Minecraft Legends
Reviewed On Xbox Series X
WHERE TO PLAY
Minecraft Legends is an action-strategy game that doesn’t take itself too seriously, making it an easy game to hop into, while simultaneously lacking the depth to keep hardcore fans of the strategy genre coming back. The extra Monthly Challenge and PvP modes add some much-needed variety that helps compensate for the main campaign’s shortcomings. Ultimately, Legends has a great foundation for future updates and is a good game to play over a long weekend.
It’s time to conjure up your best strategies and rally your mobs to topple the piglin armies invading the overworld. Having never played a Minecraft game before - I know what you’re thinking, and you’re right, I have been living under a rock, a cube-shaped, pixelated rock - I had no expectations going into Minecraft Legends. Poised as an action strategy game, it was clear within a couple of minutes of gameplay that Legends was a big departure from the main entry, while staying true to the core art style, whimsical tone, and engrossing-yet-simplistic gameplay. Instead of focusing on building massive, beautiful worlds only limited by the extent of your own creativity, you instead spend your time protecting the nearby villages and using your army of mobs to take down the evil piglins that have invaded the world.
The game starts with you mining for resources in what appears to be the core Minecraft world. After observing the invading piglin threat elsewhere, Foresight, Knowledge, and Action search for a hero that could restore peace — and wouldn’t you know it, they inevitably find you! With very little explanation or coercion, you jump through a portal to help, as all selfless block heroes are won’t to do. After completing the tutorial and battling your first piglin army, you’ll have seen pretty much all there is to see in regard to the story. You’re tasked with saving the world from the piglins, and that’s about all there is to it. While it may be a one-note kind of melody, it works and lets you focus instead on the gameplay.
Legends’ main story campaign is relatively short, requiring about 15-20 hours to complete. Half of that time will be spent exploring the world to gather a variety of resources you’ll use to spawn your mobs and build or improve your defensive structures, making you more capable of both defending the nearby villages from nightly piglin attacks and pushing back the piglin armies scattered throughout the world. The other half of the time you’ll be focused on rallying your mobs to attack and destroy the piglin bases.The world of Legends is procedurally generated, which means you’ll experience a different world map for each campaign you play through. There are a handful of biomes to explore, each uniquely beautiful and filled with wildlife and fairly spaced resources. After gathering some wood, stone, and iron, I was able to construct new defensive structures, unlock more storage capacity, and create new types of mobs to take with me into battle. The variety of upgrades available was very limited, but the pace at which you unlock them makes it, so there is something new to build throughout most of the campaign.Related:Best Cozy Multiplayer Games, RankedAs entertaining as the exploration and crafting can be, the most fun to be had is in confronting the piglin armies head-on. At first, neither attacking nor defending requires much strategy as you can push back the enemy with relative ease. But after you take down a base or two, the piglins will get stronger and savvier, requiring you to do the same. There is a variety of mob types that you will unlock as you progress through the game. Some are specialized in taking down defensive structures, while others focus on attacking piglins or healing your army.Atop your chosen mount, you’ll lead your troops into battle by rallying them around you and then issuing commands as you carve your way toward the center of the piglin base. This can be done with either a quick command that sends anyone following you in the desired direction or by using the more advanced commands to choose specific troops, enabling you to tackle multiple objectives at once. I found that for the majority of the game, I was able to use the simple commands most effectively. However, there were some situations where splitting up my forces was the more helpful option. For example, I could use my cobblestone golems to topple the enemy’s towers while having my archers and combat golems focus on holding back the waves of troops trying to halt my progress.
