Minishoot’ Adventures Review

 Minishoot' Adventures is a twin-stick shooter that’s also an open-world adventure, developed by SoulGame Studio and published with help from IndieArk. A game developed by a two-person team, it promises a “charming handcrafted world” full of caves and dungeons to delve in and insane bosses to fight. I’ve played a few games sort of like this, like Archvale, so let’s see if it’s worth enduring another trip into bullet hell for.

You are a Shipling, a tiny spaceship chosen by some higher power to fight against the corruption that has just recently destroyed your home and has now created a hostile world. Now, you're on a quest to retrieve primordial powers, rescue other ships, and stop this corruption once and for all; A simple story, but good enough for this game. There is some lore to find, though, so if you’re interested, you better hunt down those collectables.

As for the presentation, I really liked the art style. The world is vibrant and full of untold history, only figured out by just studying the area (as long as you haven’t blown up everything). I also really like that the game shows what you might want to know visually instead of telling you, from your ship’s wings showing your energy level, how much an enemy has been damaged, to how long bullets last until they fade on their own. The visual design is great here, and it allowed me to focus on the action rather than watching a health bar go down. I especially love how your experience is shown: it fills drops bits like a Twitch sub jar that turns into a crystal once it’s filled up, which is used to improve your stats. If I talk about how a game displays EXP, there's something special here. Oh, and the music is great here: it is very upbeat and fast-paced.

Onto the gameplay. Minishoot’ Adventures is a twin-stick shooter, so controllers are recommended. Thankfully, the game gives you options on what your button layout should look like, which not even some bigger budget games do. You use your two sticks to move and shoot, and it’s all buttery smooth (unless you’re over water, which gives it slight ice physics). You start off with very little you are able to do other than fire a peashooter and move on land (you can't even fly over water at first; you just sink), but with enough time and effort, you'll become the most dangerous ship to ever fly through the skies. The game definitely becomes easier the more you play, level up,  and unlock upgrades.

The abilities you unlock through major dungeons and exploration can be used to get to new areas and even in combat. Dashing to get over gaps and for a handy dodge, time stop to slow down projectiles and cheat at races, and so much more. There are plenty of items that you have to leave behind for another day, but you don’t have to memorise all the locations. As long as you talk to a certain NPC when obtaining part of a map and after buying certain items, they’ll mark where items are and if there are places with stuff left. However, there are no maps for interiors, which makes these items hard to find again, and there are multiple entrances for different parts of the same room, which the game marks individually as having an item. If you’re a completionist without a guide, you’ll have some trouble.

There are a ton of collectables to go and find, from heart pieces and extra batteries to special relics that can improve your abilities in major ways. If you find yourself struggling in dungeons and keep dying to bosses, you either get good or go back outside and hunt down for secrets and level up. Seriously, if you decide to rush through the game with bare minimum upgrades, it’s still very possible, although you will die faster, which means going back to your last respawn point. And boy, if you suck, be prepared to backtrack a lot.

There isn't really any fast travel other than teleporting back to the village via an item. However, you do unlock tons of shortcuts that lead you to and from the village instead. It creates a seamlessly connected world that doesn’t need loading screens to explore fully, but needing to fight the same patterns of enemies over and over gets tiring when you’re revisiting areas to grab what you missed. Sometimes, I would even just decide to just take hits and use the invincibility frames just so I could get to my destination faster.

However, those previous annoyances don't really compare to serious crashes that occurred during the review. If you check the map wrong, either by hitting another button at the same time or if you do it frequently enough, the game freezes. Luckily, the autosave is very generous, and you don’t lose hours of progress, but fearing the map button in a game where you want to check it frequently to see where you’re going and to see if you missed something is not the greatest feeling to have. Hopefully, there will be an update to correct this bug.

Despite all that, they didn’t really affect my feelings for Minishoot’ Adventures. It’s a really fun adventure with great mechanics and fun exploration. I felt encouraged to collect everything, and although you will get your butt kicked plenty of times, it always feels like it's your fault instead of the game’s. It has some small annoyances that I hope get ironed out in a future update, but it's safe to say that Minishoot’ Adventures is recommended.

Minishoot’ Adventures is on Steam and will release on the 2nd of April 2024