You’re busy exploring a cave, minding your own business and mining away before three energetic god-like beings pluck you from the underground to fight in a war against the invading Piglins. I didn’t sign up for this, but it’s at least something to do while the pork chops cook. The signature creativity 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Minecraft players are known for is why they picked you—you have the imagination needed to lead this new world to victory. It’s a shame then that 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Minecraft Legends doesn’t let you do much with it.
Like 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Minecraft Dungeons, in Legends you play the part of a silent hero thrust into a new world to save its defenceless villagers. Only this time, you have an army at your beck and call, riding on horseback (or tiger-back and parrot-back) as y𓂃ou lead the charge against enemy forts in a bid to destroy their Nether portals. You gather resources, build spawners to summon your soldiers, and craft ramps to reach otherwise inaccessible spots, mixing Minecraft’s core gameplay loop with signature RTS elements. Rinse and repeat until every Nether portal is destroyed, all three Piglin warlords are dead, and the world is saved. Simple enough, eh?
One of the biggest problems with strategy games is how overwhelming they are for newcomers. You’re normally bombarded with different unit types, essential buildings, countless resources, and other stat-heavy, jargon-ridden mechanics that require you to read walls of text and play for dozens of hours to grasp. It was the biggest barrier I faced when getting into the genre when I first played 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:StarCraft 2, but Mღinecraft Legends𒈔 throws all of that out the window.
If you know Minecraft, or any survival game, Legends is easy. Wood and stone are your starting materials and you get them by chopping down trees and mining rocks which are everywhere. It's that simple to get going, which is something the genre has sorely needed for years. Rather than replacing materials with better ones as you progress, wood and stone are vital to the end, with every build relying on them to some degree, and since they’re🔯 so easy to find, you’ll never get bogged down hunting for complex materials in hard-to-reach places. One of the biggest problems strategy games have for onboarding new players is how quickly they b༺ecome a confusing spreadsheet of intricate details, and by streamlining the crafting process, Minecraft Legends ensures that it never falls into that trap. By the end of an entire campaign, you only have one toolbar of materials, not a codex full.
The downside is that after the six-hour campaign when you’ve mastered everything, there’s nowhere else to go. All the forts are destroyed, you won’t have anything new to try in PvP, and the monthly mode has everything you’ve used a dozen times already. You can’t take the game further since the endgame is an empty world at peace, which ironically misses why so𝓡 many people stick with strategy and surviva🍷l games—because they’re endless sandboxes even beyond their story modes. Beating 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:the Ender Dragon is how you 'win' Minecraft, but there's so much left to do after. In Legends, maybe you can rid the world of Netherrack or build more fortifications, but to what end? There are no fights to be had and nothing to earn, making it a shallow experience where the only solution is to start over or venture into PvP to use the same limited toolse💫t over and over again.
Even if the world still had battles left for us to fight after we beat back the horde, attacking Piglin forts gets dull and repetitive fast. You can only approach them in one major way—build ramps, send in troops, retreat, get more troops, go back up the ramps, and send in those new troops. You do this over and over again until you reach the Nether portal and close it. Villages offer plenty of variable defences that can be built in different ways, synergising with each other and your troops to keep things fresh. Attacking forts is more limited since you can’t build on Netherrack unless you cure it, but even then, it’s usually not worth the hassle since it’s easier to send ten creepers to blow themselves up to tear down the walls. Like the ꦓgame, I’ll quickly side-step the ethics of using them as soldiers.
The mundane nature of leading an attack is only made worse by how finicky placing ramps can be. They stretch and contort to wrap around the environment, rather than being placed block-by-block, but this can often send the camera flying in all different directions if it happens to hit something it doesn’t like. Often, I’d get shoved off a ledge for trying to place a ramp since the camera just wasn’t having it. Even then, the ramps are only made of wood whi🔴ch can somehow withstand lava—a missed opportunity to utilise other resources for different scenarios, as Minecraft itself does so we꧟ll.
It’s a wider symptom of how limited the options are in Legends. On one hand, it tries to emulate Minecraft’s creative freedom, but on the other, it wants to appeal to strategy newcomers by making the genre more intuitive and accessible than ever before. It succeeds at its second goal, but that means it’s incredibly simplistic since there’s so little to unlock and play with. After a few hours, you’ll have exhausted most of what the game has to offer, learning the ins and outs of each tool until you crack a meta that makes the little left redundant. I’m over 2,000 hours deep in Minecraft and still learning new things, but💜 after six hours in Legends, I was already tired of using the same walls and towers in and out.
Longevity will no doubt come from DLC, much as with Dungeons, but that ultimately leaves Minecraft Legends feeling like an incomplete experience. There are so few schematics and troop types to work with, keeping things from getting too overwhelming for those new to the genre, but leaving little else for those hoping to enjoy a new strategy game. And if you come to it hoping to find Minecraft’s signature sandbox feel, you’ll also be sorely disappointed, as the well quickly ru💧ns dry.
3.5/5, reviews on Xbox Series X. Review code was provided by the publisher.
Minecraft Legends brings together the popular sandbox game and the action-strategy genre. It sees you explore, build, and battle the dastardly Piglins - who are determined to corrupt the Overworld. Available on a host of consoles, you'll need to unite your allies and stop this wicked plan.