After taking down the first few bases, I found that I needed to be a little bit more strategic if I wanted to continue being successful against the increasing piglin threat. At one point, I had to attack a base surrounded by a moat of lava and mountainous terrain on all sides. This, combined with their long-range ballista and surrounding armies, made it impossible to easily set up a base nearby in a safe area as I had done before. Since I would inevitably need to respawn mobs throughout the siege, I had to instead build my base on a steep mountainside.After crafting the mob spawners, I found that the enemy would send troops to destroy them while also firing exploding ballista from afar. To combat this, I built walls, arrow towers, anti-air defenses, a carpenter hut to auto-repair damage, and masonry to level up all of my defenses. My little base quickly became a fortress on a hill, ready to defend against all enemy attacks, so I could deploy my mobs in peace without having to worry about returning later to a pile of rubble. With my spawned army in tow, I confidently descended the mountainside into the enemy base, destroying their defenses and ultimately the portal in the center.Related:Minecraft’s ‘Peaceful’ Mode Is Actually Kinda TerrifyingInitially, the gameplay in the main campaign is really fun, albeit simple, which makes it easy to pick up and play for 20-30 minutes at a time. However, somewhere around the halfway point, I started to find the gameplay loop to be a little too repetitive. You can adjust the difficulty level to add some additional challenge, but the initial excitement of taking down an enemy base is lost with the lack of variety. Sure, there are new enemy types introduced, and bases have more layers of defenses, but neither requires you to implement a new strategy, just an increased amount of time. Legends takes a soft-handed approach to both the action and strategy genres, ultimately creating an experience that is unique and approachable. However, it comes at the trade-off of never excelling in a particular element of either arena.
Although the main campaign had started to lose my interest, the initial spark I felt was reignited by the elevated challenge I found in both theMonthly ChallengeandPvPmodes. The Monthly Challenge entailed defending a village from 10 waves of piglin attacks, each more vicious than the last. As I progressed through each wave, more defensive structures and mob types became available, which made me scramble to put them to use during the brief intermissions I was granted. Surviving each wave meant I had to implement 10 different strategies to succeed, which ultimately made the Monthly Challenge feel completely different from the campaign gameplay.PvP challenged me on a whole other level, requiring me to coordinate my plans with three other players as we took on the other team. At first, our approach was a bit disorganized since we had all been used to doing things solo. After a bit of time, we learned to divide our efforts so that some of us would gather and explore, pooling the group’s resources, while the others stayed back and built up our defenses. Going head to head with the enemy was fun, each of us exchanging blows on the back of our trusty steeds while sicking our small armies on each other. Attacking the enemy base proved an even greater challenge as we had to break through multiple layers of surrounding walls and arrow towers to reach the well in the center. Only with complete coordination with my team were we able to break through and unleash our attack on the well.
Knowing that not everyone will try the online modes or play them regularly, there are some opportunities for a better experience in the main campaign. For example, there are only a handful of villages you’ll defend in the world, and all of them are identical outside the biome they are located in and what you choose to build there in terms of defense. The defenses you do build can’t really be upgraded, aside from the minor boosts to their durability or range you can acquire by building some of the support structures. I didn’t really need a “Lvl 3 Arrow Tower,” but it would have been nice if I could have worked toward it. With the lack of personalization and upgrading, defending the villages mostly just felt like a chore, something to upkeep as I took down each of the main piglin bases.This lack of personalization also extended to my home base, The Well of Fate. While you do build structures that upgrade your mobs and resources in the game, none of the structures are particularly unique-looking, save a different symbol on the top of them. This feels like an egregiously missed opportunity since personalizing my base would have given me a greater sense of accomplishment and an indication of progress. Although Legends is an intentionally different kind of game from Minecraft, it would have been nice if a little bit more of that signature crafting and building magic had been incorporated.
Outside the lack of personalization, there are also a handful of smaller grievances. You have access to four different mounts in the game, but only the tiger and beetle are worth using in most situations due to their superior speed and wall climbing, respectively. There are also times when your mobs are unresponsive to enemies or the defenses near them, requiring you to have to issue a command to get them to move a foot and do their job. Once you upgrade your mob capacity, there are also times when the framerate gets choppy, occasionally crashing the game. None of these issues are severe, however, and I’m sure some of them will be addressed with future updates.Overall, Minecraft Legends was an enjoyable game that lasted exactly as long as it should have. It’s easy to pick up and play, but you may feel a bit unsatisfied with the lack of depth. The monthly challenges and the addition of the co-op and PvP modes add some variety to keep fans coming back after completing the main campaign. While there are some shortcomings with the launch version of the game, it is a solid foundation with a lot of potential to evolve over time alongside the community playing it.Next:Minecraft Reveals Dungeons & Dragons DLC With New Locations And Classes
