Minecraft Dungeons
PC, Xbox One
Can you dig it? No, you can’t. There is no mining or crafting in Minecraft Dungeons whatsoever. It does, to be fair, have dungeons, which are filled to bursting with the enemies that trouble your nighttimes in Minecraft’s survival mode. A dungeon-crawler in the mould of Diablo, the aim is to fight your way through hordes of these foes to a boss fight, pick up loot, return to camp to sort through your treasures for higher-level gear, and repeat. Minus the class traits or deeper RPG-style progression elements, this is a familyfriendly introduction to the dungeon-crawling genre.
Somehow, though, Minecraft Dungeons proves to be slightly more than Diablo in nappies. Even those wellversed in isometric action-RPGs will find something appealing here, since Dungeons succeeds in distilling the purest essence of what constitutes a good dungeon crawler. It nails the basics of fighting, looting and levelling so precisely that it briefly – very briefly – makes us wonder why we ever spent all that time fiddling in inventory screens and agonising over builds.
Here, character specs are entirely based on gear, with three slots for armour, melee and ranged weapons and three more for special abilities granted through looted artefacts. These range from speedy boots to healing totems, shields, explosive ranged fireworks and energy blasts powered by souls collected from fallen enemies. Choosing which artefacts to slot is as close as the game comes to granting class traits. We weren’t sure we could ever do without role-specific classes in a party-based dungeon crawler; Dungeons makes this flexibility intuitive. With all characters created equal, you are free to define your own playstyle as you loot and utilise artefacts. Equipping shield and healing totems puts you in a support role, for example, but you’re not tied to the decision forever: you can adjust your loadout at any time. Playing cooperatively, you can apportion skills to create a balanced party, but the game doesn’t force you to play this way. And here’s where for all its simple-stupid genius, it fails to deliver much more than a superficial experience; ultimately, you can hack and slash your way through the monsters in any way you see fit, with minimal thought or planning required.
In reality, particularly in singleplayer, your choice of artefacts does not massively affect the rhythm of play. Once you’ve found what works you’ll most likely stick to that, given little incentive to change things up. You might summon a wolf to fight by your side for a limited time, for example, but he’s not going to turn the tide of battle any more than a quick soul-fire burst. One way, you clear away a bunch of enemies in a quick blast; the other, take them down gradually with a little help from Monsieur Fangs, as we name him. Minecraft’s appeal has always been in encouraging players to think creatively, yet this spinoff offers few truly personalised routes to
Developer Mojang Studios, Double Eleven
Xbox Game Studios PC, Xbox One (tested) Out now
superpowered status, or imaginative ways to combine your skills for maximum impact.
Mobs that felt so inventive when we first encountered them in Minecraft offer little more than visual variety to Dungeons’ denizens (although for a game that’s low on character detail, the death animations are satisfying: skeletons crumple, or flinch bodily when struck by a powerful spell or arrow). Their different behaviours really only come down to those that rush you and those that range-attack. For obvious reasons, enemy-buffing enchanters are best dealt with soonest, but basic cooldown management aside, you’re not encouraged to think about different approaches to situations and the only real consideration is not letting yourself become surrounded. Depending on the toughness of individual foes, such as later-level armoured knights, it’s still a case of spamming the one melee button until the enemy falls over, healing yourself of any damage it’s dealt you, and moving on. Enemies scale to your level, but so long as you keep on top of the incremental improvements to stats through enchantments and better loot, progression is inevitable and ultimately unsatisfying.
This makes the campaign an oddly hollow solo experience. Despite this being a short game with just nine stages, dungeons are a chore when played solo, particularly with no meaningful RPG progression to spur you on. There are a handful of gimmicks like traps, springboards and criss-crossing minecarts to spice up proceedings, but the few puzzles are mostly of the ‘find key, use key’ variety. (Here at least, one imaginative design touch shines: keys are alive, and lairy. You have to subdue them and carry them on your back, but take a single blow and they’re off, scampering back to where you found them. The tedium of backtracking to drag one back to the door by its non-existent ear is, at least, mitigated by the fact that they’re quite cute.)
Multiplayer, then, is the best way to experience Minecraft Dungeons: here, its over-simplification is less of an issue, particularly if you’re playing alongside younger family members. In its brightest moments, it can feel like the purest expression of old-school hack ’n’ slash couch co-op fun, more Gauntlet than Diablo, as you work together to clear levels of mobs.
Still, if Minecraft has taught us anything, it’s that not much gets past the kids, and yours might well bemoan the lack of crafting or farming of resources. If the aim was to simplify things for a younger audience, these main-game staples could have provided an alternative to Diablo’s levelling busywork – mineable terrain providing resources to craft into gear, thereby engendering more investment in your character’s journey. Instead, with only the blocky aesthetic and familiar monsters to show for its heritage, whether you’re here for the Minecraft or the Dungeons, you’ll feel that much more could have been excavated from both.
Dungeons are a chore when played solo, particularly with no RPG progression to spur you on