Minimum Review - Just a Skeleton?

If there is one word I’m tired of hearing, it’s MOBA. Many games are trying to emulate the success of games such as League of Legends and Dota 2, and it seems like every other week, a new MOBA title is announced which is looking to cash in on the e-sports and competitive gaming scene. I can name countless games which attempted this feat and failed miserably: Battle for Graxia, Infinite Crisis, that Lord of the Rings one… the list goes on. Most of the time, when playing these games, I just wish I am playing Dota 2 instead - either the game is too similar to League of Legends for me to care, or it shoe-horns in MOBA elements to fit in with the crowd.

Minimum, strangely enough, is the first game of this kind which I genuinely enjoyed playing and, whilst flawed, it’s definitely heading in the right direction.

 

In short, Minimum is, as the name suggests, a minimalist shooter by Human Head Studios (you might know them as the developers of Prey) which blends elements from classic twitch shooters and modern MOBA games together in a simple and accessible package. Out of the three game modes currently available, two are standard ones you can find in any shooter: Team Deathmatch and Minimum’s equivalent to co-op, wave based survival game mode. Both these game modes, however, fail to truly shine and quickly become boring. It’s a formula we have seen countless times before and, in most cases, done much better. The game mode which makes Minimum stand out, is its flagship Titan mode, where the MOBA elements finally come in.

Titan mode pits two teams of five players against each other with the goal of destroying the enemy’s generator. Unlike other MOBAs, however, this is not the players’ job; it’s the Titan’s. Each team has a titan at their disposal which, every few minutes, get released at the same time and march towards the generator.

In the middle of the map, they will meet and duke it out in classic robot-on-robot combat. The winning titan will be able to continue on its path of destruction towards the generator until it gets destroyed or it reaches the generator, ending the game. Players can influence the flow of battle by shooting at the enemy titan, slowly chipping away at its massive HP pool or killing enemy players which are shooting at your titan. Each kill you get gives you materials needed to upgrade your armor as well as upgrading your weapon into a more powerful form. if you die, weapon power ups are lost; however, armor upgrades are kept throughout the entirety match.

 

The scenario I have described is called “Titan phase”. Once both titans have been destroyed, the creep phase begins. Here, the titans are being rebuilt and powered up; players now have to go to specific areas and kill Minimum’s equivalent to creeps; tiny little crystal spiders which run around harmlessly. Each spider killed drops a crystal shard used to make your titan more powerful. Naturally, this isn’t a passive moment of the game where everyone calmly farm their own share of creeps, but rather the opportunity for one team to gain a solid advantage over the other. By disrupting the enemy, making them lose time, stealing their creeps and killing players to keep them at base for a while longer, your team is able to amass more crystals. More crystals means a beefier titan, which will make the Titan-on-Titan battle favourable for the team, allowing your titan to reach the generator with greater ease.

Whilst crystals dropped by spiders are used to upgrade your Titan, materials dropped by fallen enemies and spiders can be used to upgrade your armor. Even if there are only two sets available at the moment, each consisting of three pieces, there is still a decent amount of flexibility when it comes to your build. If you want to be a fast and hard hitting but fragile character, the Berzerker set is for you. If you want to be slow but tough to take down and deal more damage to Titans, the Knight set will suit you much better. Obviously, you can mix and match between the two sets to suit your play style more, however, a few more armor sets would really help make the item choices much more meaningful as Minimum doesn’t currently leave much room for experimentation.

 

Minimum also offers a basic progression and crafting system. Each match gives you XP and other materials to be used in between games to purchase and unlock more weapons. While you do start off with you basic assault rifle, shotgun and sniper, you can buy more weapons and gadgets by playing the game. Unlocking stuff doesn’t take too long, in just a few matches you can earn the required amount of material to build your weapons; however, you only earn an unlock token every time you level up, and that requirement becomes higher each time. Luckily, there aren’t too many weapons at the moment, so you won’t be needing to spend hundreds of hours to have all the weapons at your disposal.

I had a great time with Minimum, its Titan game mode is a refreshing change of pace which perfectly balances MOBA elements with classic twitch shooters. There is already a decently sized community playing the game on Steam, so finding a match doesn’t take long at all. The biggest issue I had with Minimum is the fact that it doesn’t feel quite ready yet. I understand that games such as these rarely launch with all of their features, and need to keep something in the pipelines to keep their playerbase looking forward to what’s coming, but at times the game just feels unfinished. Some weapons even lack pictures and proper item descriptions.

A handful of features including weapon upgrades, attachments and something called maximization are also currently unavailable and only have a shiny “Coming Soon!” tag on them. Like I mentioned, armor sets in game are limited to only two fairly basic models and, whilst adding too many sets may make the game too complex than the initial intentions of the game, I doubt having more ready for the game’s launch would have confused or overwhelmed the userbase.

Minimum is also facing some annoying connectivity issues. It isn’t uncommon to get disconnected from the host for no reason or having to deal with lag/rubber-banding in-game. Disconnections are especially annoying because there is no way to reconnect to your previous match, and you only earn XP and crafting materials once the game has ended. In other words, if you played for twenty minutes in a match and lose connection even moments before the game ends, you won’t get anything for that match.

 

The core idea of Minimum is great; the minimalist art style looks great and allows the game to run on just about any PC at a smooth 60+ FPS and Titan mode is a smart take on the MOBA genre which makes it very accessible even to players who don’t enjoy classic MOBAs. Still, even server and connectivity issues aside, I can’t help but feel like Minimum is only the skeleton of a good multiplayer experience; everything that’s in there is good - there just isn’t a lot of it. Curently, the game is celebrating it’s launch with a 50% off sale, putting it at $5 which is very much worth it. Even at full price, Minimum easily offers more than $10 of entertainment but its lack of content and polish may turn off a significant portion of the playerbase before they get to see the good stuff.