A polished endless runner in the style of Temple Run, Minion Rush lets you run through dynamic environments with a little yellow fellow from Despicable Me. Enjoy sporadic twists on the classic formula like slides, bosses, and vertical sections and pummel other minions to unleash your despicable self!

Ever since Despicable Me was released in 2010, the little yellow Minions featured in the film have been an omnipresent global sensation. You’ll see these critters in advertisements, unrelated television shows, stickers, cross promotions, and uncountable internet memes. Minion Rush adds the minions to a new venue: an endless running app game, where you control a running minion as they perform some important task.

Minion Rush Description

As far as endless runners go, Minion Rush is an interesting mixture of vanilla gameplay and cute twists. Just like in most endless runners, Minion Rush allows you to progress down one of several lanes in a mostly straight environment. The track is littered with obstacles, currency, and pickups. Your goal is to swipe left, right, up, and down to change lanes, avoid walls, jump over debris, and duck under electric fences and other vertical hazards. When you smash into an obstacle, your journey ends and you have to restart the level - but you’ll keep any currency you’ve picked up.

In many ways, Minion Rush feels like a carbon copy of Temple Run and other popular entries in the series. Gameplay starts off slow and gradually builds to a breakneck pace. Obstacles are telegraphed, and you’re frequently presented with meaningless choices about where you’d like to go. You can go left, to continue endlessly running through a minion factory, or you can go right to continue endlessly running through a minion factory. While Minion Rush does mix things up slightly with how it handles score (you increase your multiplier by smashing into other minions, who have over-the-top animations in response to your high-speed collision), it feels very tame while you’re in “normal” endless running sections.

The big “twist” comes with periodic variations from the formula. The game will occasionally switch things up by moving the camera to a side view, letting you slide down a slide (or a cheese grater) and use motion controls to guide your minion as it falls, or let you grow giant-sized and smash through obstacles with reckless abandon. Bosses appear periodically, requiring you to dodge and run differently and adding a different sort of tension to your gameplay as well as a sense of accomplishment when you get them down.

Like other endless runners, Minion Rush has both unlockable characters and premium currency. You can get a very small amount of this premium currency from playing the game each day, but Minion Rush feels particularly stingy with its free rewards (especially considering the game’s age). The good news is that you can unlock everything eventually if you keep playing for long enough. The bad news is that if you want a new character, it’ll often take weeks or months to accumulate enough tokens to finish the purchase. When you combine this with the fact that tokens are the things you use to revive at the end of very good runs, you get a system where spending money to skip the grind is almost necessary if you want to unlock everything.

Overall, the level of polish and the interesting gameplay twists make Minion Rush worth checking out if you’re a fan of other endless runners. Even if it doesn’t become your favorite game, it’s a good way to scratch your endless runner itch while your other games are on cooldown.

Minion Rush Tips

While characters tend to require tokens to purchase, most upgrades and level-ups can be bought with bananas - the totally free currency you get from running through levels. Try to purchase all of these as fast as you can. If you’re enjoying the game, consider dropping a bit of cash to purchase the Golden Banana. This powerful upgrade will double the bananas you earn permanently, helping you progress through the rest of the upgrades.

As far as tokens go, the best thing to do is to connect Minion Rush to Facebook and play a little bit every day. The extra daily token from Facebook is huge. Playing for long enough to get your five daily tokens won’t take long, either. These tips should give you 180 tokens per month, which will help you unlock characters and costumes so you can master every type of level.

Are you a Minion Rush expert? What are your favorite characters? What are your favorite levels? Did we miss any tips or tricks? Let us know in the comments below!