Despicable Me: Minion Rush

If you haven’t seen Despicable Me yet, you’re missing out, but if you have seen it, you’ll be familiar with the tiny little maniacs known as Minions who run Gru’s laboratory. Step into the shoes of Dave, a Minion on a mission to become employee of the year in a workplace where anything goes and despicable actions are rewarded. Despicable Me: Minion Rush is an endless runner where you’re goal is to get ahead of your colleagues by any means necessary and create as much mayhem as possible.

Despicable Me: Minion Rush is similar to titles like Subway Surfers and Temple Run, but far more entertaining, controls are pretty straight forward, swipe left or right to change lanes, down to roll and up to jump. In a few areas you’ll also need to steer by tilting your device, on slides, rockets and fluffy unicorns. Avoid any obstacle in your way and survive to keep running…. simple. Where Despicable Me: Minion Rush differs from other runners is you can increase your scoring multiplier as you run by committing despicable actions. Wherever you see another Minion hard at work, push him, knock him down or jump on him, and damage as much property as possible, and while you’re at it, pick up as many bananas as you can, Minions love bananas. The occasional boss battle starts randomly as well, featuring characters from the movies and these offer a slight change of pace and break up the endless run tension.

Minion Rush is a visual spectacular, everywhere you look, something is happening, the Minions are hilarious and the obstacles are ridiculous. There are two main areas to run through, you’ll start off in Gru’s lab but you’ll soon find yourself running wild through the suburbs of the city above, both areas are well designed, awesome backgrounds and inventive obstacles and hazards but also offer a variety of sub-areas. The menus are nice and simple and decorated with characters from the movies, I thought the home screen was a nice touch, you can poke and prod the Minion for comedic effect.

The graphics are amazing, but the sound is the real star, the Minions are incredibly entertaining, their maniacal laughter never gets old. The sounds of the machinery are an amazing array of explosions and clanks overlayed with the nonsensical babble of the Minions, with a satisfyingly dramatic tune to tie it all together, although you could easily play this with the sound off, you will want it cranked, it really glues the game together and adds a lighthearted atmosphere.

You can spend the bananas you’ve picked up in game on a variety things, power ups, to give you a score boost or costumes to give you passive bonuses. When you begin you’ll only have access to a few pickups, some you’ll unlock in your early missions but others you’ll need to buy on your own initiative, unlocking them is cheap but upgrading them gets more and more expensive with each rank. You’ll find a few items that can only be bought with premium currency, you don’t need these items to progress, but they come with powerful bonuses, they also come highly priced, one of the costumes alone would cost in excess of $50 in Premium chips to purchase. You can find up to 5 premium chips in game everyday but it would take you months to save up for most items and some are still out of reach.

You can link up to both Facebook and Game Center, and compete with your friends in both groups, I had some initial connection problems with GC clashing with Facebook but once it was all merged and set, there were no additional problems. To avoid annoying your friends on Facebook though, it may be a good idea to head to the options and turn off the auto-publish. Through GC you also receive trophies, once earned you can claim some premium currency from them. You can also maintain a competitive rivalry with your friends by issuing challenges, you can choose to challenge on three things, distance travelled, bananas collected or score, and these can be sent with an accompanied taunt to fire up your opponent. You’ll only have one taunt available to begin with but can open the others with bananas

It’s a free title so there’s bound to be some advertising but its handled very subtly, I was playing for hours without noticing. App stability is good but there’s a little slowdown when you receive notifications and as always, clearing the multitasking bar helps improve performance.

To sum up, this is possibly the most entertaining runner I have played yet, so much so that i have let my Subway Surfers addiction slide, it looks amazing, sounds better and gameplay is varied with nice simple controls. The boss battles are a nice touch to break up gameplay and the power ups are well designed. Some content is overpriced, I have no problem with premium and exclusive content but it should be affordable as well, still, this is a minor concern as these items are non-essentials. This title is definitely worth your time, 4 Stars.