Released in 2009, Mountain Sheep’s Minigore was a very fun and very polished twin-stick shooter. But there wasn’t really much to it. Just pick your character and your difficulty and try to survive as long as possible. With Minigore 2: Zombies the studio more than makes up for the original’s limited scope. This is an absolutely gigantic game, packed with hours of content and new ideas while maintaining the same storybook graphics and high level of polish that made the original so memorable.

Loading

Gamers play as John Gore (or one of the ever-expanding roster of unlockable characters), once again shooting, chopping and smashing up horde of enemies with a wide variety of weapons including machine guns, shotguns, giant hammers and exploding sheep launchers. But as the sequel’s name implies, this time around Gore must mow down the perennial video game enemy: hordes of undead.It’s Minigore 2’s clever and elaborate progression system that truly makes the sequel stand out from the original. Gamers now have seven stages to work their way through, each concluding with a unique boss encounter. The first stage will be far too challenging to clear the first few times players jump in – Minigore 2 is designed with replayability in mind. After each session players can spend the souls of their defeated enemies to level-up their character and increase the power of each individual weapon. New characters and stages also have to be purchased, giving gamers plenty of goals to work towards.It’s an extremely compelling meta-game. Any time I came up against a tough new boss, I knew I was only one or two upgrades away from being able to take him down. But a meta-game only matters if the actual gameplay itself is fun and rewarding enough to dive back in time after time. Minigore 2 succeeds here, as well. The game’s engine is rock-solid – on a third-gen iPad I never experienced one lick of slowdown, even when hundreds of enemies were on-screen at once. Mountain Sheep hasn’t made any visual sacrifices that I can see to keep the experience fast and frantic. Each block-headed enemy is rendered with a sharp and distinctive style that makes me think of oldschool claymation. Weapons explode the enemies into cartoony buckets of blood and goop.Minigore 2’s fast pace and polished twin-stick mechanics reward skilled twitch gamers, but there’s plenty of depth for more tactical gamers to uncover as well. Sometimes it’s best to save up an especially strong weapon for the occasional unique miniboss enemy or super-strong giant minion. Players can also partially restore some lost health as long as it doesn’t drop beneath certain thresholds, making tactical retreats a must. Casual players also have access to a simple “auto-aim” mode that automatically points gamers at the nearest enemy – a welcome edition for less serious gamers.The lack of an endless survival mode in Minigore 2 is a disappointing and puzzling exclusion unfortunately. It makes the second half the game feel much more like a grind than it should. I cleared the final boss with most weapons only halfway upgraded and only around half the characters leveled up. It’s still fun to replay stages but without a highscore-based endless mode there’s no real motivation to keep earning souls to further power-up my equipment. Upgrades also crawl to a glacial pace in the game’s back half. By the end, a lengthy play session would only net me enough dough to buy one of the 150+ total upgrades remaining.