HomeReviewsMinecraft Legends
A right piglin’s ear
Surveying the sprawling piglin outpost before me, a plan forms. With a flourish of button presses from my controller, I spawn a sizeable army of zombies. They’ll zomble their way up the main path, and with their high health pools they’ll cut into the vast piglin forces and buy me time. With another flourish a contingent of friendly creepers scuttles along behind me. I lead them on a flanking attack around the outpost, targeting their spawners while the main piglin army is occupied with my frontal assault. A masterpiece of tactical engineering!
Or it would have been, if my minions weren’t so bloody stupid. Half my zombies fell off the staircase they were climbing due to their terrible pathfinding, and burned up in the lava moat below. Meanwhile, I sent my creepers off to explode against the first spawner I found. Only one of them got there; the others relentlessly humped a wall they could easily have climbed, until Piglins surrounded and slaughtered them. I returned to my starting point with what remained of my army, a fair bit poorer in resources, and a great deal poorer in patience.
Behind the Look of Minecraft LegendsWatch on YouTube
Behind the Look of Minecraft Legends
I was dropped into the world next to the Well Of Fate, my base of operations throughout the campaign. It lay at the centre of an open world that was now entirely mine to explore, and this world looks truly beautiful. It’s very clearly Minecraftian in nature, but celshading and lighting works wonders at breathing new life into those familiar blocky vistas. As I cantered through forests and across rivers, I placed down chests, ordering friendly Allays to automatically gather particular resources like Wood and Stone while I rode on. No need to manually chop down trees here - a fact that I tried not to be disappointed about as I figured out what I was expected to do next.
The map in both the campaign and the PvP matches is procedurally generated each time, which theoretically leads to different experiences each time you play. It’s a pity there aren’t more biomes to discover.
It’s an interesting idea, forcing you to use your character to control your armies. It goes hand in hand with Mojang’s and Blackbird Interactive’s attempts to simplify the RTS genre and potentially offer young players a new way into it. And I do admire how Minecraft Legends' simplicity means all your commands can be handily mapped onto a controller. But this admiration paled in the face of my growing frustration at not being able to control my units with more precision. Tactics that are utterly simple to execute in a more traditional RTS are next to impossible in Minecraft Legends. Why isn’t there a way to control things on a larger scale? I feel hamstrung whenever I play, forced into the most rudimentary tactics and strategies because they’re the only ones that I can pull off with this simplified control scheme.
Most of the buildings you can create in Minecraft Legends are defence-oriented. There are walls, gates, arrow towers, carpenters to heal your buildings, kaboomeries to make arrows explode, and so on.
So I endeavoured to wipe out the piglins as quickly as possible so I didn’t have to waste more time building cookie-cutter defences around my villages. The sad truth is that over the course of my roughly 20-hour playthrough of the campaign, I mostly just amassed the same type of unit whenever I wanted to get anything done. The limited control I had meant the best course of action was pretty much always to build up a monotone army and lead them on hit and run attacks to destroy key buildings. At no point did the piglins ever come up with a response to this tactic. Their army would just mindlessly chase after me, never quite reaching me in order to do any damage. The only time I ever got in trouble was when my minions failed to obey my commands, or poor pathfinding meant they shoved each other off ledges and into awkward positions.
The Firsts, giant immortal golem minions, can be found dotted about the map and reactivated to help fight against the piglins.
Because of the various frustrations with building and fighting, I spent more time than necessary exploring the world. There are three important things you can find while exploring: 3 new mounts, 1 new tower type, and 4 unique special units called Firsts which will always remain with you, respawning whenever they die. What’s sad is that none of these things are tied to specific biomes, they’re just scattered all over the place. In regular old Minecraft, you journey to a biome because it houses what you need. Want bamboo or ocelots? Head to a jungle. Terracotta? Head to the Badlands. Lilpads? Swamp time. In Minecraft Legends, the biomes feel like a superficial skin stretched over the world. The only reason to go to one biome in particular is to pick up the one basic resource there - either iron, coal, redstone, or diamond - which are required to build more units and construct improvement structures back at the Well Of Fate. But all those resources are scattered in clumps all over those biomes in just about the most uninteresting way possible. Not exactly a good incentive for exploration.
It’s such a shame that they haven’t taken full advantage of the game’s connection to Big Daddy Minecraft. It could have been an entirely unique RTS with more of a focus on building and exploration than anything that’s come before it. The focus seems instead to have gone elsewhere. In fairness, the amount of polish that has gone into some parts of this game is really impressive. The animations are full of life, the world is vibrant and welcoming, the cinematics look great, the voice acting is… well, not my cup of tea, but it’s still done very well. It’s a real sadness that the game gets in its own way to the point where I haven’t been able to end a play session thinking, “well, that was fun”.
Unfortunately I wasn’t able to properly try out the PvP mode of Minecraft Legends, which is where Mojang are hoping the longevity lies. I hopped into a training match against an AI base on my own, just to see how it all worked, but didn’t stay in there for long. While the developers have said that the PvP mode can be enjoyed as just a 1v1 experience, I feel that’ll just lead to more frustration, because barely a minute into a match the piglins will start attacking your base, and you’ll find your time split between defence and resource gathering even more jarringly than in the campaign.
I’m sure that won’t be an issue if you can get some friends to join you, but I just can’t find the enthusiasm for it - not after 15-20 hours of the campaign. The map in PvP is absolutely miniscule, so exploration is even more meaningless than in the campaign. The focus is instead on building defenses and forward bases, and attacking your enemy’s Well Of Fate. Controlling my units was enough of a hassle in the relatively stress-free PvE campaign. I’d hate to think how frustrating it would become against a more intelligent player who you couldn’t simply trick into an endless game of duck-duck-goose around their base.
I’d highly recommend you bring at least one allied player with you when you play PvP, or it’ll quickly become a game of returning to base every 30 seconds to defend against piglin attacks.
I just don’t think Minecraft Legends is anything like as good as it could have been. There seems to be an absence of imagination in some areas of the game, and it hurt my enjoyment a lot. This is a Minecraft RTS! What if I wanted to play as the piglins? Nope. What if I want to delve into a cave and dig under the enemy’s base? Can’t do that. What about towers that throw splash potions, or lava? Nada. Can I summon an army of spiders that can climb walls? No. Can I build a base that’s multiple stories high instead of just one flat plane?Well, why the fuck not?!
All of this could be fixed with future updates, but I think the devs have built themselves into a corner with the fundamentals of Minecraft Legends. Adding more content and complexity won’t solve the issue of the awkward control scheme and lack of precision - something that all RTS games need in order to be great. I’m fully aware that this game is primarily aimed at a younger audience, potentially as a point of introduction to the RTS genre. At this, it could succeed. If you can get behind the controls and make peace with the fact that the tactics you’ll have to employ are likely even less complex than the button presses required to execute them, your minions will frequently kill themselves rather than obeying your commands, and your builds will all end up looking the same… Well, then you’re a more patient person than I am, and I’m sure you’ll find a fair bit to like about Minecraft Legends - as did I. But even then, I’m not convinced the game has enough staying power to keep its playerbase’s attention. Once you’ve seen one biome, one mount, one piglin outpost, one well-defended base, you’ve seen them all.
