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Despicable Me: Minion Mania HD

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Despicable Me: Minion Mania HD

In the movie trailer for Despicable Me, Gru, the world’s second best super-villain, makes a cute balloon animal for a crying child.

Just as the boy begins to smile with joy, the vile man pops it with a pin. Because he’s evil.

Gru could very well be the force that so cruelly popped the potential of Despicable Me: Minion Mania HD, because it too has the inklings of joyous gameplay across its face. Cute, layered puzzle-solving meets pointed control issues.

Lost minions

Minion Mania HD starts off on the right foot. You're charged with navigating three sickly coloured minions through labyrinthine levels full of switches, levers, and assorted obstacles.

Each minion is identical in terms of skills, with only the number of lenses in their spectacles and (optional) customisable clothes differentiating them.

You move your little blighters around by tapping on either their portraits at the top of the screen or on the creatures directly, then tapping the desired destination.

Helping the minions reach the end of level portals are a variety of objects and weapons: freeze-rays, speed-enhancing cinniminion cookies, anti-gravity potions, rocket launchers, and grappling hooks. Each gadget can only be held by a single minion at any given time.

Using a gadget is a matter of tapping the corresponding icon located above the carrier’s head, then tapping to aim the laser sight, and finally hitting the 'fire' button in the lower-right corner.

Mini-despicable me

The mazes themselves are cleverly designed, requiring experimentation and thoughtful tinkering to solve. Only one minion needs to reach the exit to complete a level, but after the first few stages there’s rarely an occasion when all three aren’t required to work together in tandem.

The combination of reaction-based movement to avoid traps and opening doors in the right sequence is involving, with the difficulty remaining just about on the right side of tricky.

That is until the fifth level comes along with its multiple hammer-traps and steaming lava pits, at which point the game buckles under its poor control scheme.

The tap-tap-move part of the controls is the first to crack, often not registering movements and too frequently causing your minion to rush under a hammer-trap.

Dr Evil

This slow registration makes timing harder than it should be, but it’s nothing compared to the ill-advised accelerometer controls.

Kicking into gear whenever a minion (aided by an anti-gravity potion) is hovering above steaming lava, the idea is to tilt your iPad so they drift safely over the top.

Too bad it’s utterly broken. The game doesn’t register tilts unless you disable rotational lock before starting the game. Even then it hardly works as expected, resulting in much frantic shaking just to get the blighter to move an inch.

These hammer traps and anti-gravity moments pop up in almost every subsequent level, causing what could have been a fun puzzle game to spiral into the fiery pit of frustration.

Despicable Me: Minion Mania HD

Despicable Me: Minion Mania HD has the right approach, but lousy controls let down what could have been an interesting and enjoyable puzzler
Score
Will Wilson
Will Wilson
Will's obsession with gaming started off with sketching Laser Squad levels on pads of paper, but recently grew into violently shouting "Tango Down!" at random strangers on the street. He now directs that positive energy into his writing (due in no small part to a binding court order).