Guys! Seriously! Minishoot’ Adventures! No really! I heard of this game last year when it released on PC, but like a lot of us with neverending backlogs, I didn’t get the chance to play it before Game of the Year time. Now that it’s out on Nintendo platforms and we have some space between major releases, it’s finally Minishoot time and let me tell you, this game has juice for days! Within the first hour it had its hooks in me deep, and I couldn’t stop until I had rolled credits.
From the very beginning, Minishoot wears its inspirations on its sleeve. You play as a fabled hero of legend, awakened when an ancient evil lurks, but in this world, all creatures are anthropomorphic spaceships. That’s kind of all you get as far as direction. You complete the tutorial cave and then the world is open to you, with some very light directions but for the most part it’s all for you to explore. You will discover map pieces that once connected will give you highlighted points of interest, but the game’s sense of discovery is absolutely peak.
Minishoot’ Adventures plays like any twin stick shooter, with directional movement on the left stick and shooting on the right stick. Enemies drop red gems when defeated and if you accumulate enough to fill up a gem gauge, you get a level up gem. There are upgrades like damage, range, and speed, which take these level up gems to upgrade. So if you want to increase your damage, you can slot in a single level up gem, but to upgrade it to the next level, it will cost you three upgrade gems, and so on. The best part is that you can downgrade these features too, so if you are having a particularly tough time with a boss, you can just respec for a different strategy. This also makes it so if you are stuck, you can always grind, but I found zero grinding needed in my time with the game.
Outside of the occasional dungeon boss, I rarely found myself stuck. Generally if you are stuck, you missed something, and that’s the best part: the constant sense of exploration. When you’ve hit a dead end, you can be sure that you may have just not unlocked the ability needed to progress. Anytime I stumbled into a new movement ability, my mind raced for all the spots I had to remember to return to, which would lead to me combing every inch of the map again, with my new found ability in hopes of a new weapon, friend or heart piece upgrade.
You have a homebase at the center of the map that acts as a respawn point for death as well as a place for your friendly vendors to hang out. To find new vendors, you need to save or rescue them on the map to send them back to your home base, where they will offer other types of upgrades for high level enemy currency. Death isn’t too big of a penalty, though. You do not lose any currency, but enemies respawn, and that means more upgrade materials, so death never feels like a major setback.
Still, the Legend of Zelda connections sync one to one, with map pieces, heart containers, and dungeon layouts, but these don’t feel like pale facsimiles as much as a well understood language. The game does very little as far as tutorialization but you might not really need it. Cracked walls mean eventually you will find a bomb item to blow up that space; every dungeon has a boss door and boss key that you will need to solve puzzles to get through. For those true Zelda fans, you also know that there is a secret heart container in those dungeons as well. So despite being a new indie game, it feels like a well worn cozy sweater that welcomes you in with its familiar mechanics and expectations, and yet…
There’s still so much new to be gained from taking that Zelda formula and mixing it with the bullet hell shooter genre. Entering a new room, to find it closed off and suddenly populated with eight enemies all blasting enough bullets to fill the screen. Surviving through a massive boss battle by the skin of your teeth with a single heart remaining when he was firing gigantic bullets bigger than you are: it all makes for some electric moments of triumph. The boss encounters and dungeon puzzles were always tough but fair. I rarely needed more than a few tries on base difficulty, and on the Switch 2 there was zero hitching, stuttering or slow down in both handheld and docked mode. Just pure bullet hell goodness. I’m definitely picking up what Minishoot’ Adventures is putting down.
Once the upgrades are flowing, and you are exploring every nook and cranny that’s where Minishoot’ Adventures shines. It doesn’t get bogged down in the details. Just cuts the fluff and gives you exactly what you need to have a good time, providing upgrades, new weapons and abilities at such a satisfying clip that I honestly had trouble putting it down to write this review. It’s addicting, looking for the new ability or finding a new secret area. There’s also end game content for those inclined (which I definitely am) but just in general, the game hovers between 4 and 6 hours but I spent around 10 more exploring. That may feel like a wild swing but if you’re like me, you are milking it for every new hidden wall or bonus end game boss. Minishoot’ justifies the case for being worth your time in spades. This one may fly under the radar for most, but I beg of you to look up from the new triple A hotness and enjoy this fantastic diamond in the rough–for all the retro feels that it invokes, but also for doing something wholly new. Top to bottom, Minishoot shoots for the stars, and lands among game of the year material.
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