Minecraft Legends review: The bridge is basically quite far

while our minecraft legends reviewNever wait Minecraft, of all the franchises to try to get into the subgenre of action and strategy in real time. It’s hardly fashionable. But after appearing as both an episodic narrative adventure (Minecraft Story Mode) and ARPG (Minecraft Dungeons), Minecraft Legends has done another solid job of expanding the IP into new territory, even if its simplicity doesn’t do much for connoisseurs looking for ” action”. ”. or “the real-time strategy really worked.

Like the previous spin-offs, Minecraft Legends doesn’t try to play like its namesake at all. The story begins when your hero, whose appearance you choose from a small number of options at the start, is tasked by a trio of otherworldly beings to save the earth from an invasion. Piglins, a group of Minecraft pig monsters from the Nether, are invading and no one can stand in their way. It’s up to you to gather resources, fight their bases, and smash their portals.

Cutscenes generally appear with little narration, but the pacing doesn’t randomly stop to scream for a few minutes of dialogue or attempts at characterization. The story sequences are charming and show a lot of personality, although the vast majority of the characters never speak. The game’s voxel presentation also looks as good as expected, though there are only high-quality presets available to choose from with no additional adjustments. Regardless, Minecraft Legends looks great, though it would definitely benefit from smoothness with the GPU settings, as gameplay was quite choppy for me at 1440p.

The player character in Minecraft Legends is constantly mounted on a horse (or a cat if you choose to switch mounts) and can slash his sword if you repeatedly hold or press the attack button. However, there is nothing else in your combat skills. You don’t learn any extra moves, the enemy’s reaction to damage doesn’t make them particularly effective, and oddly enough, only monsters can damage structures, which I don’t like. Jumps and sprints are also a measure of your mobility. The “action” side seems a bit light.

Fortunately, things get more interesting when it comes to elements of “RTS” and other systems. You create individual monsters by creating little devices to summon them. You can only call one at a time, so you have to hold the button while the others appear, which can get beyond monotonous when calling dozens at once. Press the button to call all soldiers within range to follow you, but you can’t call them all at once.

In terms of control, you can send them forward as part of standard third-person gameplay, or you can go into banner mode, which gives you a top-down view. This allows you to tell your monsters to move or focus on one point, which means they will attack an enemy or building in that location. You can choose to have all your monsters converge at this time at once, or separate them based on their designations, like the melee and ranged fighters mentioned above, though you can’t dispatch them based on their particular class.

There are seven types of Minecraft Legends mobs ranging from melee to ranged and support. The game starts with two types of golems that quickly drop in front of enemies, but you’ll soon have access to some more specialized varieties, as well as skeletons, zombies, and creepers. Skeletons and Zombies are completely superior to the melee and ranged starter golems, but they also require rarer resources. Resources are acquired in two ways, the first of which is more convenient; you will go into mining mode and send out creatures called allies to mine certain resources. These creatures also build your buildings, including those that spawn monsters. It will make you smile if you’ve played “real” Minecraft; As Will discovered in his hands-on preview of GDC, it’s fun to drive alleyways to create structures that you could have built yourself with a lot more effort in the base game. If you’ve spent hours in a personal vantage point, Zoom is a treat.

When you start the game, Minecraft Legends creates a world based on the difficulty you choose; Harder difficulties have larger maps and larger enemy bases. The worlds are quite large and open, containing a mix of enemy bases, villages, colonies of friendly monsters, and points of interest that allow you to summon giant golems or collect special towers that can be placed on the battlefield if you have the resources. . You can quickly move between villages, each of which has chests that will give you certain resources that are displayed on the game map, they always include a large amount of wood and stone, as well as lapis lazuli, which is needed to create mobs.

The general gameplay is divided into offensive and defensive actions. At night you must defend yourself; Piglins usually invade a village or settlement at night, and you probably want to protect them, although in my experience it wasn’t a big deal if their central building was destroyed.

Attacking the piglins’ bases is, of course, the essence of the game. There are three factions of Piglins in each world, and after destroying all the bases belonging to the faction, you will summon a boss. Destroy all three factions and three bosses to summon the final boss and rid the world of the piglin plague, your ultimate goal.

One faction’s bases are often on cliffs, while another’s base may be fortified with layers of walls and iron gates. These outposts have different buildings that spawn enemies, shoot at you from afar, or turn the ground into Nether rock that you can’t build on. You’ll want to use your mobs or buildings to destroy them, eventually breaking the Piglins’ Nether Portal and removing all traces of them from the area. There are difficulties, of course.

The biggest problem I have with Minecraft Legends is that your creatures aren’t ready enough to keep up with you. To access the rocks where some of the bases are located, you need to build ramps. It’s annoying even with a mouse, because it’s too sensitive by default. Worse yet, the mobs are unable to get through these ramps without falling off. Some bases are surrounded by lava pits through which you have to build ramps and, yes, your monsters will fall. However, the rocks are even worse. I regularly saw my mobs fall to the ground not only trying to get past ramps, but also attacking enemies and buildings too close to the edges.

Fortunately, you can call all summoned monsters to any spawn building. I tend to build one on the highest level of the aforementioned raised bases, because by the time I get to the top I’ve always killed dozens of soldiers. It doesn’t help that when following you, your mobs don’t always pay enough attention to attack something they weren’t specifically told to. Minecraft Legends’ real-time strategy mechanics are functional, but the focus has clearly been on making console players feel comfortable, so the lack of precision in the controls can be tiring.

Despite how carefully the game manual takes you by the hand, I was surprised at how little was done to explain some important details. All enemy bases are built on corrupted land that you cannot build on. To do this, you’ll need to destroy the Netherrock generators and then use the area-clearing machine, which must be purchased with the upgrade, but you’ll need to read the full upgrade details to find out. All upgrades can be obtained by placing buildings at certain locations in the pit, which serves as the player’s central base. be running out of space to build them all at the end of the game. The game is also less than perfect in explaining how to get the base resource needed to purchase these upgrades.

Once the infested terrain has been cleared, you can place buildings. Regular towers and all wooden buildings can be turned to stone with a mason, and you can even build some kind of cannon to shoot at enemy buildings, which can be invaluable. You will need to use these buildings to properly defend attacked villages and settlements. Tired of shutting down what you do every night to fight off invaders, especially since enemy raids in later games can last eight minutes. It does at least change the gameplay though, and the lower difficulties are pretty forgiving – you can often sneak around without crafting and just aim your mobs at the enemy.

Overall I had a great time with the Minecraft Legends campaign. This will likely take anywhere from ten to twenty hours, depending on which difficulty you choose (and even the youngest kids will be able to get through the lowest, made even easier by the game’s regenerative health system), and there’s a mode PvP where players try to destroy the bases of friends of friends. It is noticeably differently paced compared to the main campaign and extends the lifespan.

Once the game is over, there will be no more enemies in this file, so you will have to start over. The combat is generally uninteresting and the RTS elements aren’t as deep as I’d like (and having all the nearby mobs following you after you dispatch them is a bummer), but the game is fun enough that a wide range of players will probably find something. to the core. As long as they don’t lead their mobs across the bridges.

Interested? The Minecraft Legends release date is April 18 and will be available on Game Pass at launch. Check out the system requirements for Minecraft Legends to make sure your platform can run it, and here’s what we know about its Steam Deck compatibility right now.