Minecraft Dungeons Review
No Calculator Required
A Game for basically everyone who doesn’t love the intense grind and spreadsheets of most other action RPGs. Minecraft Dungeons brings the blocky pixelated art style to the ARPG genre but with a simplified RPG system. No long skill trees with great depths or even classes. Instead, your character is given 3 slots for different artifacts that decide your abilities, along with a slot for a long-ranged weapon, a melee weapon, and armor. Each weapon and armor piece can have anywhere from 1–3 enchantments of a fair variety depending on its level. It is truly that simple.
The game comes with a short campaign that will only take about 3 hours to complete on your first run. But that’s just the start, next you’ll unlock a harder difficulty and you’ll begin to see more artifacts, weapons, and armor sets. But finally, you’ll once you complete that difficulty, you’ll unlock the hardest difficulty which is hard enough to make you wish you had friends to help. The levels of the difficulty will likely require several more attempts and the right balance of healing, damage, and attack damage. The game is in theory very short, but it continues to mix things up by throwing such a vast variety of different artifacts, weapons, and armor at you to try out. The main shortcoming is the long-range weapons. There are crossbows and regular bows. Bows must require you to briefly pause before firing in order for it to deal its max damage while the crossbows require no charge up but a slightly longer delay between shots. They tried to mix it up a bit more by adding explosive arrows or rapid-fire crossbows, but I feel it could still use more variety.
As for the gameplay and overall impressions, Minecraft Dungeons runs smooth as butter with great lighting, great animation, responsive controls. Everything from the sound effects to the particle effects are amazing and suits the game perfectly. The game didn’t do too much to change the sounds you’d expect from the Minecraft world, but not trying to solely rely on preexisting sounds either.
Next, is the enemies. Oddly enough the typical cast of mobs from regular Minecraft works perfectly for an ARPG. They did change spiders though to shoot webs at you to pin you in place and they added more enemies that are more deadly and have more armor. The original enemies from the game are good but they aren’t enough to keep an ARPG interesting and force the player to change their playstyle often enough. The illagers from Minecraft have become the main enemies in Minecraft Dungeons while Creepers, Skeletons, and Spiders are the weaker enemies that act more like a warm-up. The other Minecraft worlds and enemies will likely make their debut in the upcoming DLC.
To wrap this up, I want to talk about how beautiful the game looks. I mentioned that the lighting is nice but damn. The environments look so nice and the color palette is pleasing to the eye and even though the lighting is pre-baked, it looks a pretty as a game with Raytracing.
Anyway, to wrap this up, the game seriously lacks content and depth but it makes it perfect for casual play or for those new to the genre. It is an amazing foundation for what could be an amazing game to come. As of right now, it’s a good thing that the game is only $26 CDN. It is worth the price, and luckily the DLC is also cheap. Just maybe this game will be good and continue down a path of greatness if they make more content.
