I got to play Minecraft Legends EARLY

I was invited to play Minecraft Legends early. Now while I play the B-roll footage of me traveling to London, let me start of by saying this isn’t sponsored in any way. I just got an early peek at the new game: Minecraft Legends. My goal here is to do two very important things.

One, explain what this game is and two, give you some honest opinions of what I thought when I played it. So, I travelled to London and I met up with Martyn and Timmy and a few other creators including Oli. It was in this really cool little cellar

Where they’d set up a whole bunch of gaming PCs and they showed us a little about the game. When I attended this event I had no idea what Minecraft Legends was or what genre it was, it looked completely alien to me. If you feel the same way, hopefully I can explain

How this game works and what it is. There are two ways to play. First is the campaign and the second is PvP. Let’s start with the campaign because that’s where I believe everyone should just to learn the mechanics of the game play. It does start with quite a sizable five minute animation.

The quality is really good and it helps provide context to the rest of the game. So I’m going to play that animation but feel free to skip ahead if you wanna just get straight into the game play. So to summarise for those of you that skipped ahead, in this alternate Minecraft universe

The piglins are invading and taking over and these astral entities of some kind have pulled you from your normal Minecraft world to come and help them. And of course I love the fact that the universal symbol for yes was just crouching a few times, I love that. It was a nice nod to

Real Minecraft knowledge on the developer’s part. And then they’ve hopped in and then now being taught by these astral beings how to play the game. So this is where we get dropped into the tutorial. So the next animation cutscene that plays is probably more important to watch

As it gives you a lot more context to the actual game play. So the first mechanic that you learn is how to gather resources which is a base mechanic of the entire game and you basically command allays to do that for you and it’s quite satisfying to watch.

Then it teaches you how to construct some basic things like staircases. I usually find tutorials a little bit laborious and usually I can just hop into a game and work it out as I go. I think in this game playing the tutorial is an absolute must and the astral beings

Are pretty playful and fun and make it easy to learn the game. The next thing that you learn is how to spawn mobs with spawners and you command your yellow allays to build some bits for you and then you can spawn them using your resources.

Once you’ve got that you then use your banner to command them. Now these little fellows are your army and they are used to attack enemy structures and enemy mobs which we do with the piglins. And when you do that, you get even more resources. Those are the base mechanics of the game.

Collect resources, spawn mobs, destroy piglins. Then it throws you straight into the overworld. In the campaign you can choose to explore but of course we just followed our instructions and we went to help a village that was being attacked by piglins and it taught us a few new mechanics.

Now I played the campaign for about 30 minutes from this point and I’m gonna try to really condense it down. Obviously this is a bit information overload. The campaign introduced more mechanics. Predominantly it taught us how to build more structures and defensive turrets and walls and things of that kind of nature.

Now some of you may still not quite know what this game is. Well, it describes itself as an action strategy game. Well, what does that mean? Well, my experience has led me to describe it as a melting pot of different strategy genres. So it takes elements of tower defense,

Of arena battle ground games and of course real time strategies which is what it’s most closely compared to. But the truth is, it’s kind of a bit of everything and it has its own unique identity. It has elements of exploration, base building and PvE and I really hope further in the campaign

It really delves deep into a story. But where this game really, really shines is its PvP. I’ve said at the start of this video I’m going to be giving you my honest opinions and after I’ve finished this part of the visit and this part of the campaign, we’d played for about 40 minutes,

I was feeling a little bit mild about the game. Yes, I’d learned the mechanics but I hadn’t really felt invested at this point. It’s worth saying at this point that there are two massive, obvious pluses to this game. One, it’s really got some incredible visuals and ambiance and two,

The music and sound effects are really top notch. Both of those combined create a really, really nice unique Minecraft experience. However, they then dropped us in the deep end in a 4v4 PvP match. Now it’s worth mentioning right now before we even start that all eight of us

Did not know how to play this game before starting. We had very basic knowledge all at the same level so it should in theory have been pretty evenly matched. The game went on for about an hour so there’s no way I can cover the whole thing

But what I can do is show some gameplay and talk about my experience and give some opinions. I’m also going to link to Pixlriffs’s video who I think did a much better explanation than I did of explaining more of the mechanics of the game. We spent the start of this match

Doing what we knew how to do which is gather resources and get some basic structures. We also got our bearings on the map. Now all four of us naturally fell into some roles. For example, Pixlriffs stayed at the base and worked on the infrastructure, defenses and the building side of thing

