Minion Masters is a “free” game on Steam that is free in all the ways you would expect it to be free. It creates a unique experience by combining card-collecting with tower defense gameplay, but it fails to provide an interesting enough experience to justify its pay-to-win mechanics.
Visuals
The first thing you notice about Minion Masters are the graphics. They’re clean, well lit models reminiscent of Warcraft 3’s style. It’s a style that’s become synonymous with many free-to-play games. It’s a style that feels unoriginal and generic in today’s market.
While I don’t want to criticise the work the artists have put in, the overall design of the characters in the game seem to be a mishmash of different genres. None of the characters in the game really tell a story other than a generic “good” style and an “evil” style. And, as I’ll talk about later, you move so quickly through all the different troops in the game there’s very little time to get attached.
Audio
For the most part, the audio works. The music is competent and the sound effects go well with the splashy attack and spell animations. It’s not amazing work, but it’s competent enough for a game of this caliber.
Where the game really fails is in the voiceover. It’s played like a sports announcer screaming every time something barely interesting happens. He has a short number of quips for each situation, so his grating voice is made even more annoying by how repetitive it is.
Gameplay
A basic match has two players. Each player draws four cards and can play them based on how much energy they have. Every time a card is played, a new card is drawn to replace it. Players can wait to gain more energy so they can play more expensive cards.
This is actually a great balance mechanic. Do you wait to play a more powerful card while leaving yourself open to attack? Or do you first player lower ranked cards to build a defense against anything your opponent deploys?
Cards are used to summon minions or cast spells in the arena. This arena is where the real battle is fought. On either side of the field is each player’s avatar, the titular Minion Masters. Minions travel from one side of the arena to the other in order to destroy the opponent’s master. They will also fight and destroy each other, creating an emergent attack/defense mechanic.
In the middle of the field are two bridges, each of which can be captured by ground-based minions. Holding them grants your Minion Master experience, allowing them to unlock their abilities. Each Master has unique abilities that can grant spells, heal minions, slow down enemies among other abilities.
All of these mechanics lead to some interesting gameplay and strategy for your first few battles. However, once you’ve figured out the basic technique to win a game, it all starts to get repetitive. Just keep deploying troops until your enemy is destroyed. And at some point you’ll realise that the only winning strategy is to have better cards than your opponent.
There are other game modes that mix this formula up a little, ranging from team ups (2 vs. 2), to single player quests, but they all end up feeling exactly the same. Just keep playing cards and hoping your cards are better than your opponents.
Rewards
After each battle you are given multiple rewards. You get experience to improve your Minion Master, which unlocks more rewards. You unlock multiple in-game currencies, an early sign of what’s to come. You unlock new cards with new minions. You unlock chests that can be opened. You unlock power tokens that give you cards.
It’s honestly overwhelming. The rewards come at you so fast that you overdose on dopamine and struggle to comprehend everything that’s happening. Between every match you need to adjust your deck to take advantage of the new cards, but you have so many you don’t know what to choose.
Whats worse is that opening chests and power tokens takes so goddamned long. At one point I had ten power tokens, and it felt like it took forever having to watch the same animation over and over again, followed by the annoying announce making a quip you’ve heard a thousand times by now.
Then he says something I hadn’t heard before and I couldn’t stop laughing. The announcer cheerfully announced with that grating and annoying voice, “Spend to win!”
Talk about being less than subtle.
“Free”
If it isn’t obvious by now, Minion Masters is a pay-to-win game. You can technically grind and grind to get crystals and other in-game currencies to unlock everything for free, but realistically you need to pay to get anywhere.
On top of everything I’ve talked about, the game has season passes with free and “paid” paths (you can technically purchase with crystals, but you need the grind), daily achievements, skins, emotes, avatar icons, and many of the other trappings of a game designed to extract money over being fun to play.
Some people clearly enjoy this kind of experience and that’s fine. There’s a reason these games make money, and that makes them an attractive project for any company. But for me, this simply isn’t an experience I’ll ever want to engage in.
