238 million copies sold and almost 150 million monthly active players registered in 2021: these are the numbers for Minecraft, the best-selling video game in the world, far ahead of titles of the caliber of GTA V and Tetris. And not only that: according to a study carried out by Microsoft after the acquisition of Mojang in 2014 for 2,5 million dollars, more than 50% of the population between 9 and 11 years old played Minecraft. This is also due to the version of the game designed for educational purposes and adopted by 115 countries for a total of 35 million students.
The phenomenon generated by the Swedish team has broken any record in the field of gaming and it was more than reasonable to expect that this universe, although still alive and well and capable of producing mind-blowing numbers, would be used to try to create a new, equally successful formula.
The undertaking is arduous and full of dangers and before talking about a Minecraft 2 capable of repeating this enormous success, there are several paths to follow in search of a different audience; partly to test the waters and partly to bring innovation within the brand.
The first attempt was Minecraft Dungeon which, supported by the launch also on Game Pass on launch day, received the favor of users without coming close to the monstrous numbers achieved by the original game. However, for Mojang it is time for a new adventure and in this Minecraft Legends Review We will take you to discover an RTS with strong action overtones.
Piglin's Revenge
The world of Minecraft has introduced us to many creatures, but The true protagonists of Minecraft Legends are the Piglins, the pink pigs whose home is in the abyss. These friendly monsters have always been neutral, as long as they wear a piece of golden armor and respect its rules, such as the prohibition of stealing this resource from under their noses. Times, however, change and, after years of prosperous trade, the Piglins have become our worst enemy, fiercer than ever and ready to lay siege to the Overworld, a parallel universe that has enjoyed peace and serenity until then.
This is how we know Foresight, Knowledge and Action, the three creators of this new world in which we find ourselves catapulted into the role of Hero, our three guides in battle and beyond. There campaign of Minecraft Legends is based on this narrative device, it is a fairly basic story, but it embodies everything that has made Minecraft famous: its simplicity. Even in this title, learning the mechanics of the game is quite intuitive and this made the many hours that occupied us during the main campaign go smoothly, keeping us glued to the screen battle after battle.
Mojang's new game is in all aspects. a strategic one in real time, but it also adds the free movement of the protagonist and the possibility of interacting with the world around him. Therefore, there is no chess board on which to prepare our pawns, but quite the opposite, the battles against the Piglins are very hectic and require changes of front and new strategies that will be implemented as the battle evolves.
Minecraft Legends Overworld needs a hero
Piglin's forces are divided into three main factions of different difficulty, distinguished by the color green, orange or red, visible directly on the game map. These are respectively thespore horde, of the bastion e Of hunting. Curly-tailed creatures have literally invaded the Overworld, and after an initial startup phase where you learn the rudiments of the game like gathering resources, building defensive items, and grouping troops, the real campaign begins.
A Minecraft Legends time It flows exactly like in Minecraft: enemy attacks are concentrated during the night, while opponents use the daylight hours to fortify their fortresses. This mechanism has a double usefulness: giving you time to explore the game map to discover secrets and allies useful in the war or attack each outpost head-on before the Piglins manage to fortify their bases. Minecraft Legends has four difficulty levels that influence the frequency and intensity of attacks on villages by the "bad guys" and the availability of resources spread across the map. By increasing the difficulty the focus changes radically, since more time will be needed to better prepare for the current battle.
It often happened during the Campaign that we had to pause exploration to help a target village; On the map, Piglin's objective will appear surrounded by red markers and with an indicator that determines the strength of the Horde. This signal gives time to build defensive countermeasures such as walls and towers to keep the piglets away from the Fountain, the main building of each town that determines the health and happiness of the inhabitants. Our task is therefore defend the harmless inhabitants in a kind of horde mode that can last a few moments in the initial phases, but can lead to real sieges marked by a stopwatch with an increasing number of minutes as the story progresses.
A Creeper for a friend
The Overworld, before the invasion of the Piglins, was a veritable Eden and therefore you can imagine our surprise to learn that all the creatures here lived in peace, including Creepers, Zombies and Skeletons. The terrible mobs that tormented us in Minecraft are now our allies and we had to defend their towns from enemy attacks; Protecting their lands will ensure that we can form an alliance with them thanks to which we can call all three species to our side during attacks on the outposts of the three Piglin factions.
In the early stages you only have Golems at your disposal, cute creatures made of wood, slime or rock created through Foresight, Knowledge and Action that require few resources to create. With the addition of Creepers, Zombies and Skeletons, the battles become decidedly more interesting and we must admit that their strength and endurance represented a solid help even in the most complex outposts, but obviously the cost in terms of resources to create them It is undoubtedly older. . Skeletons, for example, require diamonds to be called into battle, the most valuable resource in the game.
Finally, helping us in this war against the Piglins are the Giants which, once discovered and assembled, will join us in battle permanently. Unlike Golems and Creepers which are “single use” and infinitely replicable as long as you have the resources to do so, Giants are practically immortal and if they fall during an assault they will come back to life every time we return to a village or village. .main center. Finally, in the latter it is possible to manage the improvements of Minecraft Legends, thus obtaining a greater inventory capacity or the possibility of deploying a greater number of creatures in battle.
Union make force
The Minecraft Legends campaign certainly surprised us, both for its longevity and for the numerous mechanics put into play; In order not to fall into repetitiveness, Mojang has found the right balance between attacks on Piglin's outposts, the real objective of the game, and the defensive phases of the villages, a kind of secondary, random and timed missions. What might have seemed like an extended tutorial to prepare us for PvP battles turned out to be pretty solid content and fun to complete. Obviously, once all the modalities have been tried, the race to free the Overworld from the Piglins is quite schematic, finding us fighting against three fortresses per faction and a relative final boss for each Horde.
