Someone recently queried why Microsoft should be interested in buying Minecraft, well the answer to that one is fairly easy, the idea and aesthetic of that game seems to have gotten free of its sandbox and is appearing just about everywhere.

To prove this Atari, which I honestly thought was a company which had been confined to the history of computers and gaming, has released Minimum, a game which mixes the crafting and look of Minecraft with the furious team on five team mechanics of third person online combat. At the moment the game is still in its beta phase of development.

There are a number of games which have taken this route, but with Minimum, Atari have decided to Quake up the action, which does give the game a distinctive look, though whether you want to play with blockmen rather than something with a little more detail is very much up to you.

Whilst the players are very reminiscent of Minecraft this idea is only slightly reflected in the environments, which whilst they are angular have less of a Minecraft reflection. This also holds true for many of the in-game creatures. In a way the look is more Transformers than Minecraft.

When you power up the game you are presented with a number of panels. To your left are the current available missions, you can also review your trophies and you collections of weapons, armour and blueprints. Also at the top of the screen are your basic navigation buttons. Next to this are your stats for XP points as well as the crafting materials you currently own.

There is a heavy leaning towards weapons and item crafting from items either collected during a game or by finishing a game. These can then be spent on creating different loadouts allowing you to equip different weapons. Armour upgrades are accesses via blueprints. You are really going to have to do this as being a new character you’re going to die a lot at the hands of gamers with flaming katanas; I really want to get my hands on one of those.

The game contains a number of different gaming modes, the most fun of which is Titan mode, where your team has to defend an invasion of giant robots against the opposition, making sure it gets to its objective, but you can also choose from the standard team deathmatch and co-op vs AI (horde). You can gather materials from destroyed creeps, smaller insect type creatures, and resources are also dropped by any defeated players. As with many of these games, if you die you respawn, in this case in specialist areas.

Once you are all set then you can enter a match. Even though the game is still in the beta stage it took only about thirty seconds to get a match and the other players were pleasant and polite. The matches will be familiar to anyone who has played an online shooter: Run like hell, and try not to get killed and try and kill the guys who are wearing the colours of the other team/s. How you do this will depend on your initial loadouts which give you the opportunity to run around like a headless chicken with a machine gun or be much sneakier with the ability to drop turrets and pick off the opposition with your sniper rifle.

The controls are very responsive and I detected no lag whilst playing the game. It does contain a couple of bugs which are still being worked on, but for the most part the game plays pretty flawlessly.

Overall it’s a fun experience; however I do wonder what, if anything it offers by way or originality over and above the blocky aesthetic.

8

Charles Packer