Minecraft Legends review – a bridge mostly far enough

Minecraft Legends review: I only thought Minecraft, of all the franchises, would attempt to enter the action-RPS market once we reviewed Minecraft Legends. It’s barely fashionable. Even though its simplicity won’t do much to win over connoisseurs looking for either the “action” or “RTS” components to excel, Minecraft Legends does a solid job of extending the IP into new territory after appearing as both an episodic narrative adventure (Minecraft Story Mode) and an action role-playing game (Minecraft Dungeons).

Is Minecraft Legends good yet?

Thus, the gameplay in Minecraft Legends is often rather enjoyable. Ordering your soldiers has a certain grace, melee combat is simple but not mindless, and your character’s attributes are virtually always affected by the stuff you gather.

Like other spinoffs, Minecraft Legends does not try to play like its inspiration. The narrative begins with a trio of otherworldly creatures entrusted with rescuing a country from invasion. You get to pick your hero’s appearance at the beginning of the game. There is no one to stop the Piglins, a horde of pig creatures from The Nether in Minecraft, from invading. You are responsible for amassing resources, advancing the battle to their bases, and destroying their portals.

Cutscenes often include some narrative, although the action will only abruptly stop for a short chat or efforts at character development. Though most of the characters in the narrative segments never talk, they are endearing and full of personality. The voxel presentation of the game also looks excellent, even though there are no advanced options and just high-quality defaults to choose from. Even at 1440p, Minecraft Legends looked great, although it would benefit from having anti-aliasing enabled by your GPU’s settings.

In Minecraft Legends, the player character always rides a horse (or a cat, depending on your preference). It can slash its sword by holding down or pressing the attack button. However, that’s all you can do with your fighting skills. It’s strange because only mobs may harm buildings, which I find objectionable, and you don’t gain any new skills. Additionally, foes’ reactions to damage are not significant. You can only move to that amount when you jump and run. The element of “action” seems a little sparse.

Fortunately, the “RTS” components and other systems provide more useful information. Building little gadgets allows you to call forth certain hordes one at a time. It may become repetitive to summon many hundred at once since you can only call out one at a time and must hold the button until it appears. Any troops within a certain radius may be called to follow you by pressing a button, but not all can be called immediately.

Regarding controlling them, you may either send them racing forward in the typical third-person experience, or you can switch to Banner Mode, which gives you an aerial perspective. This lets you direct your mobs to assault a structure or enemy at a certain place by telling them to go there or concentrate on it. Though you can’t send them ahead based on their particular class, you may opt to have all your mobs converge on one spot at once or divide them according to their designations, such as the melee and ranged fighters stated before.

Mobs in Minecraft Legends come in seven varieties, ranging from melee to ranged and support. You begin the game with simply two golem kinds that enemies easily defeat. Still, you’ll soon be able to summon skeletons, zombies, creepers, and a few more specialized golem types.

The first ranged, and the skeletons and zombies much outclass melee golems, but they also need more rare materials. There are two methods to get resources. The first is the more direct one, where you go into a mining mode and dispatch creatures known as allays to search a region for certain materials.

These are the same animals that create your structures, including the ones that produce mobs. If you’ve played “proper” Minecraft, you’ll laugh at this; as Will discovered during his hands-on peek at GDC, it’s entertaining to order allays to construct buildings you may have constructed in the main game yourself with far more work. Scaling up is exciting, especially if you’ve worked hard at the personal level.

The landscape in Minecraft Legends depends on the difficulty level you have chosen when you first launch the game; greater difficulties feature bigger areas and more significant opponent bases.

The planets are rather spacious and open, with various enemy bases, towns, friendly monster settlements, and areas of interest. If you have enough resources, you may summon enormous golems or gather unique structures you can use to set up on the battlefield.

Each hamlet has a chest that will offer you access to certain resources shown on the game map, and you may move between them quickly. They always contain an abundance of stone and wood, along with lapis, which is required to spawn creatures.

In general, there are two types of gameplay: offensive and defensive. You have to defend at night. Piglins usually attack villages and settlements at night. Thus, it’s said that you should defend them, even if, in my experience, it doesn’t matter if their main structure is destroyed.

Attacking Piglin bases is where the real action occurs. There are three factions of Piglin in each globe, and you will summon a monster if you have destroyed every base in that faction. Your ultimate aim is to destroy all three factions and bosses to summon the last monster and eradicate the Piglin plague from the globe.

Some factions have bases on cliffs, while others may have walls and iron gates supporting their positions. Various constructions at these outposts may fire you from a distance, spawn foes, or change the terrain into unbuildable Netherrock.

To eliminate their traces from the region, you should utilize your structures or mobs to demolish them and ultimately crush the Piglin Nether Portal. Of course, there are problems.

My main issue with Minecraft Legends is that your mobs need to be fully capable of following you. Some bases are perched on cliffs, so you must construct ramps to get to them. Even with a mouse, this is uncomfortable because of how sensitive it is by default.

Worse yet, crowds often need help to traverse these ramps safely. You will need to construct ramps to bridge the lava moats that encircle certain bases because your monsters will fall in. But the cliffs are terrible. I often saw my mobs collapsing while hitting foes and structures that were too near to edges and when attempting to traverse ramps.

Fortunately, every spawn structure allows you to recall every monster you summoned. Since I would usually be down several hundred troops by the time I reached the top of the previously described elevated bases, I usually built one of them there. It doesn’t help that your mobs aren’t usually focused enough on what they’re following you to assault until they get explicit instructions.

The RTS features in Minecraft Legends work well, but it’s obvious that console players’ comfort was the main priority. Therefore, the need for more accuracy in your controls may become annoying.

The game’s tutorial holds your hand somewhat gently, but I was astonished at how little effort was made to explain several crucial features. All enemy bases are constructed on impure land that is unsuitable for construction.

To do this, you’ll need to demolish Netherrock generators and then utilize a machine that purges the region needing an update—but you won’t know that until you read all of the upgrade information). You may get upgrades by positioning structures at certain locations on the Well, which serves as the player’s main base.

However, by the time the game ends, there won’t be enough room to construct them all. The game also poorly describes how to get the primary resources required to obtain these upgrades.

Buildings may be erected once the contaminated ground has been cleared. A mason can turn any wooden building, even regular towers, into stone. You can also construct a cannon to fire potshots at opposing structures, which is useful. You’ll need to deploy these structures to protect attacked towns and communities effectively.

Dropping what you do every night to battle the invaders becomes very tiresome, particularly since enemy raids in later games may take up to eight minutes. However, the lesser levels are fairly forgiving; you can often get by without creating anything and aim your mobs at the opponent. This at least modifies the gameplay.

I like the Minecraft Legends campaign overall. Depending on the difficulty level chosen, it should take anywhere from ten to twenty hours (but even younger children may complete the lowest, which is made much simpler by the game’s regenerative life mechanism).

In addition, there is a multiplayer option where players try to demolish one other’s bases. This adds a good amount of length and moves at a noticeably different speed from the main campaign.

You will have to start again since after you win the game, there won’t be any more opponents in that file. A wide range of players will likely find something to love in the game despite the action combat’s lackluster nature and the RTS aspects’ lackluster depth (which includes the tedious task of persuading all surrounding minions to follow you after sending them out). as long as they don’t cross bridges with their crowds of followers.

Curious? April 18 is the release date for Minecraft Legends, which will be available on Game Pass at that time. Check out the system requirements to ensure your computer can run Minecraft Legends.

Here’s what we know about the game’s compatibility with Steam Deck. See what Minecraft Legends multiplayer offers. If you’re looking for something more than a single-player adventure, gather some allies for combat.