Stop what you’re doing and just go play this game. Highly recommended. That’s it, that’s the review.

The slightly longer version is that Minishoot’ Adventures is a literal actual Zelda game, you’re exploring a world top-down, screen-by-screen, killing mobs of enemies, solving little environmental puzzles, fighting through dungeons, getting power-ups and abilities, fighting bosses, finding secrets, etc etc etc.

You know, a Zelda game.

Except in Minishoot’ Adventure you’re a little spaceship. Everything’s a spaceship. It’s all spaceships all the way down. It’s a twin-stick shooter Zelda game.

In addition to Basic Zelda Stuff they also have a very simple XP / Upgrade system for all your core abilities, so you can choose to upgrade your gun’s range, fire rate, damage, various special abilities, etc. Focus on whatever you want, respec whenever you want, it’s totally free and unlimited, do it in the middle of a fight, game doesn’t care.

Difficulty is also sort of whatever you want. There’s three tiers of base difficulty that tweaks enemy and bullet movement speeds, and three tiers of movement controls scaling from full on auto-aim / auto-orient, to just aim-assist, and then full-manual twin-stick shooting. Then there’s also accessibility options for infinite health / energy if you just want to get through the game. Personally I played it on full manual controls + normal difficulty, but I bumped it up to the hard difficulty for a final boss achievement.

Structurally the game has six-ish different regions of the overworld, a bunch of underworld tunnels, four major dungeons, a couple minor dungeons, a couple optional hidden bosses, and a whole mess of collectibles. I found it to be pretty breezy, not too hard, not too easy, movement was great, nothing was frustrating. There’s a lot of ease-of-use stuff built into the game too, like there’s a ship . . person . . thing . . in the main town that will highlight points of interest on your map and tell you if you’ve gotten everything out of each little cave, late game there’s also an optional item to highlight all collectibles. It’s a game full of stuff that wants you to experience all of it and will happily help you do it.

I got through the base game in about 4.5 hrs, post-game ultra-boss was another 15-20m, post-post-game challenge content was another hour or so. All told, 100% game content and achievements in 5h26m.

It’s great. It’s a perfect bite-sized little game. It’s reasonably priced and it’s in Game Pass. I had been waiting for it to show up on console since seeing it on PC late last year, and when it showed up in yesterday’s Nintendo Indie World presser I slammed that purchase button immediately for $15. Then I realized it was in Game Pass too, so I flipped over there. If there is one thing I can warn about is that Switch 2 performance is garbage. Even with a specific Switch 2 version, even with pre-caching, even with it on the on-board memory (not an SDCard), going in/out of a cave is like 5-10 seconds of loading. There’s none of this on Xbox. What the hell Switch 2 Port Team?

That said, still, incredibly highly recommended. Go play it.