izigame.me

Minishoot' Adventures was a surprising disappointment for me. The Zelda meets Bullet Hell combo sounded like a slamdunk. I was sold on its concept alone, though it looked a bit generic on the surface. But I never judge from a trailer and the crazy high score gave me enough confidence to look into the game. Luckily there was a Demo available to test the waters!
The Demo is extremely generous letting you venture through a massive chunk of the map and the entire first dungeon. This was nearly an hour of content if you were particularly explorative and I was having a decent amount of fun, honestly! Though that nagging feeling of "buuuut I do hope this goes somewhere a bit bigger than this" was still a thought in my mind and by the end of the Demo, I wasn't exactly satisfied or saw a lot of promise but didn't dislike it either. Extremely neutral. But okay, good enough for me to dive in and find out why the reviews were sitting at a staggering 98%
Aaaand... truthfully, there isn't much to experience beyond the Demo. I don't mean the game is short, I mean... that's kind of it. The game never feels any different from what you'll experience in that Demo. And I think this comes down to two major problems I had. There's simply no player expression and the enemies never gain any new feeling tactics.
Despite having plenty of upgrades to discover and a talent tree to increase your powers, none of it will change the way you approach enemies. It's the classic "Talents let you get +Damage to keep up with enemies gaining +Health" all you're doing is keeping up and not gaining any new exciting ways of fighting.
And the tuning in this regard is actually very counter-intuitive to the game's adventure semi-open-world design. So one of the first major upgrades you can get DOUBLES your DPS. If you don't explore enough to get this, there's no point in exploring past the intro level. Adventure games I feel are meant to reward curiosity, not stifle it. One of the earliest areas you can go to from the start is a Forest stage South of the intro. Nothing stops you from going here and you even feel kind of cool for finding it since it's slightly hidden. Your reward? Enemies that already are So Tanky that you can sit there for literal minutes powering into them and they just refuse to die. Gee, okay, this must be a late game zone or something. Nope. You can honestly do this as Zone 2, it's just the power difference you get with or without upgrades is so staggering it just slaps the idea of non-linearity in the face unless you have the patience of a whole conga line of saints.
I'm not saying the game had to become as gimmicky as an over the top roguelike or anything, but I cannot stress how little option you have for changing HOW your character feels, which I think is a big fun part of bullet hells in this style where you're gonna end up having a ridiculous amount of shots flying out of you later on anyway, so we can get a bit nuts with them. Bouncy shots, maybe poison shots, shots you charge and release, things like "do more damage when standing still" or damaging auras around you, like anything to make you wanna play slightly differently. No matter what the game gives you, you simply feel exactly the same as the start just with more DPS, which was serviceable but not super exciting.
But this is where the enemies could spice things up. Cause even if your player character isn't that interesting, if it's exciting to throw that simple character into a complex world of diverse foes constantly making you rethink how to approach combat, then it balances out! But. It's really exactly what you see in the trailers. I want to say the bullet patterns become more complex... but I beat the final boss on my first try and it was one of the easier things in the game. Like, the thing about bullet hells is adding more bullets doesn't really make things harder cause whether you're dodging 10 or 100 bullets, you just wedge yourself in the government mandated openings. The only thing being attacked is the framerate.
Maybe have enemies that have shots that turn into landmines so you have to be more aware of your positioning, or shots that serve as physical objects you have to shoot and destroy to prioritize over the boss, shots that stop/start chase you, or more interesting patterns that aren't simply a bullet that moves in a direction that doesn't change and that's it. I'm not even saying these ideas are good or literally what the game should've included, I'm just saying, the shots and patterns are extremely basic and uninspired and everything in the game amounts to a thing going a direction and you quickly get accustomed to that with the game not having another trick up its sleeve.
The bosses in this regard were particularly underwhelming. They're almost all a bigger looking basic enemy. And they don't have many things to call their own gimmick. Half of them even do this phase where they start slowly spinning in circles like "yeah, we all do that at half health in THIS world!!!!" as if its a cultural practice. And when the game does try having more unique bosses, such as the sand snake in the desert zone, it's such a shrug where the boss doesn't even know you exist since the shots just go wherever, extremely easily dodged, and the boss fucks off screen and you gotta just wait for it to return for it to continue to not acknowledge your existence as you slooooowly chip its HP pool down. This was somehow one of the more interesting things in the game too 😭
(Okay, so I just watched a video of the bosses to make sure I wasn't exaggerating here, but it's *WORSE??* than I remember? With the exception of literally stationary bosses and two others, ALL the bosses have extensive phases where they decide to spin around in circles. I really just don't know why, it feels like there were not many ideas to go around here)
So back to my initial concern of "seems generic on the surface" and yeah, it just does feel that way. Was kind of hoping there'd be a bit of a plot or characters to it cause it's admittedly hilarious to see every NPC being some random shmup ship and I was like "how are they gonna characterize these things"? They don't. Game just feels very bland in that serviceable way where it doesn't feel like any ideas went into it, but it's not *bad* exactly. Just plain.
Lastly, the Zelda feeling aspect just isn't there. You get upgrades in the games' dungeons that gives you a new ability, but it's almost always a form of "you can walk on that now" You can now fly over water, you can now go over pits, but this doesn't really make for new obstacles for the most part. It just makes the world more accessible. In all fairness, the game isn't calling itself a Zelda-style game, it just seems like a major inspiration and many people have compared this to Zelda, and I think people forgot that the items in Zelda actually give you new things to do and let the designers form unique puzzles around them. This game does not do that at all. They just gate progress. And while the game doesn't say it's a Zelda-like, it does call itself open-ended, which gating progress behind upgrades goes against that purpose. So kind of confused on the design philosophy here.
All in all, the game's "okay." If you play the Demo and have a blast, you'll enjoy the whole ride. But if you're looking at it thinking it's lackin' something, you're probably right.