Minoria Critic Reviews

Fights against traitorous witches and hulking beasts are incredibly fun, testing your reflexes relentlessly. Unfortunately, it’s also in these encounters that issues like enemies lacking proper visual hit-stun or the fact that bosses can dish out multi-hit attacks that render your parries and invincibility frames useless truly star to become apparent. They’re minor issues, in the grand scheme of things, but they’re issues that Momodora: Reverie of the Moonlight didn’t have at all, leading this game to feel just a bit less polished in comparison. Still, problems like those simply prevent a fun game from being truly magnificent. Minoria still has gorgeous art, haunting music, and addictive exploration that is sure to keep any Metroidvania fan well entertained.

What more could you ask for? Minoria is a beautifully realized title that is entertaining throughout. Aside from some minor nitpicks, this game is a masterfully crafted Metroidvania complete with an interesting story, gorgeous level design and a phenomenal soundtrack to tie it all together.

Minoria is a great Metroidvania that we’d hate to see slip under the radar amongst the more well-known titles like Bloodstained and Hollow Knight. It’s not quite as feature-rich as some of the other titles in the genre and will only last roughly 5 hours or so, but the combat is so impressive, that we’d urge you to check it out.

Minoria is a title that fans of action games and metroidvania style will love. Despite its simplicity in some aspects it has an interesting story and excellent controls that make it a highly recommended adventure.

Even though Minoria does little to distinguish itself from similar titles, it remains a fairly satisfying playthrough. Lasting 5-8 hours, its campaign tells a largely forgettable narrative, but the action segments are enjoyable and the boss fights quite thrilling. A lackluster leveling up system means you won’t ever really feel all that strong; maybe the issue is that even the most basic of enemies are incredibly dangerous at all times. Fortunately, retrying after death is decently quick, and checkpoints that save your progres and refill your incense charges aren’t uncommon. Even though it’s not a must-own title, Minoria is quite competent and will likely appeal to fans of the genre, in particular those who enjoyed its predecessor, Momodora.

If you look past the simplicity of combat and poor animations, there is a pretty high chance you'll get hooked on Minoria. Clash with deadly opponents turns into a dance with the Devil, as you outsmart and outplay armies of monsters with nothing but your reflexes. There's plenty to get disappointed on here, but if you dig deeper, there's a lot to like as well.

With challenging battles and obscure environments, Minoria invites players to overcome their fear of deep, dark places, lethal traps, and horrifying enemies, even if the journey is short. While the game may not always stack up to its peers in production value, those interested in delving into an action RPG crafted with equal amounts of love and nightmares could do worse than giving this one a chance.

Minoria readily services its fanbase and does make a great first impression. The extras thrown in - including some weapons which directly link to those other Momodora games - are decent bonuses, but the core gameplay will leave neophytes wanting. It’s easy enough to complete, and includes some challenge variations that extend its value, but it’s hard to put Minoria ahead of the vast collection of superior metroidvanias in the Switch library on offer at comparable price.

Minoria is excellent, but it's also very limited. It's beautiful, the action is solid for the most part, and there are plenty of intriguing ideas running behind it. The game's problem is that it deserved a bigger vision than the modest execution, and while that is a much more preferable problem than the other way around (too much ambition for too little means), it still means that Minoria will be forgotten well before it deserves to be.

Minoria is a metroidvania-type of game that encourages the player to explore and which benefits from having a good combat system. At the same time, it feels it could have gone much further in its ambition, and its rather short length and repetitive settings, a certain lack of orientation when it comes to the exploration, and the lack of attention dedicated to the other characters make this a game that doesn't clearly standout amid its peers, even if it gets part of the job right.