Just leave my minotaur alone!



At the center of the labyrinth is a minotaur. He is bound with muscle. He is fearsome. He is… snoring. Asterion, bored with how long I am taking to place my traps, has gone to sleep. This is despite warriors armed with swords and bows lining up at the gates leading into the maze, itching for their chance to battle the bull-headed, human-bodied creature.

Still, even though he is in mortal danger, I, Daedalus, the labyrinth's designer, am happy for him to sleep. If I do my job in roguelite tower defense game Minos right, my minotaur won't have to lift a finger to defend himself.

Each level of Minos presents you with a small section of Crete's famous labyrinth. At its heart is a lair where Asterion the minotaur has set up home. It is my job to reshape the walls of the maze and place traps to kill off any plucky Greeks trying to slay the beast at its center.



In the myths, these adventurers are teenagers, volunteered by their parents to please Minos, the king of Crete. The monarch is embarrassed by the minotaur and wants rid of it. After all, the creature is the only evidence that his wife, Pasiphaë, slept with a bull. It wasn't just any bull, mind. By all accounts it was a beautiful creature gifted to the king by Poseidon on the condition that Minos would sacrifice it to the sea god. The equivalent of your friend giving you an olive tree as a house warming gift when they know you don't have a garden, so you'll have to give it back to them "for safekeeping". Except, in this example, you decide to hold onto the tree and they cause your partner to get the hots for the shrub and... I don't know if this analogy is really clearing anything up. Look, let's just leave it at Minos wants the minotaur dead. You, Deadalus, are helping the minotaur stay alive, and let's not get hung up on whether you're killing press-ganged teenagers or not.

I was drawn to Minos as an Orcs Must Die fan. Any game that lets me fend off waves of incoming enemies with spike traps, fire pits, and deadly seesaws is a winner in my book. And Minos is exceedingly pleasing on that front. As the level starts, eager Greeks line up at the entrances to the labyrinth. A golden thread weaves from their doorway to the labyrinth's centre revealing the route they'll take. Dotted around the maze are trap spots where you can place one of the limited killing devices from your inventory. However, as is often the case with those wily Greeks, their initial route may not take them over all that many traps. Luckily, that is where your role as the labyrinth's creator comes into its own, you can raise and delete most of the walls in the maze, shaping the invaders route to pass over more trap spots.

Say what you like about the Greeks, they're very well-behaved, only entering the labyrinth when you give them the go ahead. At which point you can watch as they march over your traps, one-by-one, thinning out their numbers. Even if they manage to reach the labyrinth's centre, Asterion, for all his sleepiness, is still a minotaur, and will easily tear one or two warriors apart. Though, there are bonuses you'll only receive if you kill all the attackers with traps – so if you can wipe out a wave without Asterion lifting a finger, you should.



While this will all be familiar to Orcs Must Die fans, it builds to a very different experience. In Orcs Must Die, your traps are less deadly – dealing damage rather than outright killing your enemies – and, unlike Minos's traps, they rearm after use. In Minos, each wave of enemies is more like a puzzle to be solved than a horde to be thinned. If there are six enemies invading the labyrinth, how can you ensure their route takes them over six traps on their way? This becomes much more complicated when you're dealing with multiple entrances and separate paths to your lair. It's complicated further still when you face enemies that have resistance to particular trap styles. A firepit will kill a swordsman outright, but it will...Read more: Full article on www.rockpapershotgun.com

What do you think about this?