Pik-Minions.
Controlling a group of mindless minions isn’t a new concept to videogames. Pikmin, Overlord, Army Corps of Hell, and Sea Salt, are just a few examples of having hordes of small creatures do your bidding. Teratopia is the latest title to pull this off, a charming blend of creature beat’em up and platformer that has a very Conker’s Bad Fur Day look to its cast of characters, mixed with the parody aesthetic of a Rabbids game. While the title has a few technical issues that hopefully are addressed in an upcoming patch, it honestly surprised me with its wealth of variety in its bosses and enjoyable moment to moment gameplay.
Teratopia’s premise is a simple one, you play as one of three creatures; Benito, Horacio, and Tucho, the latter of which is who you will start your adventure off with. The game opens up sometime after an invasion of a red menace that has taken over your home, kidnapping your various neighbors and friends. As Tucho, you’ll attempt to track down your friends and the trio of you will then be tasked with defeating this family of invaders and take back your land. Now, when I say family, I mean exactly that. The numerous bosses you’ll encounter all seem to be related, from parents to grandparents, to siblings or their dog, these invaders will need to be stopped by any means necessary.
Your three central heroes; Tucho, Benito, and Horacio, each has different abilities. Tucho has a more melee-focused attack, with a dodge roll that he can also perform in the air. Benito, is your ranged class, firing off projectiles from a distance. His dodge is more of a teleport, which can be useful when surrounded, but be careful not to use it too close to the sides of a cliff, as it can very easy to fall off and have to start the level all over again. Horacio, is your (sort of)magic class, firing off a poison attack from a medium-range distance. His dodge is a slimy dash, which is easier to read than Benito’s teleport. Each class has a charged attack from having a more powerful melee strike, a stronger ranged attack, or in the case of Benito, firing off a poison bomb that can cause damage if the enemy stays within its sludgy remains, which is tremendously useful for most bosses. Each character has their own selection of stats that make them useful for many situations, making them the prime choice for certain encounters.
Each of the three main characters will also have access to certain magical abilities, these range from fire attacks, creating shields around yourself or your minions, to ensuring health drops from enemies if you defeat them in a certain time limit. You can have one active skill available at any given moment, with simply using the D-Pad to select which one you want at-the-ready with the LT button. You’ll earn these skills as you open chests or defeat enemies, so it pays to kill everything you come across or revisit old areas that now have chests and other secrets to discover. And, as you continue to push through the game, you’ll earn experience and level up, gaining new attacks, abilities, and massive increases in stats. This level is thankfully shared across all three characters, so you’ll never have to worry about a newly unlocked character being under-leveled for where you’re taking them.
The game has you traveling across 13 zones, each of them connected and while you can dive into them via starting points in each environment, you can freely travel across the map in generally one motion, something that did cause the framerate to struggle considerably when you transition from one biome to the next. Despite the massive armies you can pull together, I only seemed to have these performance issues when I would be moving from zone to zone, and especially when I would double back from initially entering one. While the game is certainly not optimized for the next-gen consoles it can be played on, it’s a shame seeing such a graphically simple game stuttering so poorly. Eventually, as you push through to the final encounter, the rest of the game is locked off, preventing you from going back to older areas to level up if you’re not prepared, and is even still blocked off even after beating the game. The game does warn you of this, but it’s a shame the world doesn’t open back up after defeating the final foe.
The levels themselves are fun enough to explore without being too innovative with their designs or offering us something we haven’t seen several times before. There is some platforming, and each character will take to jumping and dashing in their own way, making some areas harder to access with certain characters. I will say that the jumping could be a bit higher as some locations, such as when you are set to leave the costume shop, can result in a cheap death of falling to your doom when you simply just wanted to jump back to the neighboring platform. One location, a side-scrolling death trap, was an incredible nuisance due to how unforgiving the jump height requirement can be for a few of its higher platforms. While many of the jumps can be easier with certain characters, falling to your death will result in failing the level and having to start it over. Had you simply appeared at the edge of the cliff with a bit of lost health, like many games offer, then the failings of how the jumping can feel would be lessened considerably.
As you thrash about the various enemy types with each of the three characters, you’ll be earning eggs and eyes. Eggs are where you’ll procure your minions from, with there being five different types of them to summon. Each egg-type will vary in what sort of minion you’ll have ready to be summoned. At first, you’ll only be able to contain so many minions, but as you explore previously completed areas, you’ll be able to increase your minion capacity as you track down special chests that grant this increase. Minions can be selected with LB or RB, and then put onto the field with RT. The responsiveness to the controls makes summoning and selecting your minions to be a rather quick affair and thankfully is not a clunky system in the slightest.
