Recent reviews by RavenStryker

I've had this game for 1,926 days (according to the mobile account link) and in those 5 years, I've had a lot of mixed feelings about Minion Masters. It has been a roller coaster of a ride, that's for sure. Many will say 1.0 around October of 2023 was the peak of the game, it was the most polished and outside of some balancing and potential UI improvements people were happy.

The first week of December 2.0 released, and man was it a dumpster fire. It seemed to be rushed out, not in a state of well testing and LOTS of bugs, loooooooots of bugs. Over the next 2-3 months BetaDwarf worked very hard to pull the pieces back together. Is the piece back together yet, not quite, but I can confidently say that I and many others, are no longer complaining about feeling like we want to play the game. Things have been getting more and more polished over time and they needed to QUICK.

Come this past week, we now have the release of mobile and with it came a bunch of new fixes, as well as one of the devs took the time to sit down with the player base in real-time to discuss and knock out a SLEW of important bugs. Things are looking very good now and with that update bringing in an android mobile player base, things needed to be polished to make sure they stuck around for the game to become prosper.

Minion Masters is one of the best Free to Play games on Steam and now mobile. There are no ads, there are no forced upgrades that need to be made to make you competitive, just fun deck building clash-royale style game play, but with.. better graphics, more unique cards, an opportunity to sync your steam account with the mobile game carrying over your progress (amazing!), a very helpful discord community that does promote toxicity and accept equality, cards are as they are they don't get more powerful with rank, and more!

So in saying all this, despite the rough times, this game is definitely worth playing and if you haven't given it a shot and instead sink money into other money grabby games, give this a shot, you won't be disappointed!

I have the game on Steam, purchase with a Codemasters Race Pack in 2010. Apparently it's super rare now, that's neat. I will install this and play it again in the near future.

I have a very powerful computer when comparing to normal standards. I am able to crank everything up to ultra and still get 120-140 FPS throughout most of the game. That is really good. I am able to get over 300 FPS if I lower everything except Render Quality to low.

PC Specs
Windows: Windows 11 Pro 22H2 (22621.457)
CPU: AMD Ryzen 9 5900X 12-Core Processor
RAM: 64GB DDR4 3600
MOBO: ASUS ROG STRIX X570-I GAMING
GPU: ATI AMD Radeon RX 6800 XT
SSD: Samsung SSD 980 PRO 1TB
MON: 2560x1440 @ 240Hz

Over the last 6 months of beta testing, we have gone on a rollercoaster of a ride. There have been ups and downs, good and bad changes, fixes and bugs. We still have a lot of adjustments to make, but for a small 5(?) person team, what has been accomplished is nothing short of incredible. I've put 63hrs into playing and testing this beta leading up to the release. The game is in a very very good state now compared to how it was back when I first started testing and giving feedback. More details below on additional subjects.

The AI are much better than they have been. Woods and Uber offer a sizable challenge compared to the others, but Than/Mass are also tough on some tracks as well! I find this to be good as in many racing games either ALL the AI are difficult or none of them are, this is an interesting mix and while it may be difficult for some people who are not that good at racing games, not everything needs to be easy, sometimes you just need to get better.

The Vehicle Physics are LEAPS and BOUNDS better than they were. I feel like they are right on the verge of really fine tuning it and getting it in it's place. The biggest things that still need looked at, are the tier 2 & 3 gearboxes for vehicles, as tier 1 seems to work the best so far and in my testing, there's not really a reason to upgrade to tier 2 or 3 at this time. They only really provide extra top speed which isn't used on 90% of the tracks, and the "weight/stickiness" of the cars themselves. The cars feel weighted when you are driving them, until they go airborne, then it's like they become light as a feather. I can't talk like I know how the game engine works, but it almost feels like there is not mass to the vehicle off the ground. The "stickiness" is more or less when you are racing next to other vehicles or crashing vehicles run into your car. They stick together like velcro/glue and it seems like the only way to get unstuck is to either stop or drive away from them. If not, you'll both keep slowing down until you can't move or turn.

