Minecraft Dungeons is a new game from Microsoft and Mojang and released on all platforms on May 26th. Considering I am extremely late in writing this, I am figuring you have probably already played the game and already decided if it is for you or not. It is available through Xbox Game Pass, so if you partake of that it is pretty much a no-brainer to at least dip your toes in the water. For the rest of you that have not placed your hands on this game, you might want to pause a bit and listen.
Minecraft Dungeons is a game in the Minecraft universe, but effectively has nothing at all to do with the gameplay of the baseline game. It is instead a top down isometric dungeon crawler that just happens to feature the primitive graphics of Minecraft. You choose from a list of preset characters, which is the first strike against the game given it would be nice if we had some measure of control over our characters features. You equip suitable Minecraft world items like swords and pick axes and use them to bash your way through levels filled with a greatest hits collection of things you will recognize from Minecraft, namely Zombies, Creepers, and Skeletons.
You defeat levels, which unlock additional levels… each of which having a difficulty slider effectively determining the sorts of drops that are available and supposedly the relative difficulty. I am primarily playing this as my before bedtime game, but I have yet to finish unlocking everything available due to lots of short play sessions. I am not sure exactly what the ultimate point of the game is, but it seems to have a storyline woven around a bad group of Villagers called the Illagers. This is apparently a thing in actual Minecraft but I never thought of them as some sort of an enemy faction.
The game seems to sell itself as a sort of Minecraft meets Diablo experience, and based on my play sessions it feels like neither. I would say the core gameplay loop reminds me significantly more of something like Gauntlet Legends or Gauntlet Dark Legacy. The loot is neither plentiful enough or good enough to really feel like a Diablo game. The game also lacks anything close to the build complexity and nuance that is traditionally available in the ARPG genre, so in the end it feels exceptionally shallow.
In theory as you go throughout your travels you collect melee weapons, ranged weapons, armor, and can equip three artifacts at a time. The second significant strike is that all of the gear can be enchanted, but each item acquired has a randomly assigned fixed ability that as far as I can tell you can’t change. This leads to situations where you might find a weapon that is technically stronger than the one you are using, but it has a worthless enchant on it leaving you to hold onto your existing gear for far too long.
Similarly not all artifacts are created equal. Some are going to have useful effects and others are going to largely be pointless. For example the first one you get is an old timey bottle rocket style firework that you can in theory aim at a group of enemies to explode it. The challenge there is an exceptionally long cooldown and that it never seems to go in the direction you actually want it to. The best item I have found is an amulet that collects souls each time an enemy dies and then allows you to effectively have an extra healing potion. Over time this seems to heal less and less of your health pool diminishing its usefulness.
The third strike against the game is that there are a significant number of “cheap” mobs that seem to put you in positions where it is exceptionally hard to avoid taking damage from them. Additionally I have encountered even on lower difficulty settings several mobs that can just straight up one shot you. It isn’t so much a difficulty thing, as most encounters fall over without effort. There is an unpolished nature to the design that makes me question if it got the requisite time to balance the encounter design or even had a significant alpha or beta testing period. The game as a whole has this half baked and unfinished feeling to it.
A significant amount of your time is spent in your camp, which you unlock as a safe base of operations after the prologue. The game operates on collecting emeralds and then you can spend those emeralds at your base with first the Blacksmith for randomly generated weapons, and later the Wandering Trader for randomly generated artifacts. The problem is that in both cases the items created for you are generally several levels worse than whatever you can get as loot from the zones themselves.
The camp itself is also huge, but almost completely devoid of purpose. You have a house that appears to never change as you go through the game levels. You have various ruins scattered around the play area, that again never evolve over time. At first I thought that maybe this was just a side effect of me not having gotten far enough into the game to unlock more things. However one of my friends who has played a ton of this game with his son indicated that I have effectively seen everything that is going to open up. Once again… the game feels like it was meant to be something more, but instead we got an unfinished product that was rushed to market.
I have played the game on Windows and Xbox One through Xbox Game pass and then purchased it for the Nintendo Switch. In all cases they rely upon your Xbox Live account but also in all cases they do not seem to support any manner of cloud saves. This would be strike number four, because even though I have issues with the experience as a whole it might be more enjoyable if I could start the evening on my PC and then finish playing the same character and making the same progress on my Switch. It seems to pull in all of my Xbox Live friends, but while playing on the switch none of them have actually shown up as someone I could play with… making me question if cross platform play is a thing either.
What you have in the end is a game with the primitive graphics of Minecraft but is devoid of any creative outlets. A game that would like to pattern itself off Diablo but lacks any interesting loot and character building options. A game that seems to have a shared account system but is not utilizing it in any meaningful manner. Ultimately Minecraft Dungeons is a confusing mess of a game that feels unfinished and unbalanced, and after experiencing it myself for a few weeks there is no way I would ever suggest this game to someone. If you have Xbox Game Pass, by all means check it out for yourself since you can do so for free… but I would not spend a dime here until things have sufficiently changed.
I’ve been tempted to write a blog about Minecraft Dungeons but I just struggle to come up with anything worth saying about it. It feels like an empty reservoir meant to be filled with DLC packs.
… and I think this is my ultimate fear? It was a full priced empty container designed to eventually filled with microtransactions once all of the reviews have been written. That has been a growing trend, game releases… then six months later they patch in a ton of microtransactions after all of the initial reviews are out. Game sites rarely go back and update the review so the original one holds there.
This really seems like one of those games that depends almost entirely on the IP rather than the gameplay. I guess it’s targeted to a younger audience, but wouldn’t they just rather play Minecraft? And play pretty much any other ARPG if that’s the game mechanics they want?
It’s interesting, cause neither of my kids want anything to do with this. They’d rather dive into something like Roblox (a longer story.)