SPOILER-FREE REVIEW
A streamlined, mostly kid-friendly dungeon crawler with a threadbare story, Minecraft Dungeons makes good use of its franchise’s signature aesthetic but does little else.
I think Minecraft is best defined by two essential qualities: a sense of discovery and a sense of freedom, whether it be the freedom to build almost anything you want, or the freedom to make your own adventure through organic roleplay. Over the years, we’ve seen people create extraordinary builds and gripping adventure tales. The answer to the question of whether you can have a Minecraft game without those qualities is, as Minecraft Dungeons proves, not necessarily a no. An excellent genre-breaking dungeon crawler set in the Minecraft universe could one day be made, but Dungeons, a streamlined adventure that plays it far too safe, and only looks and sounds like Minecraft, is not that game. Truth be told, it’s something of a disappointment that offers the occasional pleasant surprise.
What Dungeons lacks is that vital flair; Minecraft won people over with uniqueness of visual style and gameplay spirit, whereas Dungeons offers the former but not the latter. That’s not to say that all games under this IP should be exactly like Minecraft, but they should at the very least try to add some of what makes it special to their own genres. Aside from its looks, Dungeons is disappointingly safe: a clone of Diablo whose only distinguishing features are a skin and the simplification, if not outright removal, of the many systems that give it tactical depth and the all-important ability to retain a player’s attention. Minecraft clearly keeps it; the existence of a server shared between the three of us readily attests to that, but we were never that invested in returning to Dungeons.
Let’s start with the good: it looks terrific. Its beautifully rendered levels perfectly capture the eccentric blocky world of its parent IP, with rich and full-bodied colour and stunning lighting. The pixelated lava in its ancient underground chasms spits and pops while its twilight forests, drenched in deep teal and green, are punctuated only by clusters of glowing gold mushrooms that chime when you draw close to them. Its abandoned villages are burnished in oranges and golds, house signs swaying gently in the breeze, while the pools in a desert temple contain a water with an almost otherworldly glow. Its characters fight off a swarm of Minecraft mobs: skeletons, creepers and the like, whose familiarity makes them wonderfully endearing. The soundtrack and effects complement this sense of authenticity; pulling levers and opening chests sound exactly the same as they do in Minecraft, while the sound of a creeper priming itself to explode is sure to provoke that sudden rush of fear.
The trouble is that this is all a façade, albeit an artful and well-designed one. Dungeons was designed with the ethos of making the traditional dungeon crawler game more accessible, especially for kids and casual gamers, and so it lacks the tactical depth and the complex interwoven set of systems that so commonly define games of this genre. When you first start the game, you’re prompted to choose from a number of different skins for your character, who can then make use of any weapon, armour or special artefact item in the game. There’s no class system and no character-based abilities. Instead, levelling up gives enchantment points, which allow the player to choose and improve on a variety of different abilities for their gear, like letting your sword summon the occasional bolt of lightning or giving your armour the ability to drop food when you use a health potion.
Of course, the traditional structure of people playing different classes and playing co-op in well-balanced parties goes directly against Mojang’s intention of making a simple game, but it seems like the developers forgot that removing the class system also removes useful guard rails. Throughout the game, I picked up new, more powerful weapons as loot, and to keep pace with the game, I had to constantly swap between playstyles. I wanted to play as an archer, but I had to play as a swordsman once I picked up a sword because its stats were better. Then the game dropped dual daggers, I ditched the sword and the cycle repeated itself. That I didn’t have control over my own playstyle was infuriating to say the least.
Of course, you could grind, but the trouble with that is you simply don’t care enough about the game to do that. There’s no motivation to do so since the minimal amount of effort required has gone into the narrative, and the total lack of interest in telling an interesting story is blatantly obvious from the get-go. The main narrative is practically skeletal and to be honest, after the first few missions, I stopped paying any attention to it and came out of the game feeling like I hadn’t missed anything at all. Even your kids, the clear target audience for this game, might run into trouble with the game’s difficulty curve. It’s a rollercoaster, with spikes and drops in difficulty between levels and even occasionally between stages of the same level. Get wiped out four times and you’re kicked back to your base camp and forced to trudge all the way back to get to where you were before. Worse, Dungeons is missing some of the most basic features. There’s no crafting system, a harsh irony since this game is apparently part of the Minecraft IP, while your base camp and all two of its merchants make for one of the emptiest hubs in the history of the medium. There isn’t even a system to trade gear with your friends, so you can’t alleviate that niggling issue of having to rotate your playstyle every mission that way.
Neither mining nor crafting seem to feature in Dungeons . Over my seven-hour playthrough, I never felt compelled to backtrack, to move forward or to replay the game at all. While I don’t doubt that one day Mojang could make a proper dungeon crawler set in the Minecraft universe, this isn’t it. It looks and sounds the part, but on closer inspection, it’s clearly a half-baked effort. Think about how it feels when you’re at the crafting table, slotting in materials only to find that you’ve gotten the recipe wrong and your materials haven’t been combined into something new. That’s what it feels like to play this game.
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