And he really rocked the technology tree. As a result, I really didn’t learn an awful lot about it because I fell into the role of going on the offensive. I made it my job, along with Oli, to go and disrupt and see if we could attack their tower

And win the game as that is the objective of the game. False went into the very vitally important resource gathering role. Attacking the piglin village to get prismarine. Now prismarine is one of the various resources that’s required to develop your base. It sounds like an awful lot of complication

But after a little while we really got into the swing of things. Now here’s where the opinion piece comes in. I really loved this game. I am a personal fan of real time strategy games, tower defenses et cetera. So this falls in my wheelhouse. I think the Venn diagram

Of people who enjoy Minecraft and like RTSs is maybe a little on the small side but Minecraft Legends goes straight in the middle of that Venn diagram. That’s not to say that the PvP wasn’t without criticisms. My main issue that I had was that I didn’t know how to play the game

And that’s no fault of anyone’s. However, some of the controls and the UIs were not particularly intuitive. And that was a struggle that I had even when I had learned how to do things. Some of the more advance controls were very, very difficult to get the hang of.

So maybe it’s just the case of learning how to do things or perhaps there was a better way of implementing it. So our game went on and Oli and I wanted to really try and just brute force our way in with low level units. We created lots of these little cobble golems

That wanted to just bash through the walls and get to the towers but we were thwarted again and again and again and just throwing ourselves at their defenses wasn’t working. In the meantime, Pixlriffs and False were working on getting our technology tree up there so that we could develop better units which

Is vital to getting into their defenses. My team naturally fell into some roles. Pix was doing the infrastructure and False was doing the important job of taking down piglins to get some resources for Pix to be able to develop the infrastructure. And because Pix had invested so much in the right technology,

I was then able to summon in much higher level units. So now I have creepers and skeletons. The idea being that I can now send creepers in to just go in and blow up their base. As simple as that. But as you can see, as I’m sending in the creepers,

I’m kind of just getting whaled on by the opponent’s team. So it was another change of tactic for our team. We had learned that you can create TNT cannons. So naturally, that was my one and only priority. And again, thanks to False and Pix I was able to make a forward base

To try and do it. Now there was some definite control issues here. I absolutely whiffed this first shot and had to sit there and watch it just fire a TNT into nothing which was so devastating for my moral because we had spend so long gathering the resources for this machine

And then they obviously discovered it and came and tried to attack it. It wasn’t my fault, the controls were a bit weird. The mouse acceleration wasn’t quite working but because I knew that a second time round I managed to actually fire some TNT where it was supposed to be.

I actually did open up a gap in the wall and I naturally ran straight in, took a bunch of fall damage, and I thought I could just rush in but I had no mobs with me so there’s nothing I could really do and died. Again. From this point though things got pretty intense.

They were in our base at this point whittling down the blue tower which is ours. You can see it says “under attack”. And it is going down fairly swiftly at this point. So I had to act fast. So I spawned a bunch of creepers. That hole that I made earlier was still there

And their tower was exposed. So some very quick swift action and some panicky placing and I managed to explode their base right at the last, very last second because they had left it mostly abandoned to secure a very, very last minute victory which I have to tell you was satisfying and really rewarding.

So while we won, it was a game made up entirely of new players so it probably didn’t play out as most games should. However, again here comes opinion time, my immediate reaction is I want to play again! I really enjoyed the PvP aspect of Minecraft Legends.

And of course, I had to just rub it in Tim’s face a little bit. He’s lost. – What? [laughing] But my final thoughts are this: I’m looking forward to seeing what the campaign has to offer beyond what I experienced. It was a little bit slow but also was very early game

And paced to teach rather than to drop you into some sort of exciting battle. The PvP was frustrating in the sense that I didn’t know what I was doing and frustrating to learn all the controls in the heat of battle. However, I had a lot of fun,

I had to adapt and I had to really think outside the box to defeat my opponents. So I want to say thank you to Mojang for inviting me to play the game early. I am going to be playing a little bit more of it

And really try to get to grips with the mechanics. I’d say approach this game with a positive attitude and you will probably surprise yourself with how enjoyable it is. Get a squad together of four players and try and defeat someone online on PvP. I think you’ll have a lot of fun.

So that’s it. Thank you very much for watching, I hope you enjoyed this video and good-bye!