Minecraft Dungeons (2020)

You should play it!

​​I don't really like Minecraft and all that building hype. However, 20 minutes of watching my son playing Minecraft Dungeons flipped a few things around.

Minecraft Dungeons is a great example of an ambassador game. A game that transplants its roots and turns them into something new. This is how the first-person game of collecting resources and living in a cubic world became an isometric dungeon-crawler a'la Diablo.

(my video review, yay!)

The plot in Minecraft Dungeons plays a second, third... 11th role. Well, the great... khem, villain called Arch-Illiger loots and kidnaps the villagers with the help of various monsters and shady characters. Our task: become a hero and stop Arch-Illiger. The bestiary has some variety. We will face zombies, spiders, skeletons, knights, and mages just to name a few. If you plan on getting the DLC package, the range of opponents will be further expanded by several units that are thematically related to a given region. For example, if we buy a jungle DLC, we will also encounter some guys that can block our way with vines or summon poisonous plants. Sweet.

Minecraft Dungeons is an RPG where our task is to oppose the army of evil and find the kidnapped folks. We will do this by acquiring stronger weapons as we progress through the game. There are various weapons at our disposal, from swords, axes, daggers to long-range weapons, such as crossbows and bows. Each one has an indicator for damage, range, and speed. Instead of range, the long-range weapons use the ammo capacity descriptor. The icing on the cake is the variety of magical items and the possibility of fusing magic (spells) with melee weapons. Here it is called enchanting. Thanks to this we unlock powerful skills on our weapons and armor. It is very simple. After each level, we get one point that we can use to unlock skills on weapons or armor. We can have a maximum of three active spells. My favorite spell was reducing the cooldown of magic items by 38%. Even better! I found an armor with a double cooldown reduction. If we happen to mistakenly assign a point to a skill, then by using the blacksmith's services we can regain the invested points and strengthen the item. Then we can reassign the points to any item we want.

The sheer variety of magical items and spells effectively arouses our curiosity to learn about their powers. For example, I found a unique armor that while exploring the map helped me find emeralds (in-game currency) every few steps. For some time I did not really have to worry about cash. You can equip up to 3 magical artifacts. Some of them give you unique skills, boost your defense, or are have used as a crowd control tool.

Some of my favorite artifacts were:

• a horn that was very useful in melee fights when I got surrounded
• a mushroom that speeds up our hero and their attacks
• a satchel with elemental attacks from which we could randomly cast attacks based on fire, lightning, or slow down groups of enemies using a blizzard
• seeds with vines paralyzing and poisoning up to eight enemies. It works like a charm when we combine this with a perk that increases damage from poison attacks!

We progress through the game teleporting to different missions, which have a dungeon-like feel. From time to time, there are encounters when we get locked inside an "arena" and cannot progress until we defeat all the opponents and unlock a sealed gate. The exploration is in isometric view and we generally don't have any problems with orientation. A clear map helps us not to overlook any important portals that will allow us to discover additional locations or find some keys needed to unlock passages. Each map also finishes with a boss fight. The game itself looks very neat! It is colorful, but the colors are subdued and therefore we do not have the impression that it is too distracting. Any special effects like flashes or explosions look juicy and you really feel that the game was very polished. Music also works well building the atmosphere and, when necessary, becomes ominous and warns us if there is something more than just an ordinary mob lurking around the corner. It makes clashes with Evokers or Endermen memorable.

After each mission, we return to the camp, where we can spend crystals and buy additional weapons, magic items, or give our beloved ax to the aforementioned blacksmith to raise its level (increase the damage output).

Completing the Basic Level is fun and takes less than 8 hours. But the real fun begins when we unlock the Adventure level and the highest - Apocalypse. Repeating missions on higher difficulties has higher chances of unique item drops or special sub-boss appearances. Defeating them allows us to activate random modifiers: HP reduction, more explosive opponents, boosting opponents’ attack or damage resistance. Those of you who like to get kinky or get smacked might find some pleasure by adding more modifiers. Those modifiers can flip an ordinary mission upside down. Once I was just looking for a map that would unlock a hidden mission and decided to spice it up a bit. I picked up a modifier that changed the time into Night. At first, I thought this would only cause limited visibility. Hell no! Enemies kept respawning indefinitely! I couldn't stay anywhere for too long as they were also more resilient and dealt more damage. At some point, I just started running away... Another time I got a modified that reduced my HP by 40% and increased the damage dealt by opponents by 90%. They were almost one-shotting me! When it comes to DLC, we have 5 of them:

• jungle,
• underwater
• mountains,
• ice area,
• Nether, which is something of a Minecraft hell.

There is also a season pass if you would like to get the cosmetic items. Each extension is around $5-$7. I bought it from a Japanese Microsoft store and the entire package (without the game) cost me 2500 yen. The game comes with Microsoft's Game Pass subscription. Each DLC will add 2-3 more missions which is around 2-4 hours of extra gameplay per area. The missions you get with the DLC don't expand the storyline, so it is your call if you want to dive deeper. Rerunning the DLC missions on higher difficulties will add a bit more bang for the buck. After nearly 30 hours, only one thing really bothered me. If you play with your friends (up to 4 people can play in one session) then you have to prepare for something annoying. Namely, when one person is browsing the inventory, the others must wait. Imagine a situation when all four of you want to have a look or change something and you do it ONE AT TIME. ONE afer ANOTHER… A nice solution, in this case, would be to split the screen into 4. Instead of staring at someone else's blade, I can play with my own…

Back to Minecraft. ​I got hooked! I bought all DLC and a premium pass for the cosmetics. Hell! I even bought two additional gamepads to play with my children (8 and 5 years old). Since then, Minecraft Dungeons has become practically our number 1 topic. And I didn’t really like Minecraft.

Decided to invest in Xbox Gamepass for PC per my girlfriends recommendation, and this was the first game I tried. This is... surprisingly scratching my Diablo itch. I kind of dismissed this game when it came out solely because I figured I personally wouldn't enjoy it due to it's simplification of the ARPG formula, but it's that exact simplification that I enjoy. I intended to play for about an hour, then actually spent about four hours playing.

Side note: Why isn't crossplay implemented yet?? Apparently there was a glitch that allowed PC and Xbox to play together, but they patched it out? Why?!