Minishoot' Adventures

It’s so pretty, and so happy, and somehow non-verbal spaceships are able to have meaningful relationships. More importantly, Minishoot is also exquisitely well designed, with splendid dungeons to puzzle and fight through, and a vast overworld that’s so smothered in secrets that I’m still revelling in finding every part of the game long after I’ve rolled credits. This is utterly stunning.

Minishoot’ Adventures is great, plain and simple. It’s oozing charm from its art style and UI to gameplay and exploration. It’s a game you want to complete 100%, and I wouldn’t have it any other way.

Minishoot’ Adventures may just be a Zelda game with twin-stick combat, but that description sells it short. It’s obvious SoulGame Studio has put an enormous amount of care and consideration into every detail, from upgrade frequency and enemy placement to boss behavior and world design. It takes all the right lessons from Nintendo’s beloved franchise and puts them to good use in a new package. Sure, the enemies might be forgettable visually and some of the upgrade paths might be a little slow, but this is a minimalist action-adventure game very much by design. It’s how that unique mix of formulas is combined that keeps Minishoot’ Adventures fun all the way until the credits roll and beyond.

It's pure fun, and I honestly can't ask for anything more from a game.

Minishoot's Adventures has nothing new to say about twin-stick shooters, shmups, or the typical Zelda formula. It's the things you know, just remixed in an innovative way, and perhaps that's enough. It doesn't change your relationship with these respective genre frameworks, apart from convincing you that these frameworks are flexible enough for this sort of thing to be entirely feasible, and that's probably a victory in itself.