The Best Zelda-Like This Year Is A Twin-Stick Shooter

There is a reason why Minishoot’ Adventure has that apostrophe in its name, but it isn’t a good enough one, so we’ll rightly ignore it from now on. But this certainly isn’t a game you should ignore: despite the awful name, this is the best Zelda-like 2024 has offered so far, and it’s also somehow a bullet-hell twin-stick shooter.

Much like in every other Zelda-inspired RPG, an evil corruptive force has destroyed your village, and filled the surrounding world with purple-tinged enemies who must be encouraged to leave. Unlike every other, this is a twin-stick shooter in which you play as a floaty spaceship, taking out huge numbers of enemies firing ridiculous numbers of bullets. But before you shrug and walk away, this is the fairest bullet-hell game I’ve ever played, with settings that make it accessible to absolutely everyone.

Much like the green-hatted top-down RPGs, progress is made in Minishoot by exploration, gaining new abilities that grant access to new areas, and recovering NPCs who can help you back in your village. Despite none of the little ships being verbal, a surprising amount of storyline and relationship is conveyed in their excited wiggles and bursts of blue hearts above their heads, and the vast numbers of upgrades, boosts, and new skills ensure a constant sense of compelling progression.

Except, you know, it’s a twin-stick shooter. Having not only finished the game, but then gone back post-credits and 100-percented everything that remained, I still can’t get over how brilliantly the two disparate genres work together. While there have been RPG-leaning twin-stick games, to my knowledge, they’ve tended to be roguelites, rather than a linear story with save points and constant progression. And rather importantly, it’s also a brilliant twin-stick shooter.

Controls are simply perfect, which isn’t a word I throw around. Movement feels exactly right, offering that zen-like state where you find yourself miraculously weaving paths through criss-crossing screens of bullet madness, and the progression of your abilities means you always feel on top of the challenge. And if you don’t, the game totally has you covered. There’s an easier difficulty mode that slows down enemy movement and fire, alongside an accessibility option that lets you slow the overall game speed to anything you wish. And if even that’s not enough, then there’s a tick box that makes you invincible.

There is a long, tedious history of “git gud” dickholes trying to police gaming from having such options, people who’s self-worth is so fragile that they cannot cope with the idea of a person seeing all of a game they paid for, even if one bit midway through is much more difficult than the rest. Hey, if Hollow Knight: Silksong ever comes out, they can have a little parade. But Minishoot wonderfully eschews such gatekeeping, allowing it to be super-hard for those who want that, and have entirely skippable boss fights for those who don’t. Which is wonderful.

Minishoot Adventures is just a damned brilliant game. It has so much to do, so many satisfying fights to complete, and constantly rewards exploration. It’s exactly the direction no one could ever have predicted Zelda really needed to go.

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