Minecraft Legends Review: Action, adventure and strategy intertwine

Minecraft legends has all the beautiful, blocky graphics and goofy humor you would expect. With pleasure Minecraft Dungeons, legends takes these soothing images into a whole new genre. Instead of freeform mining and building or dungeon crawling, legends puts you on a mighty steed to control an army of allied golems, monsters, and creepers in a strategy/adventure mashup.

The player is recruited as a protector of the overworld. Piglins swarm from the Nether, attacking poor villagers and corrupting the lands around them. The catch is that while I can mow down piglins with my diamond sword, I can’t touch their structures. To stop the Nether from corrupting the overworld, I must find allies to tear down these structures – which requires resources. Luckily the world is ripe for looting, and each village I save rewards me with a big box full of goodies for my efforts.

Image: Mojang Studios, Blackbird Interactive/Xbox Game Studios

The campaign begins with you digging a tunnel only to be recruited through forethought, action, and knowledge. These three extradimensional hosts are said to represent the pillars of play Minecraft, and they take you through several tutorial battles to showcase the game’s clashing genres. They will then give you some tools to fight the Piglin menace. I have a diamond sword, a nice lute and several helpful golems.

These golems are critical to my success. I can set up spawning centers for them and then gather them under my banner. Since I don’t have many methods of fighting the Piglins head-on other than riding my horse and swinging my sword, I’ll delegate most of the work to my new allies. There are golems called “Allay” that help me mine resources and turn them into defensive structures. When I encounter more challenging forts and army camps, my starting troops may not be up to the task. Fortunately, I can find more soldiers and even pull enemies to my side, including explosive creepers.

It can be a little counterintuitive to actually deploy my army, and it takes multiple steps to implement a strategy. I need to create spawning centers for the minions, stand by and manually spawn each ally, rally them to my side, and lead them into battle. It’s very similar to a real-time strategy game, but scaled down. It makes for an accessible strategy/action mashup – Minecraft Legends is on consoles and, like most things in this universe, is intended to be a game that kids can enjoy – but it means I have to carefully repeat a sequence of small and easily forgettable actions to get a large army moving .

While my new friends are the star of the show, the structures I can create also come in handy. If there is a piglin camp on the other side of a lava chasm, I can just build a stone bridge to allow me to pass through. If I find a mysterious chest full of resources on a cliff, I can build a ramp there to enjoy those riches. I can also strengthen villages, build defensive towers, walls and gates. Over time, the Piglins are getting more sophisticated in their technology, and so am I – we’re now locked in a blocky arms race. Minecraft Legends

starts out as a very easy challenge, but the battlefields are getting busier and I have to find new ways to propel my armies like lemmings through enemy territory.

As it turns out, there are almost no concrete consequences for abandoning overworld combat for a while. In fact, there’s plenty of time to explore the wilderness, discover treasure, and generally tinker around. I found that rushing to an outpost and taking a leisurely time had exactly the same effect; There are no penalties for being late.

Image: Mojang Studios, Blackbird Interactive/Xbox Game Studios

Trouble is, my three hosts would prefer I stick with the task at hand. So they keep emphasizing that another village is being attacked. This nagging diminishes the further you progress in the campaign – but it was frustrating for the game systems to allow me to explore a forest and enjoy the light speckled through voxel branches, only for his overseer characters to constantly berate me.

The campaign of Minecraft Legends is about 20 hours long, give or take, so it doesn’t feel like a too Sisyphean task of exploring the world, defending villages, and scouring the biomes for ores and gems. There is also a cooperative option. But Minecraft Legends

Legs are taken from the multiplayer mode where two teams of four players compete to destroy each other’s base.

Multiplayer matches take place in procedural worlds, requiring players to relearn the landscape each time, collect wood and rocks, go to the right biomes to find Prismarin and other valuable ores, and fend off attacks while making their own start. That’s where Minecraft Legends feels the closest thing to an RTS, and while communication was paramount during my sessions, there’s no in-game voice chat. Discord was enough, but it’s a pity the developers didn’t create their own way.

Minecraft Legends is a charming portmanteau of genres that manages to simplify the RTS formula while still requiring a good amount of focus and strategy. I’m excited to see where the game goes in the future; Players can use its mechanics to create truly terrifying multiplayer strategies that escalate in amazing ways. Or they may just enjoy the campaign and then return to their own realm to tame their own wilds from the quest givers’ bells. legends is a charming and colorful adventure, and it’s nice to finally befriend the humble Creeper.

Minecraft Legends will be released on April 18th Nintendo switch, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Xbox One, Xbox Series XAnd Window personal computer The game was verified on a Windows PC using a pre-release download code provided by Mojang. Vox Media has affiliate partnerships. These do not affect editorial content, although Vox Media may earn commissions on products purchased through affiliate links. You can find For more information on Polygon’s Ethics Policy, click here.