Minishoot’ Adventures is a glorious but flawed reminder of the early 2010’s indie game movement. A small studio, asking a fun twist question (what if we took the zelda formula and melded it with a twin stick shooter) is a solid foundation for the game.
The game itself is pretty reminiscent graphically of a flash game from the late 2000’s, but overall is both serviceable and fine to look at.
Where Minishoot’ shines is in its overall combat loop and general exploration. There’s a fun little world here to explore, and the combat is tight and offers you nice steady progression of player power over the playtime you’ll have with it. It’s a true twin stick shooter with just a few addons that you’ll find over your adventure (a dodge, a time slow, etc).
This combat is enjoyable, and I always found myself looking forward to the next boss pattern. I played on the normal mode, and it challenged me without veering into “insanely frustrating” which is where this genre could have easily taken me.
Where I think Minishoot’ falls short in its design is that while the exploration is good, and the combat is great, there really felt like very little reason for the lock-and-door consistency that I found in every dungeon. The dungeons themselves are well designed but really do fall into the category of “extremely light puzzle” or more often “you’re locked going this way, go find the switch/key/fight room to progress.” This tension really bore itself out in the final dungeon, where I felt myself relieved to be done, as opposed to excited I’d gotten through it. The gauntlet of backtracking through various doorways got tiresome for me.
The other piece of Minishoot’ that really could have been better was the music - it’s a great little game but the soundtrack is essentially nonexistent, and that was a real shame, because there was a lot of opportunity there.
The secrets and puzzles of the game are a little too easy for me as well. Not that you won’t miss things, but I felt like there wasn’t much in the game that made me have a hard think about what the game was asking me to do, and the logical leaps were not real brain-teasers. Totally ok, just not necessarily as much as I was hoping for.
In the end, that’s what made this game special and enjoyable though, despite its flaws. This is a well crafted experience that really doesn’t overstay its welcome and invites you to engage with all of its little secrets after you have beaten the final boss. I can’t really say that 100% completion is for me, but what I played was enjoyable, and I definitely say if you’re ok with a flawed but fun experience, this is worth your time, especially when discounted below 10$. I got just around 8 hours of gameplay for just completing the main quest and a few extras.
A few things for steam deck players: i had a lot of FPS issues and ended up having to specifically cap the framerate to stop having stuttering, and sometimes on startup the game would just ignore my controller inputs and require a restart. Hardly gamebreaking but it was a minor annoyance.
Overall, I’m giving this a thumbs up recommendation with a 7.5 out of 10.
