Minutes is a simple action arcade game that dabbles with bullet-hell esk gameplay. Each level lasts a minute and in that minute your aim is to rack up as many points as possible. The gameplay premise is very simplistic; all you literally have to do is collect light coloured lines, whilst avoiding the black.
Even though the game has bullet-hell type gameplay, there are no bullets present in this game. Throughout my time playing, I felt it was very similar to many classic arcade games, considering a lot of them followed the same patterns and simplicity. The objective is simple; at the end of each level you must score a certain amount of points to unlock starts, which will then be used to unlock the next level. If you haven’t reached the target you will have to either replay the level or previous levels to unlock the next stage. There is a lot of back-tracking in the game, especially if you want to complete the levels perfectly, meaning collecting all the points and not getting hit. It may sound easy, but switching between the circles (big and small) to get more points and avoid the black objects is very challenging. The overall feel of the game is simple and it plays simple enough, but to proceed you will have to switch to the larger circle for the majority of the time to gain more points, which may not be the hardest thing to keep doing, but it does add a fair amount of challenge. This isn’t bad, but furiously frustrating at times.
When I first started playing the game and made it too level 6, after roughly 6 minutes, I started to have some difficulty, I was being silly and didn’t realise that every time you become the larger circle and collect points, earning extra points as being the bigger circle can be frustratingly difficult at times. The game doesn’t have any introduction levels or tutorial to show you the ropes, which I think this, is something the game lacks. Just a few tutorial levels would have explained the game a bit better.
This aside, the game can be quite enjoyable on the first playthrough; however having to replay a lot of the levels just to unlock the next level is very repetitive and quite boring. After the first few levels the game will spring power-ups onto you. When I first saw the ability to slow down the game, it was really beneficial and can really help you out when things get hectic. Sadly, none of the power-ups really add an eliminate of excitement. Once you proceed further into the game, level 20 is where things start to get incredibly frantic, especially when there is only one obvious path through a level. The other power-ups in which you will unlock include; reduced the number of hits, destroy some of the black lines or provide a shield. The power-ups can only be used once per level. Like I mentioned before, they can be helpful, but they don’t really offer anything we haven’t seen before previously in other games similar to Minutes.
The nearer you get to finishing the game, the last set of levels offer a nice mix up to the gameplay. You will encounter blobs that alternate between a circle of the collectable colour and a black square of unsatisfying death, timing is very key, if you are off by a millisecond you will soon regret it. If you haven’t guessed, the game focus’s highly on timing and being precise.
As I mentioned before, you will have to replay a fair few levels to proceed to the next level if the score hasn’t been met, luckily a large majority of them only require 50% completion. Getting a perfect score on each level is incredibly challenging, but you don’t need to be perfect to move on. When replaying the levels, you will notice that all sixty levels play the same. If you wish to master the game and get the highest rank of each level, you have the opportunity to memorise the patterns of the lights and enemies as you weave your way through for the perfect score. Perfect precision is needed and using the power-ups will also require precision.
The game offers a lot of frantic moments considering the levels are only 60 seconds a piece. You do feel an adrenalin rush when you manage to perfectly weave from corner to corner, gaining points and not getting hit. You can’t blame the controls either, if you fail, it’s your fault. The game can be quite addictive, but having to replay a level especially if you were only a few hundred points off from earning another star can develop into a negative experience. I recommend playing the game for a few “minutes” at a time. Then again, it could just be me being easily frustrated. If you wish to switch your Minutes from PS4 to PS Vita, then you can, as the game has a Cross-Save feature (and is Cross-Buy), which means you can transfer your high scores to and from the PS4 and PS Vita versions. For this review, I played the PS4 version. The game runs very smooth at 1080p and 60fps, the PS Vita version also runs at 60fps.
Also, if you have completed the game, or just fancy a challenge there is an another mode up for grabs. This mode is the daily challenge mode. As you can imagine, every day the challenge is changed, giving you more levels to master. You only get one attempt at each of the Daily challenge levels too. The last detail to mention is the music. The music is easily one of best soundtracks to feature in an Indie game in my opinion; it possibly offers one of the best soundtracks available to date. Minutes has delivered each level with sixty seconds of thumping, up-beat dance music created by Black Bag Music. The music excels in this title and suits the game perfectly. All the sounds in the game are a very high quality and I think the soundtrack really helps make the game more enjoyable. When the slow-down power-up fills up, you will notice when activated, the music also halves in tempo, giving you both an audible and physical experience.
Richard Ogden has gone a great job creating a simplistic bull-hell title. It does lack in some areas however and could improve on its level progression system. It’s a good puzzler and easily one of the best and artistic looking puzzles on the PS4 and PS Vita to date. It can get very repetitive at times, which is hard to avoid with puzzle titles. The game is very simple, so simple in-fact that anyone can play, to a certain point. Then the difficulty kicks into play when you need to earn more stars to proceed. To sum it up in a sentence, Minutes is a simple, high action arcade game offering a lot of impressive creativity, but can be very repetitive.
You can read our interview with Minutes creator Richard Ogden here.