The OST is amazing, and as they add more to it, keeps getting better. 10/10 would recommend.

Can't give enough praise with the amount of content in the game for the price that it is being released at. Many Triple A games don't come with this much so it is a breath of fresh air seeing this being done with future plans for additional content after release both for single player and multiplayer. Tracks are awesome, fast, technical, chaotic, and beautifully done. There hasn't been a single track I've been on and said "this needs polishing". Chef's Kiss

Outfits are great, just enough to have fun with but not too many to seem useless and overwhelming. I would say a great variety for everyone's taste. I love how you can see all the vehicles in your garage when the camera pans into the workshop or junkyard, having 21 slots may not seem like a lot for someone who wants to be able to own every vehicle, but sometimes that's just how it has to be. Pick your favorite 21 and there you go. The variety of vehicles is also great, large, small, fast, slow, off-road, racing, it's all there. Nailed it in this category as well!

Looking forward to assisting with future bug fixes, tuning and other testing that you may need done before pushing it out to the public. Sometimes I felt like I was being annoying with certain things that needed fixed, but I only do it because with racing games being my favorite genre (arcade and sim), I want to see this succeed because it's in a really stale place currently. This game can fix that, I just know it's going to take time and trial and error. Lots of it. Thanks for the experience Johann and team! It's been a pleasure!

The career is fun, and takes a LONG time to complete. The events don't seem repetitive, and there is enough content to keep things feeling fresh throughout the whole thing. The boss battles are great, and I love how they start off small and simple and as you progress become more of a monumental overtaking with cinematic scenery, explosions and story line depth. I think people may have the most difficult time with certain demo derby events, but I always say, what's a good game without a good challenge.

I'm very happy with how the game is now. I've put 63hrs into beta testing the game and feel like things are in a good place. Sure there is room for improvement, but there is a lot of time in the future to get that done. MOST of the cars handle really well, and this game alone has made me more self-aware of the racing environment around me and in front of me. I feel like I'm always on edge, because I don't know if something has changed, broke, exploded or crashed around the next corner. I've learned to balance caution with speed in this game and I feel like anyone who doesn't use caution or has terrible reaction/car recovery skills may suffer for a while until they learn how it works for this game in its current state. I like the challenge that this game provides and hope it stays tough, I don't think you need to make it easier for people, make them get better to beat it. Too many games that are developed these days have an 'ezmode' to allow people to just participate in the game without needing to try and get better to beat it. Keep this a game of skill and not convenience. 🙂

Just picked up the game today.
Overall, pretty mixed on it's current state for the price, but has a lot of potential. Going to say yes and I have hope this will turn into something great once everything is finally polished!

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Track Editor - Literal unlimited game play potential by allowing the players to create and released their own tracks. Lots of official tracks in the game already made by the community, but custom tracks will also put a fun twist on things!

Graphics - It's not a "realistic" style game, definitely arcade, but everything looks really nice and as long as the track creator put the effort in to make the track look nice, it will.

Community, Mods & Dev - Very helpful, doing everything they can to make sure people are able to enjoy their early access. Helping with bugs, looking into suggestions and feedback, managing bad attitudes professionally!

Game Size - The game itself is only around 550MB download, which in and of itself is great! So many games these days are 50-100GB in size, so it is refreshing knowing this has a small footprint.

Leaderboard - Each track in game (seems custom or not) has it's own leaderboard which is great and allows a competitive environment no matter which track you're on. And the leaderboards look to be individual per each car.


Buggy Menu - Font is using a comic sans family style font, not very appeasing and doesn't scale well with different size ranges. Things seem to be in places that don't make a lot of sense, but you are able to find them if you look hard enough. Not exactly intuitive, but functional.

Keyboard, Controller & Wheel Support - Keyboard and Wheel seem to work good out of the box, Controller you need to make sure that ALL Steam Controller Configurations are disabled. If they are not, your controller is picked up as a keyboard and keybindings are all over the place. This may get fixed in the future, BUT not sure it could be just how it is.

