Minecraft Dungeons is what you get when you take the E for everyone approach to a Diablo style Action-RPG. An isometric RPG in which you click your way through hordes of famous Minecraft baddies like.....the green explody ones, square livestock, and other minecraft people.
Where Minecraft Dungeons seems to set itself apart is in it's utter simplicity. Left click to melee, right click to shoot your bow, and beyond that there are items you can equip that grant you either an extra attack or some other ability like a medallion that can give you health back. This allows the game to be very easy to get into an understand. The maps are very simple and straightforward with a marker that always points you in the right direction.
This simple approach makes Minecraft Dungeons the easiest action rpg I've ever played. Even when cranking up the difficulty options (of which there is a very easy to understand and very straightforward slider upon mission select) there isn't a lot of challenge simply because there aren't a lot of tools the player has to work with.
There are no builds here, not that I can tell yet. No classes, nothing. You start by picking a minecraft figurine and off you go. Each time you level up you earn a talent token which you can spend to grant every piece of gear a passive trait. For example you can one of three abilities on your sword like adding fire to attacks, adding posion, or adding lifedrain. Once you pick one of these you can continue to invest points to level that ability up but you CANNOT change the ability once chosen, nor pick a different ability later. Though you get new items so quickly it wont matter.
Which leads to a question, if you invest a level up token into an item and then instantly replace it, then do I lose my tokens? Thankfully no. Salvaging old gear grants you money and refunds all level up tokens applied to that piece of gear which allows you to instantly invest in your new item or dump the points into a different piece entirely. The whole system is incredibly simple and straightforward. The problem with that is that it makes the gear boring. You find a new item with better damage, but it's the level up tokens that give the item any life. I suppose later you can only use items that have specific abilities on them (like all fire damage items or stacking movement speed type things) but I don't see a lot of possible freedom for the system to grow later on.
More powerful pieces have up to three abilities you can invest in at a single time, but those must be much later in the game because after 3 hours I found only 1 item that allowed for two abilities and none of them changed the way I played.
Levels themselves are mission based. There is no open world here, you select a specific area you want to tackle, choose your difficulty, and off you go. Once you're done you'll get a treasure chest and jump back to you little hub village. Your hub itself seems to grow the further you go into the game but I don't know why. NPC's just appear after certain missions without any real reason, which is fine I guess, but it makes the progression feel hollow. It's not like you find these people one missions and save them, they just are there once X mission is done.
And each mission feels really long, maybe because the enemies aren't interesting and the maps themselves are not interactive or explorable in any way. You can find the occassional chest down a side path like every ARPG, but the loot is dumb so it doesn't matter. Basic gearing rules apply, keep your number higher than the recommended number of the mission and you're fine.
The AI also seems rather stupid. One boss fight I dealt with spawned a bunch of enemies that couldn't hit me if I stood in a certain part of the map, and they never seemed to want to move to come get me. So I would zerg the boss until my health got low, run and hide until my potion came off CD, then repeated until I won. My reward was an apple for this boss fight, which granted me 10 seconds of hp regen upon picking it up, but the mission was over so.......worth it I guess.
Minecraft Dungeons is not a bad game, it's well put together, runs great, everything about it works. But it lacks interesting things that made all the games that inspired it fun to keep playing. The key to any great ARPG is the thrill of the loot hunt, what cool item might be around the corner. So far......that's not here.
Where Minecraft Dungeons seems to set itself apart is in it's utter simplicity. Left click to melee, right click to shoot your bow, and beyond that there are items you can equip that grant you either an extra attack or some other ability like a medallion that can give you health back. This allows the game to be very easy to get into an understand. The maps are very simple and straightforward with a marker that always points you in the right direction.
This simple approach makes Minecraft Dungeons the easiest action rpg I've ever played. Even when cranking up the difficulty options (of which there is a very easy to understand and very straightforward slider upon mission select) there isn't a lot of challenge simply because there aren't a lot of tools the player has to work with.
There are no builds here, not that I can tell yet. No classes, nothing. You start by picking a minecraft figurine and off you go. Each time you level up you earn a talent token which you can spend to grant every piece of gear a passive trait. For example you can one of three abilities on your sword like adding fire to attacks, adding posion, or adding lifedrain. Once you pick one of these you can continue to invest points to level that ability up but you CANNOT change the ability once chosen, nor pick a different ability later. Though you get new items so quickly it wont matter.
Which leads to a question, if you invest a level up token into an item and then instantly replace it, then do I lose my tokens? Thankfully no. Salvaging old gear grants you money and refunds all level up tokens applied to that piece of gear which allows you to instantly invest in your new item or dump the points into a different piece entirely. The whole system is incredibly simple and straightforward. The problem with that is that it makes the gear boring. You find a new item with better damage, but it's the level up tokens that give the item any life. I suppose later you can only use items that have specific abilities on them (like all fire damage items or stacking movement speed type things) but I don't see a lot of possible freedom for the system to grow later on.
More powerful pieces have up to three abilities you can invest in at a single time, but those must be much later in the game because after 3 hours I found only 1 item that allowed for two abilities and none of them changed the way I played.
Levels themselves are mission based. There is no open world here, you select a specific area you want to tackle, choose your difficulty, and off you go. Once you're done you'll get a treasure chest and jump back to you little hub village. Your hub itself seems to grow the further you go into the game but I don't know why. NPC's just appear after certain missions without any real reason, which is fine I guess, but it makes the progression feel hollow. It's not like you find these people one missions and save them, they just are there once X mission is done.
And each mission feels really long, maybe because the enemies aren't interesting and the maps themselves are not interactive or explorable in any way. You can find the occassional chest down a side path like every ARPG, but the loot is dumb so it doesn't matter. Basic gearing rules apply, keep your number higher than the recommended number of the mission and you're fine.
The AI also seems rather stupid. One boss fight I dealt with spawned a bunch of enemies that couldn't hit me if I stood in a certain part of the map, and they never seemed to want to move to come get me. So I would zerg the boss until my health got low, run and hide until my potion came off CD, then repeated until I won. My reward was an apple for this boss fight, which granted me 10 seconds of hp regen upon picking it up, but the mission was over so.......worth it I guess.
Minecraft Dungeons is not a bad game, it's well put together, runs great, everything about it works. But it lacks interesting things that made all the games that inspired it fun to keep playing. The key to any great ARPG is the thrill of the loot hunt, what cool item might be around the corner. So far......that's not here.
