Millions of Minions sets itself apart from the roguelike genre with a novel combat system, but level and enemy designs suffer from being generic.
Developer Head Tilt Games' first title, Millions of Minions, is a roguelike dungeon crawler that takes a page out of the older Legend of Zelda games as well as 2011's Binding of Isaac with its randomly generated dungeon designs. Rather than the more in-your-face combat of those titles, Millions of Minions has its main character use their minions from a distance to defeat enemies. While this is an interesting take on the genre, there are still many rough edges present in Millions of Minions that hinder an otherwise novel concept.
Millions of Minions begins by trying to lay out an elaborate story, but it quickly becomes difficult to keep track of what's going on. The short version of this story is that players take control of a young man who was born with a shadowy face and yellow eyes. This caused him to be mocked and ridiculed by the townsfolk, so he ran away to go live in the woods. Now the yellow-eyed man has grown up and has decided to get revenge on those who mocked him as a child by amassing an army of minions to destroy them. There is also an evil king and three soldiers that were sent to kill the yellow-eyed man, but it's not exactly clear how they fit into all of this. It's best for players to just save their mental energy and mostly ignore the Millions of Minions storyline.
Gameplay in Millions of Minions is a pretty standard affair for a roguelike dungeon crawler at first. Players will begin each level in a rectangular room and are able to move through doorways to explore other rooms within the dungeon. In each room players will find either a bunch of monsters to kill or a shop that they can use to purchase upgrades, and in turn make them more efficient at killing monsters. The overall objective is to locate the enemy that holds a key to the locked door inside the dungeon. Once past this door, players will need to defeat the boss inside to make it to the next level.
What sets Millions of Minions apart from a game like Enter the Gungeon is its combat system, entirely focused on summoning minions. The player does have a melee ability, but it's so weak that it's really only useful in the most desperate of situations. Instead the player can summon several minions at a time that will surround them. This is great for avoiding damage from incoming enemies as the minions will absorb any projectiles or hurt charging bad guys. Players can also point their cursor at an enemy and tap a button to send a minion rushing at enemies. This is the primary method of attacking enemies in Millions of Minions, which is a novel concept not often seen in a game like this.
While the combat is pretty intriguing, Millions of Minions is still pretty rough around the edges. One of the largest issues is that the level and enemy designs grow repetitive over time. Despite having randomly generated dungeons, every single room in the game is nearly identical no matter how far players progress. The same goes for enemies as the player will mostly wind up fighting against the same three or four enemies over and over again. Even some of the bosses are just larger versions of the mobs that players have been taking out throughout Millions of Minions.
Another thing that sets Millions of Minions apart from other roguelike games is that there are two different game modes that drastically affect the difficulty. The Mage mode is similar to the standard roguelike experience where players will have restart the game from the beginning once they die. Those who want an easier experience can also play Minion mode, which allows the player to restart from whatever dungeon they died within. They also get to keep any money and upgrades that were picked up along the way. While kind of antithetical to the roguelike experience, it is nice to see accessibility options like this for players who aren't experienced at the genre.
Millions of Minions brings some new ideas to the roguelike genre, and is a solid entry point to newcomers to these kinds of games. What stops it from being a great experience is its very repetitive design when it comes to dungeons and enemies. Because of this Millions of Minions winds up feeling generic, which will probably disappoint most roguelike fans, though there's still a good game underneath the blandness of its over-exposed designs.
Millions of Minions releases on PC on December 20th, 2020. A Steam code was provided for the purposes of this review.
