Review on the game 'Minecraft'.

by **Jesse** Sat Dec 31, 2011 9:26 am

This review will be on a game called 'Minecraft'.

Basics of play

Minecraft has at its core three basic gameplay elements: the building (and destroying) of blocks, the crafting of items, and the exploration of the open, dynamically generated world (the mining part of the game falls under this heading). You can walk up to a tree and punch it until you get wood, which you can turn into wooden planks, which can be used to make sticks, which can be used to make tools, which you can use to quickly harvest materials you need to make yourself a shelter. You’ll need to do this, because once the sun sets the monsters come out, and they’d be all too happy to shoot you with arrows or jump on you or explode next to you. The “point” at first is to survive, and, as you become more comfortable, expand your tiny shelter into a huge, more impressive structure.

If you’ve played the game at any point before its demonstration at this summer’s Penny Arcade Expo, this will all be familiar to you—this is the root of the game and it’s still fully intact in the final version. In the last few months, sound effects and graphics have been tweaked, a new “hunger bar” requires you to keep your stomach full or you will start to starve, and things like weapon damage have been subtly tweaked, but if you’ve played the game at pretty much any point in its existence it’s going to be very familiar indeed.

Early on when I first started playing minecraft, I managed to survive for a couple of days and then just didn't know what to do it felt like I completed the game after that. To alleviate this, you’ll want to go exploring - mine shafts, caves, and ruins dot the expansive maps, and each of them contain different rare elements that you’ll need to craft some of the game’s more complex (and interesting) items, which leads me to my next point.

The easy-to-grasp basics of Minecraft—building, mining, crafting—are fun, addictive, and easy to recommend not just to gamers, but to the “casual” demographic as well. The more complicated new additions are designed to appeal to a more traditional sort of gamer. It’s not a bad thing, necessarily, but I could see the new systems muddying the simple fun of the game for some.

For people who are in it just for the fun of building, the “creative” mode is for you: it gives you unlimited supplies of all the game’s blocks, removes the health meter, and lets you fly around the map. If you want to make a giant skyscraper without worrying about fall damage, or if you’d like to build an underwater city without the complications of creating an enchanted helmet or potion for underwater breathing, this is what you want.

Mojang(The company name) has tried to make a sort of "Ending" to Minecraft, which you travel to the "End-dimension". There you must go up against hundreds going on thousands of endless Enderman, and a Ender Dragon the boss of the end dimension. You have to defeat this boss in order to "Complete" the game. It is very hard and you must have a lot of resources and good armour to defeat the dragon. Upon defeating the dragon you will gain a lot of experience and gain a lot of levels. You will also find a new portal when you defeat the dragon which will lead you out of the end dimension and once you enter the portal there will be a Minecraft title and two 'things' talking, I haven't really figured out what they are but I imagine they're suppose to be otherworldly beings. There is a huge kind of funny dialogue to read through, or you can just click ESC and not read any of it.

The Ender Dragon is the first official mob boss to appear in Minecraft. It only naturally spawns in The End. This mob uses the dragon model Notch created, but utilizes a texture more reminiscent of an Enderman, being black and scaly with purple eyes.

The Dragon Egg is a block that spawns on top of the Bedrock portal created by the defeat of the Enderdragon in The End. They currently have no explicit purpose, but are tricky to collect and are the only non-opaque falling block.

Multiplayer

Minecraft is plenty fun and addicting in its single player iteration, but it’s also a lonely game—aside from the patch of land you claim and then develop to serve as your home, you’re stuck in the middle of a practically endless expanse of world with a few animals and a bunch of monsters.

The social implications of the game are obvious: it’s more fun to build something when you can show someone else the fruit of your labors. Finding and exploring caverns is quicker and (in theory) easier with one or more friends. It’s reasonably easy to set up a Minecraft server on your desktop or laptop that can support three or four people (depending mostly on your upload speed), and public servers with dozens of players are easy to find.

Unlike most games, where the single-player and multiplayer modes share basic mechanics but little else, Minecraft is pretty much the same game. This means that the single-player mode often feels like a lonely version of the multiplayer mode. In short, this is a game that demands to be played with friends.

Issues

Out of the box, the game has two major issues that come to mind after months of play, though both have been more or less remedied by the fan community and don’t appear to have hurt either the game’s sales or popularity.

The first, as some have noted, is that the game offers little by way of in-game instruction. A simple achievement map points you in the general direction you’ll need to go for the very basics, from punching your first tree right up to tackling the “end” of the game, but things like crafting recipes aren’t given to the player in-game, requiring players (and especially newbies) to make frequent trips to the Minecraft wiki or another such resource to create the items they need.

The second issue is lack of player protections in multiplayer - by default, anyone can go up to anyone’s structure (or treasure chest, or what have you) and break it or loot it or pour hot lava all over it, and getting killed (and dropping all of your loot for anyone to pick up) happens with some regularity. If you don’t share your server’s address (or if you make use of the server’s whitelist) you can nullify this, but administrators of public servers usually turn to game mods to protect players, their structures, and their possessions. (A side note on mods: they are plentiful, often excellent, and actively encouraged by Minecraft’s developers. It would require another piece entirely to cover them in any detail.)

Conclusion

Despite these issues, the game that you get if you buy it today is pretty robust and full-featured, and Mojang says that additional free content updates will continue to roll out over time (though nothing has been said about the amount or frequency of such updates). The replay value and bang/buck ratio that Minecraft represents is hard to beat, though you should still try the demo if you’re not sure you’ll like it.

Minecraft deserves almost all of the good things that people have said about it. In a marketplace full of iterative games that often have a little too much in common with one another, it’s something unique. It can be almost any kind of game you want it to be: a dungeon crawler, a survival horror game, a farming simulator, or even a rudimentary MMO. It resonates with people because it’s not quite like anything else, and that’s intended as high praise.

http://www.pcgamer.com/2011/04/19/download-the-minecraft-demo/

That is the demo url as I stated above, if you are not sure if you want to buy the game download the demo and figure out yourself if you want to buy the game or not.

Until my next review - Jesse.