Minecraft Review

Windows/Mac

Ah, Minecraft.  The game people hate to love, and love to hate.  Most everyone who plays this game has a love/hate relationship with it.  Its seriously not a very good game, but its just so addictive!

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Premise:

Build anything you wish, but make sure you equip yourself to survive the onslaught of zombies, bow-wielding skeletons, and explosive creepers.

Randomly generated worlds give you a virtually endless amount of land to explore and conquer for your own!

Don't like playing alone?  Invite your friends to craft, survive, and build an endless empire together!

Don't care much for getting killed by monsters or dying?  Try creative mode, where all you need to worry about is creating anything your heart desires.

Visuals:

The visuals in Minecraft are...  Dated and boring to say the least.

Example of visuals

While the blocky art style and low-res textures are actually quite charming at times, the visuals are generally lackluster and bland.  Lighting is stale, environmental effects are almost non-existent, particle effects are boring, and shadow effects are nowhere to be found.

Water is also very bland and lifeless.  There are no reflections or waves to add character to bodies of water.

Be prepared for graphical glitches galore.  

Sound:

Terrible music direction.  The music doesn't match the game at all.  You are stuck with a piece of piano music playing indefinitely throught your entire gaming experience.  It is better to turn it off.  It would be nice if they could match the music to the environments you enter, but alas they did not.

No ambient sound.  You would think that a game about exploring and discovery would have moody environmental sounds.

Combat sounds are very corny.

Menus/Interface:

Menus and inventory work well enough.  My only gripe is with transferring items from your inventory into a chest, or vice-versa.  They should have some sort of 'Empty all' button on chests.

Main menu

Gameplay/Controls:

Another shortcoming of Minecraft.

Combat is uninspired and clunky.  There is absolutely no strategy to hitting enemies or dodging attacks.  It's like you're a drunkard bumbling about trying not to get hit, and just whacking anything that comes into your arm's reach.

While most games give you a dedicated run button, Minecraft's developers decide that pressing the walk button twice to run is a good idea.  News flash:  It doesn't work.

Absolutely no tutorials to get you started out.

Very little actual content.  They give you hundreds of items, but most of them have absolutely no utility and are used merely for decoration.

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Glitches/Optimization:

One of the most glitched games you will ever play.  Lighting glitches, slow loading glitches, areas not loading properly, and lots of lag in addition to a million other small annoying glitches.

Poor coding and terrible resource management make this game perform poorly despite its very simplistic graphics.

Summary:

A glitched mess of a game.  I expect more from a game which gets regular updates and has sold over 100 million copies worldwide.  BUT, for all this game does wrong, there is no denying the fun and appeal of the core concepts it explores.  This game is literally what you make of it.

Terrible game?  Yes.  Do I suggest you at least try it?  Yes.

A must-play game, despite its extreme lack of polish.  

SCORE:  7/10





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