Minishoot’ Adventures (NS2) Review

Gameplay

Graphics

Audio

Narrative

Summary: A delightful mashup that is greater than the sum of its parts

4

It's dangerous to go alone

Minishoot’ Adventures is a clever mashup of twin stick shenanigans with the structure of a classic Hyrulian adventure.

Playing as a tiny spaceship on a quest to free its friends from the grip of some terrible evil. You’ll explore the map, uncovering secrets, collecting heart pieces, and working your way through dungeons and shrines to unlock new abilities.

The twist comes when you encounter any enemies, at which point it becomes a full-on bullet-hell shooter where you need to fend off waves of increasingly aggressive enemies that fill the screen with brightly coloured bullets you have to desperately dodge around in the vain hope you might hang on long enough to destroy all of the gits firing at you.

It retains that usual desperate struggle that a good bullet hell has, tricky but far from impossible, and, oddly, this kind of combat lends itself well to the Zelda formula, as finding new abilities and upgrading your various weapons, which smooths out the difficulty curve nicely.

This is bolstered by a rudimentary upgrade system, which allows you to use experience gained from defeating enemy ships to increase the power, rate of fire, and range of your main weapons, as well as your movement speed and special abilities.

The result is a game where you feel like you’re always making some small amount of progress, even if you can’t quite figure out a way forward or repeatedly get pasted by a particularly mean boss.

But it also seems aware that this particular mash-up may alienate some of its audience one way or another and presents players with three difficulty levels and various aiming modes, including traditional twin stick as well as an auto fire mode for those that find it difficult to keep up with the rub your belly and pat your head nature of your average bullet hell fire fight.

Regardless of the control method you opt for, though, battles are tense balletic affairs that have you twirling and dodging beautiful waves of bullets while trying to dispatch everything on the screen before you’re overwhelmed. This gives fights a lovely sense of pace and rhythm while ensuring every battle has a brilliant sense of tension.

This is all wrapped up in a bright, colourful, clean, and fairly cheery art style. Your little ship is adorable, and so are all its fellow spaceship friends, especially when they excitedly spin, boop, and whistle like extras from Batteries Not Included.

Colour is also used to great effect to easily distinguish each region, so you can easily whizz from one area to the next without having to open the map to figure out where you are.

The score is also lovely; its bright and upbeat overworld themes are a series of earworms, while the music for the boss battles does a marvelous job of accompanying the ebb, flow, and desperate struggle that each of these wonderful set-piece fights represents.

It also runs like a dream on the Switch 2. A silky smooth 60fps, even when the screen gets incredibly hectic with hundreds of orbs of death dancing towards your plucky little ship, that is also spewing fire back in the general direction of a giant, angry-looking shuttle.

Final Thoughts

Minishoot’ Adventures is a fantastic mashup for anyone who has even a passing love of Zelda-style dungeon diving and the thrill of a good bullet hell shooter.

It’s an adorable little mashup that marries its disparate parts together with skill and care to create an experience that is far greater than the sum of its parts.

It’s the kind of game that you pick up at the start of the weekend and don’t put down until you see the credits roll when you’re late for work on Monday morning.

About the Author

Gareth Newnham

Minishoot’ Adventures (NS2) Review