Minutes Review (PS4)

Most big games nowadays can almost always be described as a combination of other previous titles with certain twists. While that's not usually a bad thing, it can lead to fatigue, especially for those who limit themselves to one genre. Thankfully, independent games can often provide some truly out of the box experiences.

Such is the case with Minutes from Red Phantom Games. The loosest definition of the game can be a bullet hell shooter only without bullets and without any actual shooting. Simply put, it's just hell, and if you're trying to get perfect scores, it might certainly feel like it due to the challenging difficulty.

Does the game manage to deliver on its clever concept or should we wait a few more minutes? Let's find out.

Gameplay

Minutes is a pure, unfiltered experience, meaning it doesn't rely on any story or explanation. Instead, you're just thrown into the experience with a very sketchy explanation. As such, don't expect any hand holding, just some brief images any time you unlock something.

You control a circle that needs to accumulate points by letting colored lines and shapes interact with its margins. At the same time, you need to avoid the black lines and shapes, as too much of that can lead to your untimely death. While explaining the game may seem weird, once you complete just a single level, the whole Minutes experience clicks.

Positioning your circle in the optimum locations is crucial during each of the many levels and you need to not only survive but also reach a minimum score during the 60 seconds you have at your disposal. In case you explode or don't reach the threshold, you need to replay the level and hope for a better time.

Minutes is a tough experience and you need to restart a level quite a few times before you can eke out the remaining points to be allowed to progress further. There are three thresholds for each level, as well as three bonuses that relate to not getting hit, not letting any color escape, and hitting the DualShock 4's trackpad when a small smiley face enters the screen. There were some situations where I managed to get two stars, but so far, nailing a perfect score has been unattainable for me.

While the difficulty becomes grueling as you progress through the campaign, nailing the last color bits to get you over the threshold with just a few milliseconds to spare feels really good.

Look for colored bars

While Minutes may seem like a relatively straightforward experience in terms of goals, the title also allows players to alter the size of the circle, thereby increasing or decreasing the amount of points you get. Your regular shape is relatively easy to use at the beginning, but once things get really hectic, you might want to decrease the size. However, if you want to reach any star thresholds, then you need to use the large size at any point possible.

To make things even more complex, the game offers different unlockable abilities at certain points during the campaign. Bear in mind that you can only deploy one during a level, so you need to choose between slowing down time and the movement pattern of the shapes, blowing away black portions, or doing other such things.

While at the beginning the colors arrive just in the form of straight lines, things quickly evolve, adding transforming cubes and circles, as well as rotating shapes that really require tricky thinking and timing to collect. Things get hellish towards the end of the campaign and I really have no idea how a player can collect all the colors in some of them in just one go.

Besides offering the beefy campaign, Minutes also comes with a Daily Challenge section, where a different level is offered every 24 hours. You can practice it for as long as you want before taking your only shot at having your score registered on the global leaderboard.

Visuals and Sound

Minutes can soon become frustrating due to its challenging nature, but the relaxing visuals and the smooth framerate keep it from becoming a nuisance. Every so often the nature of the background and its main color change, in order to keep things fresh, and the action on the screen remains at a responsive 60fps at all times.

The soundtrack is also quite impressive, managing to stay varied despite sticking to a single theme that keeps players calm even through the hell that's happening on the screen.

Interact with tricky shapes

The Good

The Bad

Conclusion