Minecraft Legends is a real-time strategy game that seeks to blend the world and characters of the original Minecraft with action elements. While this idea sounds great, the game doesn’t quite deliver on the possibilities it presents. The simple action elements detract from the more tantalizing strategy side of the game. However, outside of the story-driven campaign, there are good ideas that keep the game from becoming an absolute slog.
In the story campaign, you play as a Minecraft character transported back to an older version of the Overworld. The Piglins, who are constructing portals across the land and building machines that make everything more like the Nether, are attacking simple villagers and animals. Foresight, Action, and Knowledge call on you and your building smarts to construct defenses, Golem soldiers, and war machines to slaughter the invading forces. The game highlights the absurd elements of Minecraft, allowing you to build giant redstone-powered cannons or construct ludicrously giant wooden bridges.
However, the game simplifies its real-time strategy elements too much for that side of the game to be fun. The result is a hodgepodge of Minecraft creatures beating the snot out of each other in a jumbled mess, which you can join in on with your trusty sword. The game also doesn’t allow you to build on the land corrupted by the Nether, meaning most of every battle is spent running back and forth between the actual fray and greener pastures where you’ve set up the spawners for your troops.
The game gently forces you to contend with that tedium, however. Your troops are brainless without you, and if they finish destroying an enemy structure or killing all the enemies in an area, they’ll sit there and wait for you to direct them again. To keep the battle in your favor, you have to regularly get into the mix and tell your soldiers to go here, and now there, and now over here. Admittedly, this is how most real-time strategy games work, but the big difference with Minecraft Legends is that you aren’t quickly jumping around the battlefield.
The world is colorful and vibrant, with Minecraft’s recognizable blocks stacked into gorgeous vistas, precarious canyons, murky swamps, and majestic forests. Unlike Minecraft, you don’t have to mine individual blocks to gather their contents. Instead, you have a select amount of tiny helpers you can direct to collect all the available resources in a given space and automatically add them to your inventory. This is especially helpful in combat situations when you’re running low on resources, as you can run out to a nearby forest or cliff face and command your
Summary
Minecraft Legends attempts to merge the beloved sandbox game with real-time strategy elements, but ultimately falls short. While the game has charming elements, like the absurd combat and resource-gathering mechanics, the simplified strategy gameplay feels tedious and lacks depth. The drop-in/drop-out co-op multiplayer and Lost Legends challenges add some fun, but ultimately the game doesn’t build beyond its simple beginnings to address its shortcomings.
