Minecraft Dungeons Review

Minecraft dungeons is a rollercoaster ride of an action rpg giving new players a fairly deep representation of the genre while providing veterans a nice diversion from traditionally grim dark trappings minecraft’s familiar world tools and other elements seamlessly make the transition from the mainline series its suite of enemies is a natural fit

For this type of game and mojong introduces new members of the menagerie to fill out a few missing archetypes unfortunately minecraft dungeons padded out mid game is repetitive even amongst its grind heavy peers the first big drop in this ride had me screaming but it wasn’t from exhilaration

Minecraft’s play how you want to philosophy as the driving force at dungeons when you start you pick a skin for your character but not a class instead dungeons has a more free flowing system one moment i was taking down zombies with a flurry of up close dagger strikes

Only to smack a golem in the forehead with a newly found giant hammer a few minutes later that flexibility is a great goal and i appreciate not being held down by choices i made hours ago the implementation of this freedom isn’t fully successful though in its first few

Hours the power progression comes as quickly as the leveling sure the loot drops aren’t as frequent as you might expect from an arpg but since just about every piece of equipment you find is an upgrade in one way or the other it doesn’t matter after you settle into

The mid game when progress comes at a comparative crawl the cracks are hard to ignore most notably you’re completely at the mercy of probability tables when it’s time to replace your weapons armor or artifacts you can’t upgrade an item’s fundamental level as you outgrow it and there aren’t stores that sell specific pieces

So you can’t craft or customize anything new to fit your desired playstyle this approach severely limits your options because without any foundational class abilities everything your character can do is determined by the items you have equipped no matter how much you want to be a tanky fighter you can’t unless you’re

Lucky enough to have the right equipment at the appropriate level you get these items as rewards for defeating enemies but you also use in-game currency to buy blind box chests from merchants you can buy chests with gear or artifacts but gear encompasses all categories of weapons and armor swords bows armor axes maces

Daggers and more artifacts include every type of spell-like ability from pet summoning to healing this turns every blacksmith visit into a virtual casino and rather than looking forward to what every transaction might bring i started to dread every encounter with the smith getting gear may not adhere to the overall minecraft spirit

But dungeons take on enchanting is interesting when you eventually get a weapon or suit of armor that you like you can add special abilities through enchantments a degree of randomization is at play here with potential enchantments pulled from a large pool but i enjoyed seeing the different possibilities

For instance a burning enchantment sets enemies within melee range ablaze piercing gives arrows the ability to travel through multiple enemies a set of armor can be imbued with a snowball enchantment firing icy projectiles automatically at short intervals to stun enemies better quality gear has a higher chance of having better enchant options

And additional slots those operate on cooldowns and coupled with enchants allow for some basic and satisfying synergies a fireworks arrow lets you fire a special projectile with a damaging blast radius i love this artifact on its own but using it with a bow equipped with a multi shot and

Infinity enchants not only gave me a random chance of firing several of these explosive payloads at once but of knocking an additional one for a bonus follow-up salvo combinations like these are rewarding which makes it even more of a bummer knowing that i’d eventually out level their utility without a reliable way of

Finding replacements levels have defined loot tables so it’s possible to target your desired loot a little but it would be great to have more agency when it comes to gearing up curiously for a game with such a focus on items managing them is a bare bones affair

You can’t mark items as favorites or junk or create gear sets for different purposes say a loadout that focuses on support skills like healing when playing co-op or a pure survivability build for solo play and unfortunately you can’t share loot that you found with other players either loot is targeted for individual players

When you’re grouping together so you don’t have to worry about someone else stealing your gear but the collaborative element of keeping an item so you can give it to your buddy later is sorely missed minecraft dungeons nails the franchise aesthetic with 10 main story levels based on a variety of the mainline

Game’s biomes your adventure begins with a visit to a village in distress before taking you through the autumnal pumpkin pastures the rainy and appropriately named soggy swamp through the desert temple and ultimately an encounter with the evil arch illiter over the course of the roughly five hour story this evil sorcerer swoops in

Several times summoning minions and generally being a pain beating the campaign unlocks a higher adventure difficulty setting with better loot and tougher monsters beat that and you get the apocalypse setting i managed to do it over the course of several marathon sessions but it’s not worth the trouble

The awkward middle period of the game lasts entirely too long that’s when you can see the possibilities that the various enchantments and items have but none of those drops are good enough to live up to that potential i didn’t get any drops with three enchantment slots until the tail end of adventure mode

After playing the same levels over and over again for about a dozen hours every item i picked up was a compromise but not in a fun or gratifying way the difficulty is simply tuned too high to make all but a few items viable it’s fun to have a llama or wolf pet but

They die almost instantly against enchanted foes and it’s better to take on another healing item instead useful sure but boring once the initial novelty of recognizing familiar elements from the minecraft world wears off you’re left with a remarkable sense of deja vu sure the levels are procedurally generated

But barely so i was convinced that something was broken since the variation between playthroughs was so slight i played one level back to back and was proven wrong the main beats of a particular stage are the same session to session with subtle variations in where hallways

May go or whether one section will have a few extra rooms i’m not expecting completely reworked levels but it makes exploration boring that’s inexcusable for a minecraft game and it feels stingy i eventually stopped trying to clear out the map fog before finishing a level because i knew the majority of the

Discoveries would be worthless sure there might be a pot at the end of the hallway with five emeralds inside but when you consider the smith charges upwards of a hundred gems for a chest it’s just not worth the effort i was also puzzled by the overall lack of interactivity within stages i wasn’t

Expecting fully destructible environments or the ability to tunnel my way through the world that’s what actual minecraft is for but the lack of any real interactive elements in the world makes you feel like you’re touring a museum crates barrels and other genre staples are in abundance but your weapons pass harmlessly through them

Even creepers detonate without leaving so much as a scratch on the environment failing to even break nearby pots again i’m not expecting them to leave massive craters around the world but their implementation in dungeons falls completely flat overall i’d say my frustrations with minecraft dungeons are amplified because

I love so much of what it does mojang effectively tapped what makes minecraft minecraft and i marveled over the various nods and references throughout my early sessions which is toss and drink potions like they do in the mainline game making them a priority elimination in larger battles endermen and evokers pop up as

Mid-bosses adding a sense of urgency and danger to the adventure there’s even a treasure goblin analog though it’s a pig with the treasure chest on its back which you can loot after chasing it down it’s a joy to stroll through these worlds at first but playing the same

Handful of levels back to back to back gives way to monotony minecraft dungeons has a solid core and i’d love to see where it goes from here hopefully mojang recognizes the fact that games with grinding don’t have to be as much of a grind it would be great to have some kind of

Way to experience levels in a remix format similar to how diablo 3 has riffs or torchlight and path of exile offer more randomized maps to encourage replays but minecraft dungeon’s current approach is simply replaying the same stuff over again and it just isn’t enough if you like this video review follow us

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