To cushion this rather repetitive cycle there is the possibility of freely explore the game map, which offers not only resource deposits and defensive towers to discover, but also mounts for our Hero. The beauty of Minecraft, and consequently also of Minecraft Legends, is that you can do all of this with one or more friends, up to a maximum of four. There a cooperative It does not cancel out everything we have learned by playing alone but, on the contrary, manages to maintain an optimal balance, creating a shared inventory and therefore limiting the possibility of appearing in battle with duplicate resources.
Even the Golems or Creepers that will spawn before a battle are still limited, and the same goes for the Giants: all this manages to add an extra degree of challenge given that in two, or even four, we had to divide the troops and lead them . in different corners of the fortresses for an attack from multiple fronts. Playing with other players has therefore become a mechanic more capable of stratifying the offering rather than flattening it, making everything too easy. Minecraft Legends is, in fact, a full-blown strategy game, although it doesn't delve into the mechanics like Age of Empire or Total War do, for example. Mojang's title is simple and clean, appreciable also by that age group that has made this brand famous, but at the same time, fun even for those who have dedicated many hours to decidedly more challenging real-time strategies.
Blocks too big
However, we do not hide that this product is not exempt from some small defects that undermine an experience that aims to be light but without falling into the banal. The main fortresses, which are 9 in total, are located on Nether pillars, and to destroy all the defensive mechanisms or forges that create Piglin, we had to deal with Minecraft's imprecise pixels. To permanently eradicate an outpost, the Portal located on the highest pillar must be destroyed; In order to reach it we had to create stairs that connected all the surrounding platforms, taking into account that to build you must first "purify" the Nether.
As these are large areas, the recovery procedure can be quite long and thus slow down the pace of the game, in addition to a significant inaccuracy in the models that make up the stairs that allow us to reach the support point of the outpost. In our test we very often saw our troops fall off cliffs because the space available on the stairs or pillars was insufficient for our allies, which forced us to recover them by retracing what we had climbed up to that point; Therefore having to divide the Golems and Giants into small groups is not intended to be a game mechanic that increases the difficulty of the siege, but only a the problem which can be fatal in some collisions.
To dilute these inaccuracies that could lead to our early demise, there is the possibility of creating a structure capable of allowing us to be reborn near the outpost we are attacking. This allows us to return to the battlefield quickly, but the losses incurred by sending small divided units instead of a large offensive front of creatures unnecessarily prolongs the duration of the battle. Associated with this is the fact that generating golems or skeletons costs resources, increasingly rare if you want to have an army made up of the strongest units, which leads us, especially in confrontations with the Bosses of the different factions, to spend large amounts of iron and diamonds. Being able to arrive prepared at the most difficult outposts. You need to spend a lot of time destroying small Piglin outposts., randomly generated on the map, to collect the gold and other resources necessary to expand the capacity of our inventory and the number of allies to call under our banner.
The power of friendship
Minecraft Legends, however, not only has a rich campaign as an arrow in its bow and offers other modes capable of entertaining players for a long time. One of them is Lost legends, a PvE mode consisting of 20 waves of Piglins of increasing difficulty and intensity. As each wave is repelled, in the chest near the Fountain, you gain materials to repair damaged structures or to build even stronger buildings to repel enemies.
Currently there is only one map and the reward for completing it is represented by a set of armor to equip our Hero and our mount. This is a small sample and we believe that the support that this game will receive will lead to new weekly or monthly missions, to offer not only aesthetic rewards but also new adventures to undertake to keep interest in the title alive.
To complete the offer there is a section dedicated to PvP, with public or private games to compete with friends or online players in challenges from 1v1 to 4v4. The objective of these games is quite simple, but achieving it can be more complicated than you imagine. This mode requires a lot of strategy and collaboration between the players, dividing the tasks and executing them to perfection if you want to beat the other team: the members of the two teams will have to defend their base but also collect the necessary resources to strengthen yourself and generate a capable army. to break through enemy defenses.
Unfortunately, having played the title before the servers opened, we were unable to test the game under stress, but we have to admit that we probably PvP could prove to be the most rewarding and fun experience in the entire Minecraft Legends offering.. Although at the moment there is only one mode whose objective is to destroy the enemy base, the online sector has everything necessary to expand and integrate new functions capable of attracting users loyal to the brand.
Conclusions
Tested version Xbox Series X digital delivery Steam, playstation store, Xbox Store, Nintendo e-store, Windows Store Price 39,99 € Holygamerz.com 8.0 Readers (14) 8.6 your voteMinecraft Legends is a simple, but at the same time deep RTS, carefully designed to satisfy all palates, from players tempered by the most famous strategic players to the young talents of the world of video games who will be able to approach this genre in a lighter way. . path, between resplendent meadows and characters dear to them. Being the protagonist in battle, directing troops towards objectives or creating cannons capable of demolishing buildings, adds a touch of action that makes destroying Piglins really fun. There are some flaws due to the pixelated graphics that distinguish Minecraft and that make some battles difficult, while the technical front is solid on both PC and Xbox Series X. But the success of this parallel universe will be the multiplayer support, which is supported properly, you will certainly be able to gather an impressive number of players.
PRO
- Rich, action-packed campaign
- PvP with infinite potential
- Simple and intuitive game mechanics.
AGAINST
- Pixelated graphics become a problem in small areas
- Long-term support will be evaluated