While attacking larger enemies with a small handful of minions will see them largely defeated with not much damage done to their adversary, it’s when you unleash a massive horde of minions where you’ll see their small efforts become that much more impressive as a team. I would usually wait until I could release at least 20 or so minions before I would really cut loose with them, ensuring I was getting the most out of my eggs. While the AI pathing for your minions is almost non-existent, you can teleport them along with the right analog stick, making it easy enough to get them where you need to go. However; should you summon an army of minions and then be tasked with some platforming sections, they will largely run off the cliff behind you and die unless you platform quickly and use the teleport to aid them along. It’s not a robust or great system, but it can result in saving at least a few of them from a grisly death. You’ll also find small canons for them to fire, and while I wish there were more things like this for them to interact with, it was still fun to see them seated in the contraption and firing away.
Apart from earning eggs, you’ll find eyeballs that bounce around after you defeat an enemy. I would have preferred the eyeballs to automatically pull towards you when you defeat an enemy only because I’ve had several of them bounce off cliffs or blink away too quickly as I’m trying to collect them, summon more minions, and still take part in the battles around me. Had there been an upgrade or spell to allow this, I would have certainly preferred that instead of seeing a mass amount of them roll over the cliff and down into the abyss below. You’ll use eyes to progress through areas that are blocked, or used when you find chests in completed areas. You’ll often find more eyes than you’ll ever need, but you’ll still want to collect every last one you can.
Nearly everything you do in the game all contributes to the Teratopedia, a collection of achievements you’ll complete in the game. Every time you use a minion, defeat an enemy, or vanquish a boss, you’ll chip away at it, with certain milestones awarding you monster-piece currency that you can use to buy costumes for your characters. Each character has four costumes that have special perks like earning more experience or one that causes double damage. The costumes can be purchased from a vendor that you’ll access in one of the starting levels. The Teratopedia also has a trading card aesthetic to it that should there be a sequel, it would be nice for them to embrace this more and have either special artwork displayed for each card or fun bits of trivia or lore behind them. I largely say artwork for these entries, because the overall work that is done on the storybook cutscenes is fantastic and incredibly charming.
The assortment of enemies you’ll fight vary from those that will get in your face, lob projectiles at you, or require you to use your special attack to blast off segments of armor. There are a few that tend to repeat certain themes, but overall, there is a good assortment here to keep you busy with their variety. What is also great about this variety is that older areas will start to see the later enemies show up, making their presence known everywhere you go and not just regulated to just a few later locations. This keeps the game consistently challenging instead of returning to older areas and just decimating the more simple selections you had there previously.
Across the game are 14 bosses, but there are a few where you won’t actually do battle with them, but instead progress through them in other ways. My biggest take-a-way from Teratopia is that every boss has its own unique series of gameplay mechanics and no two bosses feel the same. Each boss has a certain weakness that will give you an opening to dish out some damage. When triggering these little moments, you’ll want to ensure you have your minions out, as you can mow through their health bar when they are left vulnerable, such as when you lure a rampaging boss into a tombstone, or when a geyser has stunned them. I found every boss encounter to be enjoyable and well thought out. There are even a few bosses that require you to rely solely on your main character, as you’ll either be starved for eggs by the time you reach them or prevented from using them at all. While I wasn’t sure about a game based entirely around a minion system seeing a boss that prevented that mechanic from being used, it ended up being one of the more enjoyable encounters the game offered.
My overall last critique is that while the game has the appeal of what could very well be a kids game, this is actually a pretty crude and often adult experience, something you might have seen someone like Adult Swim publish years ago. While I don’t recall much in the way of where I would strongly not recommend this game for kids, keep in mind the game is mature rated for some sexual themes that do pop up in the game’s artwork and a few of its bosses’ designs. If the title does return for a sequel, I would either like the see the adult humor either toned down so the game can be designed for kids, or either on the other end of that spectrum and committing to its adult rating instead of being a game that isn’t quite sure what it wants to be.
Accompanied by a delightful soundtrack that compliments the game well, I was pleasantly surprised at how fun Teratopia ended up being. While I was somewhat shocked that a game like this didn’t feature any sort of co-op play, it was still a fun distraction for at least a few short hours. The minions themselves are a delightful assortment of fun designs and personalities, in a game that is colorful, bright, and often a joy to push through. It’s not the greatest minion-type game to be released, but it certainly is right up there.
Developer - Ravegan, Ravegan S.A. Publisher - EastAsiaSoft. Released - January 20th, 2021. Available On - Xbox One, Series X/S, PS4, PS5, Nintendo Switch, PC. Rated - (M) - Blood, Language, Sexual Themes, Use of Drugs, Violence. Platform Reviewed - Xbox Series X. Review Access - A review code was provided by the publisher for the purpose of this review.