Minimum
Developer: Human Head Studios
Price: $10
Platform: PC
A Steam code for Minimum was supplied to us
Minimum is a neat little multiplayer shooter with a visually pleasant minimalist look that just left early access. Human Head Studios have crafted a shooter that feels solid and tossed in a few MOBA elements to spice things up, but its lack of game modes and being multiplayer only makes me wary of its future.
You’ll be able to blast away block men to your heart’s desire in Minimum’s Team Deathmatch, Titan, and Horde modes. The Horde and TDM modes are pretty self explanatory since they offer nothing that you haven’t already seen in a modern shooter; it’s the Titan mode where you can expect to be spending most of your time. In it your team is tasked with protecting your massive titan from being destroyed by the other team and their titan. If a team’s titan manages to destroy the other and make it past the wall into the enemy player’s base then it’s game over. The interesting part comes when both titans are destroyed and the objective changes to killing creeps that begin spawning in certain areas. Creeps will then drop orbs upon death that will give your titan an extra boost in power when the titan phase restarts. The strategy then turns into deciding whether to farm creeps to buff up your titan or hopping to the enemy’s side to prevent them from collecting these orbs. The Titan mode is easily the best part of the game and it’s neat to see a game that mixes in shooter and MOBA aspects together without doing the same thing every other MOBA shooter is doing.
Minimum tries to make up for the lack of game modes by having an interesting crafting and weapon upgrade system. As you play through matches you’ll acquire materials that can be used to either purchase weapons (that you can then equip in your loadout) or armor blueprints. They both work very differently so let me start with weapons. When a match (or horde wave) starts you’ll start with the basic version of your weapon but if you manage to kill another player they’ll drop an orb that will instantly upgrade your weapon. Weapons can go up quite a few levels and killing a player with a heavily upgraded weapon will drop an orb that will give your gun/sword a significant boost. Now the offset to this is that if you die you lose everything and have to start back at level one. This adds an interesting offensive/defensive mentality to the game where you’ll only get better weapons if you seek out players to kill but you’ll also have to be careful not to let anyone kill you lest you lose your precious maxed out weapon.
Now armor works a bit differently. In the store menu you can purchase helmet, torso, and leg armor blueprints which you can then access during matches at the press of a button. Collecting materials from killed players will let you craft and upgrade your armor but unlike weapons your armor stays with you after death. There’s a pretty solid amount of armor pieces to choose from that all offer a various amount of stat changes such as increasing jump height by 40%, allowing you to double jump, increasing HP at the cost of movement speed, et cetera. You can make some pretty neat combinations and I’d highly recommend checking the blueprint menu before playing to plan out which ones you want to purchase first. There’s some nice variety to the armor sets too with them ranging from samurai armor to a space marine-esque armor.
As fun as the game can be it does end up feeling fairly lacking in content with only three game modes. For a game that just came out of early access you’d expect them to throw in one or two more competitive modes such as CTF but you’re stuck with TDM and Titan mode. Melee weapons also feel hella overpowered compared to guns, especially when you build a melee specific set of armor. If you’re far enough away it’s easy enough to shoot a melee player but lots of the maps are fairly enclosed which means some asshat with maxed dual swords is going to steamroll his way through a tight area. There’s just no good hard counter to these players who are really sporadic in their movements as they randomly double jump all over the place with increased speed and swinging their massive swords all over the place. A bad melee player can be a nuisance but a semi-decent one can completely dominate a match. Horde mode can also feel a bit cheap since enemies will spawn out of thin air and dying because a half dozen goons spawned on top of you can feel pretty shitty. Pair this with only having one life per wave and horde mode can get pretty tiresome quick.
The Final Word
Minimum’s a neat shooter with some nifty ideas but the lack of game modes and various issues prevent it from fully reaching its potential.
– MonsterVine Rating: 3 out of 5 – Average
