Minecraft Legends

The fundamentals of "Minecraft" were well honored and implemented in "Legends." There are familiar NPCs, that beloved chunky landscape, and colorful sweeping environments aplenty. There's more than enough familiarity to prevent that sense of betrayal when a well-established franchise tries to rustle up another profit stream with a poorly-executed sequel, remake, or addition.

Your enjoyment of Minecraft Legends will come down to three questions. 1: Are you in love with Minecraft and its extended universe? 2: Are you hankering for an RTS-style game playable on a console? 3: Do you have a minimum of three friends who are eager to play this game too? If you answered yes to at least two of those questions, you’ll have a good time with Minecraft Legends. For everyone else, Minecraft Legends offers a fairly unique experience and not much more. Just don’t expect to get any mileage out of the campaign.

Minecraft Legends captures the magic of Minecraft in a wholly new way. It’s chaotic, it’s creative, it’s competitive and it’s an absolute blast.

Minecraft Legends is an engaging strategy game that does a great job streamlining a notoriously complex genre without sacrificing the ever-important element of choice and consequence. That said, some genre staples like assigning custom groups of units are casualties of this simplification, which is too bad because it does limit your strategic options a bit in the heat of battle.

Sadly, the answer seems to be that Minecraft Legends is for Microsoft to sell DLC. The menu screen has four big, bold buttons emblazoned across it and the last is for the marketplace, which already has a ten quid skin pack available and is the only way to customise your hero beyond the ten skins available at the start, or to customise your mounts at all. Lure the kids in with the brand and sell them as much stuff as possible before they realise that there's nothing of what makes Minecraft special on offer here.

Minecraft Legends battles to blend its open-world adventuring with the intricacies of real-time strategy, a war that sometimes detracts from the overall fun you can have. Even so, its gorgeous environments and clever world-building inspire familiar creativity that makes up for its growing pains.

Minecraft Legends is a surprisingly deep strategy title that embodies what people love about the franchise, adding much more along the way.

It isn’t complex enough to satiate veteran RTS players and doesn’t offer mountains of content, but Minecraft Legends delivers the basic loop of attacking and defending territory and finds the odd inventive way to use its iconic IP.