Minion Masters is a fast paced online minion battle game developed by ‘BetaDwarf’. Minion Masters recently came out on the Xbox One. We are currently glad it did. Players must pick a master and then summon and use minions to get the victory against other masters. It is a simple game but that’s only at the surface.

In Minion masters, there are multiple masters and they each, off course, have their own abilities which allow for different strategies and combinations. The masters are also capable of defending themselves too. Each master has three perks for players to unlock as the match progresses. For example The Stormbringer fires an arrow at enemies with his bow that deals 35 damage every 4 seconds. His first perk is that he gets global attack range meaning as he can hit anything, including the enemy master who’s literally on the other side of the battle field. The second perk is that all his ranged minions gain marksmanship which basically increases their attack range. Last perk double the attack speed of the Stormbringer meaning he fires, every 2 seconds. Now there are many other masters too like Mordar, Settsu, Volvo and more. 

Now more about the minions in Minion Masters. Minions require mana in order to be summoned. Maximum amount of mana you can hold is 10. The biggest strongest minions require 8-10. Your mana builds up naturally and it’s up to the player to decide when to summon and what to summon. Before you can even use your minions in combat, you have to build a deck, using the cards you obtain. These go in a cycle, sort off, and then when in your hand, can you choose to use them. So yeah, build a deck from your cards, jump into a battle, select which card to use and then designate where you want to summon that minion. It’s very simple.

Now there are different types of cards in Minion Masters. Mainly minions, spells and buildings. A minion is your main card as it’s a unit that will attack any enemy units nearby (most of them do) and make their way to the enemy base to strike at their master. The spells are exactly what you think, spells. They can be anything from a healing fireball, to an actual damaging fireball, to a lightning chain strike that stuns, to a storm of arrows etc. Buildings also have varied purposes too. T.here are buildings that summon minions, buildings that give you experience, buildings that stun minions or buildings that are turrets which fire at enemy buildings and minions. Minion Masters seems to have a similar style to Yu-Gi-Oh. How? Minion Masters have minion, spells and buildings, while Yu-Gi-Oh has monsters, spells and traps. Pretty cool right?

Now there are very limited game modes in Minion Masters and this is one of the weaknesses of this game. There’s just normal battle where you face an opponent in a 1v1 online match. Then there’s teams where it’s 2v2. That’s the main body of the game. There’s also a challenge mode where you face A.I masters in standard battles. Once you complete the challenges, that’s it, you are done with them. That’s a fail on the games part. Maybe when the season resets, the challenges reset too but that’s far too long. Players need a game mode where they can fight against others that aren’t actual players for practice or training. The other two modes are expedition and mayhem. Expedition puts players on a big map that’s full of enemies and totems (it looks like a totem). Players must travel through the land and beat enemies to gain might and interact with the totems. Now this mode would have been great except for two major issues. One, it’s only like every three or four days you get a expedition. So in between you are stuck with just normal battles where your rank is constantly on the line. Second, each enemy you see on the map is a forced online ranked battle. We Dom’t even get a break from those battles. They put you in match making and you face a real person. That’s dumb. It should have been A.I like the bosses. Mayhem is basically different matches with twists to it. For example a recent one was a regular match except random cards in your hand either have increased or reduced mana cost. 

The game does allow for a lot of strategy to be involved. Different units for different purposes but you have limited space so pick well. Many want a priestess to heal and keep stronger units alive but she has very poor damage and moves super slow and may not keep up with unit she’s healing. Some use dragon help to attack ground units but with very low health a single fireball will destroy it. Some use the brothers of light unit but they cost 10 mana and can be killed sort of quickly by good air units. Some have the priestess heal the brothers of light and save a fireball to counter incoming air units. Some save the haunted hugger minion for ground only minions so that they can possess without resistance and can pass on to the next unit. There’s also the people who want to ruin the game with lame cheap strategies. Some just spam the crossbow dudes building which produces crossbow dudes and then play strombringer to increase their range with the marksman perk. There’s always those types of talentless, uncreative, no skill players who find cheap things and use that for their easy victories. If it’s not obvious, we at X35 Earthwalker hate cheap stuff. The biggest dumb thing about Minion Masters is that when we tried to livestream the game it breaks after every match. It won’t go back to the hub or main area (whatever you call it). It just shows the winning players masters standing there. We had to close down the game and reopen and the issue still persists. We won’t livestream this game ever again until they fix it.

Minion Masters is a simple game with simple content. Ranked battles is the meat of the game and occasionally a event comes along that gives a slight break. How you get new champions is badly done. You either spend real money to get rubies or you play and collect shards to get them. One costs real money while the other takes a long time. Every match you win grants you a pitiful amounts of coins. What’s good is that some masters are on a free cycle where players can play them for that set period of time like a week for example and see if they like them or not. How you get new cards is fair as completing daily challenges grants you coins but you only get one daily challenge a day, even though there are three slots (lame). You get coins for levelling up too so use them to buy power tokens to spin for new cards (random) and you also get a few shards with each spin. So keep playing and eventually you will get what you want. 

Overall Minion Masters is a fun game and it’s easy to understand. It has it’s issues and some annoying things that need to be sorted. There is more like the team keys system but even that is based on chance. You can’t play locally or with friends but you can have a good time online. You find matches quickly and it works for the most part. Something you play for a bit and then don’t touch again until tomorrow or an expedition is going on. Now Minion Masters may have many cards and minions but even all of them combined are nothing when compared to… the ‘Earth Walk!’