What this means is that, even when you're waiting forty minutes for a dungaree-clad banana-type thing to pick a single chilli, you can still be working towards your next party, and in turn your next level. Minions Paradise neatly sidesteps this by offering its form of experience points, Party Points, as a separate resource that can be collected at the same time as crafting items, rather than wholly tying up its levelling system within the quests. It makes perfect sense as a business practice, but when you're new to the idea and are so used to instant gratification, or at least being rewarded based on skill, it can be a little jarring to be told that the only thing holding you back is being miserly.

With my past, brief, experiences of free-to-play games, I'd regularly find myself frustrated by ever-increasing wait timers that would hold me back from the next part of the game to try and encourage me to use real-world currency in order to skip the waiting. If the player doesn't feel like they're making any meaningful advancement, it can be difficult for them to want to stick around. Progress is a key part of any gaming experience, no matter what the genre. It's bright and colourful, full of tiny jokes and cute animations, and it's simple enough that you can jump in and out throughout the day but still feel like you're making progress. Occasionally you go fishing for alligators.įor what is a remarkably unremarkable game, there's something quite charming about it.īut for what is a remarkably unremarkable game, there's something quite charming about it. There's a lot of waiting involved, which you can bypass by ponying up a small fee. You gather resources, craft items, fill orders, and complete quests. It is, at its core, a fairly straightforward free-to-play management game. Or maybe – heaven forbid – I'm actually enjoying it as a game. Maybe the part of my brain that actively tries to ignore them has given up. Perhaps I just like making the weird yellow blobs run around doing my bidding. It was something of a surprise, then, that since downloading Minions Paradise a few days ago, I have been unable to stop playing it. Not that there is anything inherently wrong with the genre, of course.īut as an outsider looking in on an industry slowly shifting its business practices, and having only the vitriol of Twitter to inform me how I should feel about this, the idea never seemed appealing. I was a late adopter of the smartphone, and had to spend my time playing catch-up on the early premium games I'd missed, so never really gave them any time. I have also never been one for free-to-play games.

I groaned at the idea of a spin-off movie. I'll be completely honest, I hate Minions.

Minions paradise game