Minion Rush: Running Game 9.9.0g

Despite my disdain for what I consider to be an idiotic and sexually suggestive array of characters, I cannot but admire how the phallic minions from Despicable Me have been elevated to stardom by being featured in their own animation film. Of course Gameloft also jumped on the hype bandwagon and released the endless runner Minion Rush.

In Minion Rush, you will be running as a regular minion (a two-eyed one) on a treadmill style obstacle course in the same veins as Subway Surfers and other of its clones. You will be collecting bananas ('cos what else?) and nudging other minions off the treadmill to get special benefits.

The obstacles are fairly standard, low walls over which you can jump, high wall which need to be avoided and fences under which you need to slide. There are some trampolines that need to be used in order to jump over large gaps and we can also find some tube climbing, again reminiscent of Subway Surfers. Towards the end of a stretch, the camera will change to a side-scrolling perspective, which kind of makes things worse, since you no longer see obstacles from afar. Finishing multiple stretches will eventually get you out of the 'laboratory' and into different themed environments.

The levels are pretty busy, having all sorts of animations whether relevant or irrelevant. This of course puts more stress on the CPU which can become observable on not-so-high-end devices. This focus on bling and eye candy without any thought for optimization is sort of typical. You can accuse me of having a personal grudge with Gameloft, and that may be true. However, seeing that Subway Surfers and actually other games of this kind (Asgard Run, for example) can look good and play just as good, makes me confident that what I'm making here is an objective judgment.

Minion Run feels like the typical cash grab product. Although the bonus system is fairly advanced, the formula is already overused and no longer offers something interesting. If you've never played this type of game , have a powerful device and/or you love the one eyed sna... I mean yellow antiperspirant figure, then you might enjoy Despicable Me: Minion Rush.