Minecraft
Dungeons by developers Mojang
Studios, Double
Eleven and publisher Xbox
Game Studios—Microsoft
Xbox One review written by Pierre-Yves
with an Ultimate Game Pass Subscription provided by Microsoft for
Minecraft Dungeons Review.
Estimated reading time: 6 minutes
Having released last week, Minecraft Dungeons is the latest in the
Minecraft universe to hit video game platforms from the consoles to
the PC. Shunned, thrown out and left to wander alone, a now powerful
Illiger is taking revenge on everyone in the land and if they won't
submit, they die. Picking up your weapon as the hero that you are,
it's up to you and possibly three others to slay monsters, gain
experience points, and stop the evil rampaging through the lands.
One thing right from the get go that I appreciated was that you
didn’t have to be a big or avid Minecraft fan to enjoy Minecraft
Dungeons. Having only dabbled with it in version… 0.3? Sometime
back in 2012 at any rate, there’s a lot of the lore and the
currently in place elements that I wouldn’t be able to tell you
where they came from. That said, the story gives you enough to follow
along and enjoy yourself even if you’re not quite sure where
certain things are coming from, or what an “Illiger” really is.
Thankfully if you don’t know, you’re sure to have friends close
by or the internet to find out!
Diving into the gameplay, Minecraft Dungeons is a pretty standard, if
not at times lighter, Dungeon Crawler. It follows a lot of the laid
out formulas to the point of even perhaps too much as it even
followed the path of features that some of us could pass upon such as
never ending final dungeons that are almost obnoxiously long while
adding no real flavour for it.
Starting off with a brief tutorial to show you what all of the
controls do, you’re soon left to your own devices with the new and
shiny gear that you’ll be picking up as you go. Drops from
monsters, chests, chests… on pigs? Question mark? Will come in two
main categories. Your core equipment and your artifacts. Core
equipment is pretty basic with your melee weapon, your ranged weapon
and your armor. Each of these is pretty self explanatory however
there is a nice variety of gear to be found in order to use with some
of my preferred ones being found much later. That is either because
of the challenge rating or because of my luck. I’m seriously unsure
on that front.
Your weapons will be a major deciding factor on how you want to
proceed with crashing into the hordes of enemies that will eventually
be coming at you. It was a little slow at first but it ramps up
nicely. Swords, twin daggers, axes, pick axes, glaives, claymores,
maces all offer up different attack speeds, knockbacks and attack
radius giving you an idea of how you should be moving. If things get
a bit too dicey, you can dodge roll out of the way but being more of
a one time use, it should be kept for emergencies. Thankfully to
smooth this out you have artifacts and some of them even let you
dodge. Much less summon llamas.
Coming in two flavors. Artifacts either need to cooldown after being
used, like summoning aid or dodging, while others like healing
yourself and your allies (including summoned help) require gathering
souls. Up to three of these can be equipped at a time and there’s
no restrictions on what you want to try using with what. Summon a
Wolf and a Llama? Done. Summon a wolf, keep a heal on hand for it and
you (you do have a cooldown potion by default) and a giant possible
beam of death? Also done. The choice of yours and with other things
such as a firework for a large ranged area of effect attack? There
are a ton of choices for strategy.
Unfortunately it’s not all sunshine and rainbows while fighting
against the hordes of undead and the minions of the Arch Illeger.
Overall the difficulty scales well enough and on most stages you can
even make it harder in order to get more experience points and level
up. Doing so means that you may have to play a bit smarter because
the enemies are both tougher and stronger than you, but that part is
alright. Where things really don’t work and where Minecraft
Dungeons falls into that having followed the formula a bit too well
is with it’s ranged enemies. They are simply at all times more
powerful and generally in a large crowd taking you from Hero to Zero
is about a second flat. Adding that you can’t infinitely dodge? It
gets brutal especially in the last few stages which does start to
suck the fun out of it.
In a way, this can fortunately be leveraged in that Minecraft
Dungeons is not a really long game. At least not in the sense of your
initial run through the campaign being 4-6 hours while maybe having
redone a stage or two on a harder challenge rating for better loot
and exp. Things like overly lengthening stages and the artificial
increase in difficulty aren’t as bad as they otherwise could have
been because of this. Where things do get better, but you do have to
pay attention to the enemy archers, is that once you’re done the
first difficulty, another unlocks and even the first stages may tell
you that you’re below the power level required. Does that stop you?
Nope! It just makes it more exciting to see if you can actually
survive.
So overall, while Minecraft Dungeons plays it rather safe with the
Dungeon Crawling style, it’s fun to play either on your own or with
friends. With the current state of affairs, #playapartogether and
COVID-19, it is nice that there are both a local and online
multiplayer so that families in the same house can play off of one
console while friends can just easily add each together to go hacking
& slashing against the evil hordes that threaten the land. With
more content coming soon as showcased on the world map, I’m
interested in seeing what comes next.
Score: 7.75 / 10
