Well pluck my tailfeathers and call me baldy, I did not expect to like this game as much as I did but as always, I like being pleasantly surprised. When I first fired up Minecraft Dungeons I was expecting some weird half-baked generic RPG in the Minecraft world, and I was not excited to try this out. Like, at all. I’ve never been remotely interested in Minecraft and I honestly dislike the blocky style it’s got going. Contradicting, I know, because I love old games and they’re all very pixelated. That said, from what little I’ve played of Minecraft this game doesn’t really exhibit any real Minecraft-y traits other than the art style, so I can’t help but wonder if this game would get any recognition if it didn’t have that. But I have to say that I still have a lot more fun playing it than I expected.

So the story of the game is that this Illager gets his hand on the orb of dominance and becomes the Arch-Illager. As you can guess, you’re a hero who decides to take him down and save the world. It’s not deep, and it doesn’t have to be. There’s a bad guy, and each area of the game features some sort of goal that you’ll complete to sytematically take him down little by little until you get to the final confrontation with him at this tower.

If there’s an overall theme the developer used when making this game, it’s to keep things simple and fun. You can pick this game up and learn the ins and outs within the first 2 areas and then just sit back and enjoy the rest of it for as long as you like. You start by picking a character skin, then you play through the tutorial, then off you go to adventure in areas ranging from the woods, to swamps, mines, desert temples, and more. As I mentioned earlier – as someone who really didn’t care for Minecraft’s art style, this game made me a believer and I really like it now. The animation is smooth, the worlds and characters are colorful, and the spell effects are this nice blend of blocky and flashy.

The gameplay itself is really simple, to the point where you can play this with your kids and they won’t get too angry or confused at how the systems work, but also this makes co-op really doable as well. It’s an action RPG with more emphasis on action than on min-maxing your gear and stats. Basically the gameplay consists running around and smacking stuff with one of the many weapons available. The levels are bite sized, about 15-20 minutes each, so they’re meant to be played repeatedly and at higher difficulties for better gear. Some people will find that really addictive, and others will feel like they’re just doing the same thing over and over again, which I can understand.

While adventuring, you get swarmed by enemies onscreen so there’s rolling, popping potions and special items, and the gear drops, while not frequent, are a little more meaningful. Since you’re only comparing a gear quality rating along with a couple other stats like bonus health and attack power, it’s going to only take you maybe a minute to gloss over what you just picked up to decide to equip or salvage it, then you’re back to playing. Mrs Controller and I played a lot of Diablo III co-op on the PS4 and while it was really fun, managing equipment mid-level was a giant time suck and it always felt like we were doing that more than playing. That’s pretty much eliminated in this game. While the action is fun, I’d have to say that I didn’t like the hit detection with some of the melee weapons. The sword in particular I felt like I had to get in really close – like dagger close – in order to land a hit. That’s just how it was designed though, so I got used to it. Also being a dungeon crawler, the artifacts are really fun and vary from shooting laser beams to summoning pets to fight with you, so healing totems and all that. However, it’s weird to me that there’s no real spellcasting. I don’t know if that’ll be added later on but you’ve got melee and ranged weapons, so why not add a wand or staff that allows for spellcasting? Just seems like an odd thing to omit.

Dying doesn’t carry a penalty but you do have limited lives before you get dropped back into town, doing the walk of shame to the blacksmith to desperately try to get new gear to try again.

The gear system is pretty simple as well – the most consideration you’ll give is to the enchantments that are on your main pieces of gear, those being a melee weapon, an armor, and a ranged weapon. Each one carries random enchantments on it, and each level you gain gives you an enchantment point to spend to enhance these. It’ll be everything from attack upgrades, to firing exploding arrows, my personal favorite of leaving a trail of fire behind when you roll, things like that. So depending on the enchantments on your gear, you can completely change how you’re playing, and it’s such a fun time. Finding that perfect combo of enchantments makes it hard to give up the gear you have, but when you finally decide to make the change, salvaging your gear gives you back all of those enchantment points to sink into the new gear.

As I said before, you have a gear rating and that dictates how much of a hard time you’ll have with whatever difficulty you want to play in. I found that if you’re undergeared for a difficulty, then game isn’t impossible, but you’ll definitely get your butt kicked in more often. Dying doesn’t carry a penalty but you do have limited lives before you get dropped back into town, doing the walk of shame to the blacksmith to desperately try to get new gear to try again. Speaking of, the blacksmith and trader will sell you a random gear drop. That’s really all the money in this game is for, so feel free to blow all your phat cash as you see fit. That said I do wish there was more use for the money you pick up. Some other uses, whether it’s unlocking item types or content or something could’ve fleshed out what feels like a really empty camp you always return back to. Whenever you’re dropped back at camp it always feels like there should be more there. Maybe there will be eventually but currently at launch, you’ve got a couple random gear vendors to buy from, a couple rooms to walk through, and that’s it.

The game’s main story doesn’t take long to get through but when your done, you’ll want to raise the difficulty and play through again. The rewards are better, enemies change and get nastier tricks, and you can try to find hidden levels and also find hidden runes that’ll unlock another area. DLC is already on the way, so I see this game having a really long shelf life. I have to say though that while you can play online or split screen with your friends, I was surprised that there’s no online matchmaking. Correct me if I’m wrong, but as far as I can tell you’re only able to play online with your buddies who also own the game. Which right now is fine if you’re playing on Xbox as it’s currently on the Game Pass.

So if you couldn’t tell already, I really dug this game and if you want something to play on co-op with your friends or family, or even just play by yourself and have something to mess around with, Minecraft Dungeons is a fun time. You can play it in short bursts or sink more time into this, and the simplified gameplay takes the less-is-more approach to dungeon crawling and in my opinion, makes for a fun game.