Car Control for Controller & Keyboards - While there are a few options for adjusting the car handling, it still isn't where it should be yet and you can tell the game was designed with wheel/pedals in mind first. There is Steering Speed Sensitivity, Steering Smoothing and Countersteer Assist in the game at this time. With Steering Speed Sensitivity set to the lowest setting, the car still has very sensitive steering, setting the Smoothing to as high as it can go helps, but the number values next to these options need to be shown and allow the value to go much lower for a better customization experience. The option to adjust the Steering Linearity based on how fast you are going will help a lot. Thoughts on options for car handling below:

• Steering Deadzone (10% default [0%-100% range]) - Pretty self explanatory, but adjusts what percentage of the joystick is ignored before the wheels start turning.
  
• Steering Saturation (100% default [0%-100% range]) - How quickly or Slowly the controller reaches maximum steering input, this doesn't effect the Response Curve.
  
• Steering Sensitivity (0% by default [0%-100% range])- This adjusts the response curve. The higher the sensitivity, the more the wheels turn during the first degrees of turning the steering wheel.
  
• Steering Speed Sensitivity (50% by default [0%-100% range]) - Gradually limits the steering the higher the speed of the vehicle, making it less twitchy, increasing stability.
  
• Acceleration Saturation (100% by default [50%-150% range]) - How far you need to depress the analog trigger to reach 100% acceleration. Setting this value lower means you have to pull the trigger less, setting it higher prevents you from getting to full throttle.
  
• Brake Saturation (100% by default [50%-150% range]) - How far you need to depress the analog trigger to reach%] 100% braking. Setting this value lower means you have to pull the trigger less, setting it higher prevents you from getting to full brake.

No FOV setting for chase cam - While there is a FOV setting to adjust cockpit camera, there is no option for chase cam, being able to adjust this from its default value +-20 degrees would be great.

Camera Stiffness - Not sure how this is calculated, but it didn't really seem how I set the camera, it seemed to move all over the place while turning. Made for some weird motion and I could see this giving people motion sickness if they're sensitive to it. Fully stiff should mean it is LOCKED in place with the rear of the vehicle.

Driving Line Assist - Looks good! But could look better. The colors could be Bright Red for heavy braking, yellow for slow and green for acceleration. Driving lines look to be static and not dynamic, so your speed has no change on what the driving line look like.

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While the game has a great foundation and is doing things that other larger companies need to be doing, it has also fallen short in terms of content for the price with how buggy it currently is. I would say that this needed to go through a public BETA first for 2 weeks, then a couple to few months later once the singular dev(props to him) gets everything smoothed out, then release it for $14.99 for the first 2 weeks and then raise the price up to $19.99 as it's standard.

DLC can always be used in the future to release new cars or livery/paint schemes for additional income if it is needed. The game has great potential and I want to like it, but it still needs more work. Early release as it may be, might be just a tad TOO early for this price tag.

Overall I will recommend this product, but I do hope the dev is able to work fast enough to keep people interested. Sometimes waiting a couple extra months is better than releasing too early, making people pay and then realizing how much work still needs to be done for an acceptable experience.

UPDATE:
After the recent patch they released and downgrading my video drivers back to the WHQL version things are working as intended. There are still some parts within the game that cause the fps to sludge down but overall the experience has been very pleasant and I can't wait to dive deeper into this game.


Terrible optimization.
I have an AMD 5800X w/ 6800XT and on the main menu I get 5-15fps. I have been kicked out of game multiple times due to my frame rate being too low for online game play. I've gone down the checklist and made sure steam was being run as a high priority, the game was set to high performance in windows graphics settings and Easy Anti-cheat keeps picking up my windows theme as an untrusted system file. Overall, a very terrible experience and have already submitted for my refund. I never do steam game reviews unless it's THAT bad, and this is THAT bad.

This has been my #1 racing game over the past 2 years. Once the infamous update comes out I'm sure it's only going to make this game better. Can't wait for it and you should DEFINITELY pick it up if it is on sale, but even if it isn't it's totally worth it!

1 year later, the game is finally able to be recommended to friends without feeling like a complete derp. Well done Hello Games, I've flipped my review. You've done it.