn through like a whirlwind. The buildings are in shambles and the villagers are all gone, except for one last ship that’s able to shake itself out of the corrupted crystal that should have been its prison. A mysterious voice guides it forward to rescue its friends from the Unchosen One, which is going to be a challenging task seeing as the ship doesn’t even start off armed.
Flying out into the bullet-hell world
Minishoot Adventuresis a free-roaming top-down twin stick shooter that seamlessly merges an approachable take on bullet-hell withZelda: Link to the Past-style progression. Much like Link, the ship starts off with no ability other than to move around, but it doesn’t take long for a single-shot gun with a slight homing ability to show up. A few basic shooting challenges later, dodging some slow bullets and knocking down some enemies who are built to ram rather than return fire, and it’s out into the village and then the world to explore in whichever direction seems best. The first piece of the world’s map shows up soon just by looking around, and the first boss' cave is clearly marked, but the world is full of secrets and alternate paths so it can wait until you get to it.
Minishoot Adventure Getting Ready to Embark with Release Date Trailer
Minishoot Adventure is a free-roaming twin-stick shooter that owes as much to the secrets of Zelda as it does to Geometry Wars-style action.
Like any goodZelda-alike, that’s roughly half of what makesMinishoot Adventuresso playable. It’s easy to go to the dungeon or wherever else you’re supposed to be, but there’s so many bits off to the side that it’s almost impossible to fly there in a straight line. Hidden passages are marked with a little jagged edge in the terrain, overgrown paths lead to secret upgrades, and exploring into the harder areas grants upgrades and abilities that can give a nice edge to the combat on the main quest. One of the first villagers found sells gun upgrades, turning the single-bullet pop-gun into something with a bit more punch, but it’s also worth exploring a bit for the crystal bullet upgrade that stuns enemies on a critical hit.
In addition to poking into every nook and cranny of the map to see what it holds, the ship also gets stronger thanks to the red crystals dropped by defeated enemies. Each level-up gives the traditional skill point, and a simple status screen shows both the upgrades you can buy with them plus those enabled by devices found along the way. Shot frequency, shot power, range, ship speed, critical chance and a few others are available, and their earliest upgrades are cheap, so the nearly-defenselss ship at the start is soon nimbly zipping through the bullets while sending back almost as good as it gets. Eventually the ship is a beast, with a short dash for nimble dodging, an overpowered shot that pulls on limited but recharging energy reserves, a small chance to negate a hit that more than once will rescue a boss encounter from failure, and many others of varying usefulness.
Meanwhile, though, the enemies aren’t sitting still, and the bullet swarms get denser and more intricate as you explore each new area of the map. The combination of shoot and explore is always perfectly balanced, though, so even if a secret is guarded by four or more waves of increasing difficulty, it’s still as satisfying to shoot to victory as it is to find it in the first place.Minishoot Adventures' ship is a precision machine, and whether it’s an intense encounter or a race against a spirit-ship, it always feels good to control and fair when you inevitably blow it at some point. Death is an inconvenience, sending you back either to the village or a dungeon checkpoint depending on where it happened, and while temporary defeat can occur regularly once the difficulty kicks in the game never feels overly hard even on the most difficult mode. At least until the bonus arenas past the final and final-final boss, at which point all bets are off.
Challenge and accessibility
That’s not to sayMinishoot Adventuresis easy, of course, because it can and will put up a real fight, but rather that it’s designed to be playable by anyone. Even if a few bosses took me more tries than I care to admit, the patterns felt fair and learnable. That won’t hold true for everyone, of course, and for those the game comes with a number of accessibility options that are always available. Dropping from hard to normal to easy and bumping it back up again is fully allowed, and there are three shooting methods available as well. Manual is classic twin-stick, Assisted points the ship in the right direction even if the right-stick aiming is a bit off, and Automatic makes the game an auto-shooter that targets the nearest enemy. There aren’t enough of that last type of game around, so having it as a valid and functioning option is a welcome feature. Finally, the Accessibility menu lets you adjust the game speed and toggle both infinite energy and invincibility, although those do come with a note that some achievements are blocked off when used.
Closing Comments:
Minishoot Adventuresis an excellent twin-stick quest in a wonderfully-illustrated 2D world that’s equal parts shooting and poking about to see what might be hiding under a bush or between the rocks. The story isn’t particularly deep, but it gets the job done, and at the end you’ll have an energetic little village filled with a number of different friendly ships that have each helped the adventure along in their own way. Fighting through the enemies also feels like an achievement, especially seeing as the number and variety of encounters means that few fights end up similar to each other. Zipping and dodging through enemy firepower while sending back a fan of bullets, deciding when to use the overdrive and when to hold back, and getting ready to figure out the pattern of the next barrage never gets old, and interspersing the encounters with a secret or two is the best way to cool down between one burst of intensity and the next.Minishoot Adventuresis a fantastic little game that deserves all the love it can get, and a great fusion of two genres that don’t get to play together anywhere near often enough.
Minishoot' Adventures
Version Reviewed: PC
