Minion Masters Review – “D” Not Very Streamable

So, you fancy yourself a master of minions, do you? Well, have I got the game for you! Minion Masters is a blend between League of Legends and Hearthstone, and it is free! In fact, it is one of my favorite games to sit back and relax to while getting a good chuckle from the ridiculousness of some of the minions.

It is a nice change of pace from the serious competition from games like Rocket League, and yet, it still has a sense of challenge against other players. This semi-serious approach, coupled with the dry humor of the narrator, leaves me with something that itches my need for that competitive gameplay while at the same time being completely fine with an occasional loss.

How Minion Masters Plays

When you first start up a Minion Masters for the first time, you will be forced to do a tutorial match to get you used to the game’s rules. While I disagree with forcing people to do the tutorial before you can do anything else, it isn’t that bad of an experience and adequately prepares you on how to play rather quickly.

Each game lasts anywhere from 30 seconds to 5+ minutes. However, it is fairly rare for games to go longer than 6 minutes due to mana frenzy, where you get mana for every unit your team kills, allowing you to absolutely litter the field with minions to do your bidding.

It is pretty fun to get those games, though, because it’s anyone’s guess who will come out on top.

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Card Counters Exist for All cards – Balance is Important

There are many different cards available, all with strengths and weaknesses. In some games, your deck might dominate the opponent, while in others, you are on the receiving end to the domination.

Sometimes, your deck rotation could just be unfortunate. Other times, their decks could consist of nothing but counters to the deck that you have built.

And that is the beauty of this game – it isn’t so much skill as it is the luck of the draw, at least at first glance. This isn’t as much of a factor at higher level play as to where you spawn your units, and the order in which you spawn them can have a dramatic effect on the outcome of the battle.

A quick example would be a Healer unit – you wouldn’t spawn that first and have it assault on its own, would you? No, you’d spawn a big, tanky unit that hits hard and slow to take the brunt of the hits, and then spawn the healer to allow it to stay on the field as long as possible and back it up with other, smaller minions to take the flak and increase damage output.

Strategy First – Tactics at Play In Minion Masters

Strategic gameplay does matter in Minion Masters. For example, you could choose to hold off on spawning cards as fast as possible and instead spawn in large groups or wait to see what kind of units the other team spawns first and attempt to hard counter them. Or, if you’re doing a Co-op team match, you could coordinate a directed assault on one side of the map to try and blitz their platform down, at the risk of leaving yourself open to the same tactic.

In a match, you will often shift tactics to adjust to what your opponents do. Don’t be afraid to do this because if you don’t counter a wave, it will end up wasting mana, and you will get overwhelmed fairly easily.

Now, I’ve only ever pushed to gold rank 3, so I’m not one to really give any advice on the matter; I just kind of wing the decks. I win some. I lose some. Minion Masters isn’t so serious a game to me that I have to go the meta and push hard.

Card Types in Minion Masters

There are a few different types of cards in the game:

• Minion Cards (Of Course)
  • Single Minion Cards
  • Horde Cards (Multiple weaker versions of single minion cards)
  • Minion Spawner Cards (Crossbow Guild Card for Example)
• Tower Cards
  • High Health, no attacks wall cards
  • High damage single target Towers
  • Splash damage towers
• Spell Cards
  • Standard Offensive Spells
  • Summon Spells
  • Defensive Spells

Collectable Things You can Get in Minion Masters

There are a wide variety of collectible things in Minion Masters. Obviously, you have the cards themselves, but did you know you can also get special arena halves? Not only that, but you can also get special emotes card borders and Master skins.

Almost all of them can be obtained without spending any money too. It just takes a long time. However, some areas are locked away to limited-time events, such as the Classic arena, which is only available to those of you who have been playing since Early Access.

All of these collectibles are purely cosmetic; there is no play advantage for them. The only exception to this is unlocking the cards you need for a really good deck and the masters you want to play. But even then, you can obtain them for free all the same, at the cost of time, and you can still play well without those decks.

Multiple Masters of Minions to Choose From

While the masters’ selection list in this game pales when compared to League of Legends, there are quite a few masters available. You start with the bow guy called Stormbringer, and every week, two masters will swap out in a free masters rotation. This allows you to try out the master to see if you like their abilities.

Eventually, you can choose to unlock those masters permanently using rubies that you can buy or accrue from playing the game and doing quests. Honestly, though, my favorite master is Stormbringer – the +2 range that my units get is a serious advantage in the field for ranged heavy decks, especially early on. Plus, he can shoot random minions across the entire battlefield, which can help to whittle down weak targets or break 1 shot immunity bubbles.

How Streamable is Minion Masters?

Next, I want to give Minion Masters a stream rating, which is determined using a few factors:

• Game Content length
• Audience Interaction Opportunities
• Game Popularity

Game content length is essentially infinite for games like this, which would give it a solid S Rating for making it a long-term streaming option. However, It isn’t all that fun to watch as a viewerA viewer is a person who watches live-streaming content. More, as the content becomes excessively repetitive pretty quickly. This lowers this score to D.

Audience Interaction Opportunities is one part of this game that scores well in terms of streamability – You can team up with your audience and involve them in your play. This is about as far as it goes, though, as you can’t trade cards from your deck or anything like that. So It gets a B for Audience Interaction Opportunities.

Additionally, this game isn’t really all that popular, making it a poor live streaming option. At the time of this article being written, there were only 16 total streamers in the category on TwitchTwitch is a popular, gaming-focused live streaming platform. It is one of the most well-known streamer-first platforms out there and has millions of active streamers and viewers. More, and only the super high-ranked streamers had more than the typical 1-8 viewers. I even recently checked on the active streams, and the highest viewcount on TwitchTwitch is a popular, gaming-focused live streaming platform. It is one of the most well-known streamer-first platforms out there and has millions of active streamers and viewers. More for Minion Masters was 3 viewers. Thus, the Game Popularity score is actually an F – It isn’t worth your time to stream it long-term.

So, overall, I give this game a D in Streamability – It is not something I can really recommend if you intend to grow an audience. It is more of a casual thing to do in the background while you chat with your audience on Just Chatting, if nothing else.

The game is certainly fun while it lasts, but I did grow tired of the gameplay about a month after I originally wrote this review. It just was too repetitive for long-term play.

Should You Get Minion Masters?

The game is free – you lose nothing but time to try it out. I enjoy Minion Masters, so I can indeed recommend that you give this a shot. The developers are constantly adding new cards to the game, and balance tweaks are done for truly broken cards that appear pretty quickly.

I will say this – they are pretty adamant about trying to convince you to pay money to support the game’s development. A newsletter subscription, which pops up every time you start the game until you subscribe, will try and convince you to part with your hard-earned money to get access to “free” loot each month. But, of course, it’s only free if you can resist the temptations of “Exclusive deals!” They promise not to spam you, but I recommend giving them a secondary email, just in case.

I have nothing against their methodology, as a free game needs to generate income somehow to support continued development. I just want you to be aware of their not-so-subtle attempts to influence your decisions. It is a great, free game. If you have the discipline to resist their attempts to convince you otherwise, that is.