I’m going to be upfront with you nice folks, my initial takes on Minecraft Dungeons were wrong. Personally, my experience with Minecraft begins and ends with the main title. I was even a late adopter, finally giving the game a try when I moved to the Xbox One (and I was a year behind on that). I am aware that there are end game goals to fulfill, a final boss, all that. But my times with Minecraft often involve surviving halfway through the first night, then switching to Creative Mode and building a righteous glass house in a forest biome. I like the farting around aspects more than anything.
I know many are like me, many more like to create serious rigid goals for themselves and craft insanely complex machines or incredible works of art. But rarely have I heard of folks, even those that enjoy the thrill of playing survival mode, thirsting just for the combat elements, but more simplified. As I was playing Minecraft Dungeons, an isometric style hack-and-slash dungeon crawler for up to four players, I could only wonder one thing:
Who is this game for?
If you are a fan of even the more combat-oriented side of Minecraft, you will find very little outside of the setting and art style in common with the original survival and crafting focused title. My first and biggest disappointment was in the fact that nothing in the environment (save for a few specific money-filled pots) is destructible. If your game takes place in a game world where destruction is the norm and every square is prone to smashing, then your title better let me break crates or something. Even Diablo 3 has the decency to let you smash fences and pillars, a Minecraft hack-and-slash could at least give us that! But I digress, besides wanton destruction, Dungeons also features no crafting, building, or survival elements of any kind, besides surviving mobs of enemies. This title is a Minecraft game in name only. But that isn’t necessarily a bad thing.
It certainly was weird at first, as I floundered to understand why this needed to be a Minecraft title. Was it supposed to draw fans of the original game? Was it supposed to draw in dungeon crawler fans to coax them into getting curious about the original game? In the end, it came down to simply being how Minecraft’s developer -Mojang Studios- wanted to branch out. Really, why not make Minecraft a franchise? It is certainly distinct. I had initially overlooked Minecraft Story Mode -an adventure title by the now-defunct Telltale Games- because it again seemed like something for no one in particular, but the idea was to give the fantastic writers at Telltale a blank slate with which to work. What better way to build a lore from scratch than with a title whose fundamental philosophy is allowing freedom to create. That is the fundamental part of Minecraft that has been used to forge the basis for Dungeons, freedom to make any kind of game within the context they’ve already set up. And in order to reach larger audiences, they have tried to make something accessible for folks of any level (including no level) of experience with Minecraft and dungeon crawlers both.
I am a huge fan of dungeon crawlers, hack-and-slash, and looter type games. Fundamentally, I enjoy inventory management (which is odd considering I’m an absolute chaotic mess in my actual life), so I rarely find myself overwhelmed or bothered by the mechanic. I also really enjoy deep character creation and development through stats and the like, so again, menus and pouring over class differences are not a problem. But it absolutely can be a block for keeping first-timers from jumping in. Minecraft Dungeons sets out to streamline and bring simplicity to management of all kinds.
Instead of tying the player down to classes, every weapon and armor type is usable by every player. Leveling up rewards the player with “enchantment points” which can be slotted into weapons and armor to give them different stat bonuses or effects to combat actions. There are also special items, like a firework that can be shot at mobs to explode, or a piece of meat that calls forth a wolf to aid the player, to add to combat tactics. Different weapon types do have different combat moves, but each weapon type can have very different available enchantments, so comparing loot is still a thing, but it isn’t overwhelming. If you find you like a different weapon, you can dismantle your previous one and regain all of your enchantment points invested. Experimentation is not punished.
On the other hand, the actual hacking-and slashing bits are simplistic to a fault. It boils down to moving through mostly narrow maps while hitting one button to attack, another to shoot the bow, and one for each of the three special items on your bar. The enemies are mostly zombies, with different varieties of long-range dudes and bosses showing up to round out each level. This is honestly the same thing that could be said about Diablo for example, but the difference is in the weight of those basic combat actions. When you defeat an enemy in Minecraft Dungeons, they simply fall over and kind of just fade away, there is the aforementioned lack of destructible environments, and when you add in the purposeful simplicity of Minecraft’s art style, combat really lacks any level of “oomph.” I hate to put my feelings so reductively, but it feels fake. And as absurd a criticism as that is, I find I’m at a loss for better words. “A lack of weight to the actions in the world,” is as eloquent as you’ll get out of me. But it did factor into how bored I became with this title, despite its core elements being very much my jam.
That’s not to say it’s an easy or lazy title. The team really put the work in to make Minecraft Dungeons appeal to folks who want a more difficult experience. You can crank up the difficulty before each map, and it will reward you with more experience and better loot. In a time when turning up the difficulty in a lot of games simply means “enemies take no damage, you take it all,” this title does a good job of not just making enemies into pure damage sponges. There is a degree of that, but mostly the difficulty comes from more frequent mobs, populated with more advanced enemies, causing you to rely on your tools and timing your dodge rolls properly. The procedural nature of the maps and spawns make everything a surprise, which can factor into a bigger challenge, but I personally think hinders player ability to plan ahead tactically. Either way, you can’t say they didn’t try to appeal to a large range of dungeon crawler fans.
However, the lackluster nature of the combat weight really became a factor for me. It bored me a little too much which caused me to be a bit detached, so when I did turn up the difficulty I found myself more annoyed than needing to conquer the challenge. As a seasoned player of all types of hack-and-slash titles, I found Minecraft Dungeons didn’t quite do enough to stick with me. That being said, a first time player of the genre might find it to be exactly the right blend of looting and skill management to be a solid introduction, especially with its online and couch co-op for learning together. It can offer enough difficulty to drive fans of a challenge, but the lackluster feel of the combat might turn some folks off. Minecraft Dungeons is available on the Xbox and PC Game Pass, so it’s certainly worth giving a try for subscribers. It’s also available for the PS4, Switch, Xbox, and PC for only $19.99 for the base game, so it’s not breaking the bank (or fences) for anyone.