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Minecraft Dungeons has charm and potential, but needs lot more time in the furnace - TechCrunch
May 22, 2020 1 min, 58 secs
Minecraft is one of the most popular games on the planet, so it’s natural that Microsoft, after buying creator Mojang some years back, would attempt to apply the genre’s playful, blocky aesthetic to other genres.

After modest success with the Story Mode adventure game and Pokémon GO-like Minecraft Earth, they’ve tried their hand at a light action-RPG à la Diablo — and unfortunately come up rather short.

It’s refreshing, because games like this tend to court a rather grim aesthetic, and when it comes to gameplay they pile on features and mechanics until it feels more like you’re playing a spreadsheet than a game.

It’s clear from the start Minecraft Dungeons was intended to provide the fun of fighting, upgrading and exploring without the overly complex and dark trappings of the genre.

That really just isn’t there in this game.

These weren’t lesson-teaching deaths like other games — just sudden confluences of bad luck and, it must be said, some poor design.

The issue here isn’t just that it’s hard, but that the game doesn’t give you the tools you need to deal with it.

What all this amounts to is a game that alternates between monotonous and frustratingly hard, even for a fan of the genre like myself.

And considering you’ll run through all the areas in the game in a handful of hours — there are 10 areas, each of which takes perhaps 20 minutes to clear — it’s expected that you’ll repeat them over and over to reach the gear level required to beat the final boss.

Minecraft Dungeons innovates and simplifies in some really laudable ways, but the moment-to-moment game design is too uneven and the variety on offer isn’t enough even for a $20 game.

There are two DLC packs in the works for Dungeons, one rather crassly visible from the very start — nothing like being asked to pay more for a game you just bought.

The good news is these packs will grow the game to a size that feels more like an adventure and less like a demo.

A year from now Minecraft Dungeons could very well be a no-brainer purchase, a cross-platform casual hack-and-slash that you can play with your kids or your friends and have a great time without thinking too hard about it (or opening Excel)

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