Minishoot' Adventures (2024)

Minishoot’ Adventures blends bullet-hell twin-stick shooting with Zelda-style exploration, and it pulls it off really well. I'm not a big Zelda fan but the game delivers what they’ve always wanted from that style. The gameplay loop is familiar - explore, fight enemies, level up - but stands out because upgrades meaningfully impact how you play. You can also freely re-spec your upgrades anytime, which adds flexibility and removes the fear of making bad choices.

Combat is the highlight. It's fast, challenging, but fair. Even though I died often, it always felt deserved and motivating rather than frustrating. The game balances intense bullet-hell moments with calmer exploration. There’s plenty of content, including secrets, races, and an open world to explore. My full playthrough took about 11-12 hours with 100% completion, but there's more to uncover. Visually, the game is bright, clean, and stylized, with thoughtful details like a gem-based leveling system that fills with shards from defeated enemies. The soundtrack isn’t standout but fits the gameplay well.

Overall, it's a highly polished, engaging game with strong gameplay, good replay value, and broad appeal - certainly one of my personal top games of 2024.

I had only heard of this game through recommendation on the podcast kontrollbehov. Bought it on a sale early this year and a I have to say, what a great gem this was!

This twin-stick shooter mixed with metroidvania elements really got me hooked from start to finish. You play as a small spaceship exploring a colorful open world, trying to rescue your friends and bring light back to the land. It’s simple but very charming, and the feeling of progress as you unlock new abilities is really satisfying.

The game is made by a small indie team called SoulGame Studio, and they did an amazing job. I played it on the Steam Deck and it felt like a perfect game for that device!

What I liked most is the gameplay, it’s simple but fun. There’s a great balance between action and exploration. Some hidden secrets and upgrades for you to find. The shooting mechanics and the abilities you unlock through the game feels great. I played it until I had nothing more to do. Also got all achievements in the game, which is a thing I don’t do that often.

Rating: 🌲🌲🌲🌲➕

When I first heard MinnMax sing the praises of Minishoot' Adventures (apostrophe noted), I was intrigued but skeptical. I have a fondness for novel genre mash-ups and I like "search action" games (see Yoku's Island Express), but I've yet to play a top-down "bullet hell" shooter I've enjoyed (unless you count Undertale). Eventually my curiosity won out, and I succumbed to the siren's song of the Steam Summer Sale.

And thank goodness, because Minishoot' is a blast!

I started up the game at the "Original" difficulty, fully expecting to notch it down in short order... but that never happened!

Sure, I died... a lot. But since I retained items and experience, each death felt meaningful: A chance to try again, a little stronger than before. The one or two times I felt stuck, the solution was to take a short break or explore a different area for a while. (Well, aside from one temporary 10% speed reduction for a single optional encounter after many earnest attempts. Hooray for accessibility options!)

So I quickly settled into that comfy Zelda/Metroid flow: Exploring the bright and cartoony world (with a few darker Hob vibes here and there), uncovering new skills and secrets, and learning the best approach to dispatch a surprisingly wide array of enemies and challenges.

By the time I rolled credits and sacrificed my save file, I felt the same way I felt beating Islets last year: Impressed and inspired! Maybe even more so, given some of these ingredients I believed to actively dislike on their own.

I will start off with my one real criticism. THE FUCKING PLATFORMING. I swear to God I think platforming was invented for the soul purpose of making otherwise magnificent games less interesting. I'm nit-picking, it's really not that bad in minishoot but whoever was the first person to decide 'You know what would make my game even more fun? Forcing the players to keep trying to jump on the same fucking ledge 72 times in a fucking row because they keep jumping either too far or not far enough, now that's the fucking game-play they came here for" Whoever came up with that shit (I'm looking at you Nintendo) has some fucking explaining to do

Ok, personal gripes out of the way. This game is BRILLIANT! It may just be that it was right place, right time, because I was going through a bit of writer's block and this game is designed to get you out of your own head. But no, I gotta give this team the credit it deserves. 'Zelda Bullet hell Metroidvania' is a fucking genius concept and they need to patent that shit.

What I find most endearing is the intuitiveness of so much of this. Like I said in the title, it feels like a bunch of gamers had a list of mechanics they would have loved to see in the games they played and just decided, fuck it, lets make it ourselves.

The fluid movement of the ship, weaving through bullets, I swear this thing moves so beautifully it feels like mind control some times. The snappy shooting, the two analog firing system genuinely needs to be implemented in everything I play from now on. That intimate map that you get to know like the back of your hand over 15 Hours. The progression system that allows you to downgrade and upgrade wherever and whenever you want. The hub slowly being filled with allies that feed into that intoxicating power fantasy with each new upgrade.

It's not a game that's gonna change the way you see games, but its one made by a team who know what a good game needs. The chance to customize the look of the ship would have made this game flawless for me but that's just me being greedy, overall I'm content with what I got. Bravo to this team, and I'm def gonna keep my eye on them.

A mashup of twin-stick shooter gameplay and a 2D Zelda-inspired format is one of those nice-sounding ideas where I'm surprised I haven't seen it before. Minishoot' Adventures [sic] is just that, heart pieces, boss keys, and all. Though I don't think it's great overall, it's a pretty fun, well-executed marriage of the two top-down styles.

The gameplay is smooth, particularly once you expand your movement options a bit, with some nicely hectic bosses and waves of enemies demanding careful positioning. The overworld and dungeons offer a fun and well-paced sense of progression and secret-hunting, often having multiple threads you could pursue at once. In addition to major abilities, some of the smaller skill point upgrades you can improve by killing tougher enemies give a nice sense of getting continuously stronger. I also appreciate that you can re-spec these points at any time if needed.

While the game is solidly designed, I found a lot of it bland, largely lacking the character, personality, and real context or style or feeling of adventure or something special that would make it feel truly great. Its Steam description and some reviews call it "charming", and I know some like how it looks and presents itself, but I find these ships and robots and locations mostly very plain and forgettable. It gets a bit better about interesting stuff happening the deeper in you get, but I still feel the game as a whole has a sort of unexciting feel. Around 2/3 into the game, I felt like I was just sort of going through the motions and lost interest.

I also had some instances where the game locked up and went to like 0.1fps, where I had to struggle just to save and quit to restart back at a save point. This and other bugs and feedback do seem to be getting resolved by the developers—one small bit of feedback mentioned in someone else's review here was already addressed—but at the moment it's still an occasional problem.

If you like the idea, I do recommend checking out the free demo, which gives a nice early slice of the game. It's fun, I mostly enjoyed my time with it, I just think it's cleanly and competently executing ideas and formulas without anything for me to actually love.

This game is just so fun, polished, and well designed. It reminds me a ton of Islets, another one of my favorite Metroidvanias. Every little detail, from player movement to map design, feels so well made and a delight to play.

It is debatable if this is more of a Metroidvania or a Zelda-like. There are dungeons, but they act more like zones than isolated areas. You can leave, come back, etc.

I only have tiny little bits of feedback I would leave. My main one - please add a purchasable upgrade to help locate map fragments. This was the only frustrating part of my playthrough (especially the blue forest one!) Also, not having maps for the dungeons is an interesting choice. Normally I would protest, but it didn’t really affect my playthrough or my ability to 100% the game.

But ya, this is definitely in my top 3 Metroidvanias so far this year, along with Prince of Persia and Rebel Transmute. Absolute blast and I can’t imagine many people disliking this game.