Review: MinutesPlaystation 4/Playstation Vita

Now available on Playstation 4 and Playstation Vita cross-buy is Minutes.

Minutes is to the sensation of being stampeded to death what pong was to tennis. If that doesn’t make sense try and imagine this. It’s a very simple premise where I am represented on screen by a circle with another circle in it. Lots of coloured shapes approach me, some lazily, some casually, and I find some don’t even come towards me but I found myself rushing at them anyway. Sometimes to my demise.

I am greeted with a circle.

A green line with a circle at the end and a black line with a pokey bit start panning across the screen. If I get in the way of the green line it disintegrates into me like a long tasty breadstick into Pac Mans closed face and it causes points to appear and a green halo to appear within my circle. Whereas the black one with the pokey bit does the same thing except makes a noise associated with terrible things, and a square grows inside my circle like a threatening geometrical cancer. Which incidentally when I eat too many black lines I explode like a Mr. Creosote. As the levels increase the concept of a straight line seems like bliss, as I’m greeted with what I can only imagine are linear representations of octopuses backflipping around the moon, with alternating deadly pokey lines or pleasant breadsticks.

This game is insanely difficult and yet relaxing, sure I could scrape my way past each of the earlier levels but to properly complete them I would have to have skills beyond anything you have ever seen. The invisible Tetris guys, maybe, could 100% this game. Once you’ve broken your vita or PS4 controller in half make sure to go onto their website while you are shopping for a new controller and find the cheat on there. No don’t worry I’m not encouraging you to cheat your way through life, this cheat reverts the game back to its original difficulty levels. The game was too hard to too many people and now its been made…easier.

Now don’t run away this isn’t an unpleasant experience. I found I was doing better than I thought a lot of the time, Minutes insists that I pay attention to a hundred objects all at once, sometimes behaving in very different and debilitating ways, so yeah it’s a jungle but a satisfying one. Each level lasts only a minute which is where I assume the name comes from. Lastly there is a rather innovative ‘Daily Challenge’ which seeks to annoy me further or causes me to roar with triumph as I digitally rub my friends face in their inability to eat the correct colour of circles.