Review of Minecraft Legends

Minecraft Legends: A Unique Action-Strategy Game in the Minecraft Universe

At first glance, it can be difficult to pinpoint what Minecraft Legends is or what to expect from it. It has all the familiar elements that fans have come to expect from Minecraft, including its resource-gathering and building gameplay core, blocky-but-beautiful landscapes, and procedurally generated underbelly that fuels the whole experience. But that is all simply the foundation of what Mojang considers to be an “action-strategy” game with Minecraft Legends.

The Unique Genre of Action-Strategy

“Action-strategy” is certainly a niche genre, with few titles to point to as pillars. As a flag-bearer of sorts for this smaller subset of games, Minecraft Legends will have players wage war on The Nether’s forces and stand side-by-side with an army of classic mobs that they built up in a series of grand battles. Players will also spend plenty of time planning, building, and strategizing their war effort to save the Overworld from the invading Piglins, much in the same vein as popular RTS games like Command and Conquer. Minecraft Legends attempts to do a lot with the influences it’s taking from and manages to be a compelling action-strategy game in its own right, but it does feel like it could have done more with its Minecraft foundations.

A Light Story that Puts Players in Control

Like Minecraft Dungeons before it, Minecraft Legends keeps things light regarding the story. In short, the forces of The Nether have overrun the Overworld, and it’s up to the player character to unite the Overworld’s citizens in the fight against the Piglin invaders. The story’s cast is small and comprises three main characters, Foresight, Action, and Knowledge, who aid the player with brief exposition and general warnings about what is coming next in the Piglin invasion.

As always, Minecraft is about the story that players tell organically, and Minecraft Legends does a great job of getting out of the player’s way, so they can focus on those emergent story-telling moments

Unite the Overworld and Build an Army

In order to stave off the Piglin, players will have to bring the fight right to the enemy’s bases by raising an army and creating an offensive front. There is an almost Mount and Blade: Warband feel to Minecraft Legends, as players travel the world and turn former enemies into friends to recruit them to their ranks. Zombies, skeletons, and creepers are all available to the player once they help each faction defend their homesteads against the Piglin invaders. The whole process of uniting the Overworld against a common enemy is fun and makes for an amusing twist on how Minecraft fans interact with these once-dreaded mobs. It all comes together in a great way when the player puts this rag-tag army into action.

Living Out Epic Moments and Building a Legacy

Moments like leading a massive charge against a Piglin base always feel like players are living out a scene from the Lord of the Rings. In other instances, players will nervously hunker down at a village in preparation for an incoming attack, hoping that everything they built to fortify this village holds through the attempted Piglin raid. Moments like these are constant in Minecraft Legends and regularly ground the player into the world without ever needing a narrator or NPC to tell players that the stakes are high.

The Strategy of Resource Gathering and Base Building

In terms of strategy, Minecraft Legends relies on the franchise’s staple gameplay loop of resource gathering, crafting, and base-building to outwit the Piglin invaders. The Piglin are a crafty bunch, consisting of three hordes featuring different enemy types and architecture styles that players must consider when planning an attack.

Players won’t be approaching the Horde of the Spore’s towering spires the same way they would the Horde of the Bastion’s multi-walled citadels, forcing players to think creatively about how and where they build while also considering the strengths and weaknesses of their militias. Players win by building the right things at the right spots and sending the right mobs at the right enemies. Discovering what works and what doesn’t and getting into the strategic groove of Minecraft Legends felt as good as any other real-time strategy game would.

Escalating Challenges and Limitations

As in-game days go on and players fight back the Piglin hordes, The Nether’s invasion gradually begins to escalate. Bases get progressively more challenging to attack, and nighttime invasions grow longer with even more formidable enemies spawning at the tree lines. Minecraft Legends’ gameplay loop, which consists of this constant back-and-forth of enemy escalation and player response, keeps the game fresh and interesting throughout its first half. However, throughout the closing chapters, it felt like Minecraft Legends had exhausted everything it had to offer, and the game was coasting on what it had taught the player in its opening hours.

Missed Potential and Limited Scope

A lot of the core gameplay loop of Minecraft Legends boils down to building walls, making sure those walls don’t break, and then directing an army to destroy a base and kill a boss. While the core of Minecraft’s traditional building and crafting mechanics are ingrained in Legends’ DNA, it all felt very limited and like the development team could have dug deeper to make an even better strategy game. Once all the tools were unlocked and the full scale of the game became clear, there was a feeling that Legends missed an opportunity to incorporate some of Minecraft’s rich lineup of blocks, weapons, and Redstone mechanics to flesh out the game’s systems and create more things to build, see, do, and strategize over. This could have added layers of complexity and replayability in what feels like a straightforward single-player experience.

Multiplayer Excitement and Potential

However, Minecraft Legends‘ strategy mechanics do manage to flex their muscles in the game’s PvP offering. Multiplayer is where the game’s strategy elements shift from being a more leisurely affair into a frenzy of building and gathering where players engage in a full-blown arms race between two teams. In our time with the multiplayer portion, we saw players strategize and develop metas as they quickly split into roles.

Some players were designated as resource gatherers, others designated as base-defenders, and others designated as general chaos-makers to stall the other team from making progress. Here, gears started turning in ways the single-player portion never inspired.

A Bold and Exciting Direction for the Minecraft Franchise

Despite its shortcomings, Minecraft Legends is still a bold and exciting new direction for a franchise that continues to stand the test of time. It’s a game that understands why Minecraft is so compelling in the first place and then twists those elements into an action strategy experience that can be hard to put down. Its only missteps come from its limited scope and how it leaves players wanting more because its core gameplay loop is so good. Minecraft Legends is approachable, captivating, and just a perfect time.

Minecraft Legends releases on April 18 for PC, PS4, PS5, Switch, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X|S.