Before I give the rating and review of Minecraft Dungeons, I want to touch on my experience with the game. I got all the achievements in the game in just about 18 hours across the first two days of the game’s release. I played entirely in single player, so anything I say about the experience has no co-op perspective to it.Rating: 6.0
Minecraft Dungeons is a fun Diablo-style experience, with a solid hold on the basic gameplay mechanics and some unique twists. While the core experience is decent, I do have issues with certain parts of the experience, and while I praise the creativity of new mechanics, they also have some shortfalls that probably need to be addressed in patches or as new content comes out. The difficulty and complexity of the game felt all over the place and I felt it was often missing the mark of being a kids game or a game for the core audience.
What I Liked: I think that, by far, the best part of the game is the way you get to customize your gear as you level up. Each gear piece has one to three upgrade slots that have the same amount of potential upgrade choices. So the game gives you constraints to build within while still giving you a degree of freedom. Each upgrade is also given a rating of either common or epic, with epic upgrade costing one more point to upgrade at each level than commons. I experimented a lot with all the upgrades, and while I felt almost every upgrade had a place, probably more so in multiplayer, that some felt like must-haves, while others became automatic skips. Specifically, armor without the ability to deflect arrows felt extremely weak due to the extremely high amount of ranged attackers that the game tends to litter most levels with. There are also unique gear pieces that can drop that have one of these upgrades passively, which lets you build them into 4 ability items. In the super late game that hardcore grinders will achieve I believe that 2 sets of fully upgraded legendary gear will be optimal, one for melee oriented levels and boss fights, and one for the hordes of ranged enemies. This super late game would be around level 130-180 though, and I managed to 100% the experience at level 58, so this is really just a hypothetical of where the game will eventually build towards.
I will also touch on the fact that weapon and bow variations were actually fun to try out and had strengths and weaknesses. Every weapon type had different properties, ranges, and attack speeds, and I felt most had a niche that it could thrive in, minus single knives which are slow and short ranged, and the damage isn’t high enough to compensate for that, hammers are always better. I found hammers and spears useful throughout, and dual wielding knives ended up being my late-game go to with a lightning enchantment, that triggered often with the high attack speed. Bows similarly all had a different niche, long bows were high damage and had a charge feature, great for single target damage, and my preferred choice for the slot, but you could also easily run a high fire rate crossbow and have a blast. I also liked that I was constantly changing and upgrading instead of staying stagnant, although I think gear sets with bonuses for wearing all the pieces would be a positive thing in a later patch, as they are fun things to grind for and can make for fun and unique gameplay experiences.
The other thing I felt worked fairly well was the lack of a class system. This idea isn’t entirely novel, but the execution was fairly interesting. Instead of any sort of skill tree you instead had three item slots that you could put various abilities in. In multiplayer I am willing to bet that there is a fair degree of freedom in what kind of abilities you carry, as every member of the team can specialize and cover each other’s weaknesses. That said in single player I found myself gravitating towards a specific set of abilities to make the gameplay as comfortable as possible. Specifically, if you are going for 100% solo I recommend some sort of soul-based damage ability, a defensive ability, soul based healing or otherwise, I found the knock back ability fantastic here, and the speed boots, which I honestly think are maybe even more necessary than deflecting armor.
What I Didn’t Like:
As I said above, some gear upgrades felt pretty unhelpful the later I got, and I really gravitated towards having a specific upgrade set, sometimes at the cost of using weaker gear, because I believe I found what was more or less optimal for the single player experience. A few of the weaker ones include: and rolling ability that isn’t the fire one, which is fantastic for kiting enemies, the bow ability that makes your arrows split on impact, I found this much more lackluster than I had expected, and never used it after my first time with it, and any armor ability that competes against deflect, the slowing abilities, or the percent damage reduction ability. As you can see, armor abilities in particular I had very narrowed down by the end of my playthrough. Any healing ability on melee weapons and bows was a must take most of the time as well.
Additionally, with gear, the lack of different stats that other games in the genre have, and having health tied entirely to your armor slot really hurts the idea that you can be any class you want in my opinion. The developers clearly wanted to avoid making players grind gear that have not only specific upgrade trees, but also specific stats, but I think being able to specialize a little bit more by hunting down specific stats on gear sets would have been nice. Some of the gear upgrades are supposed to make up for this, but I feel they didn’t do quite enough in this regard. Another major issue I had was with the enemy design. Diablo 3 has this perfectly, enemies that are a threat, but also can be cut through with little fear when your build is good, also, enemies are often melee, and not individually threatening, even enemies with buffs. Minecraft Dungeons’ basic skeleton archer is, I believe, the most abundant enemy, and even keeping up with the best armor possible, typically dealt at least 25% of my health in a single shot, which is why I valued deflecting armor so highly. A creeper is actually a two hit death as well, and most of the bigger enemies and bosses were damage sponges that offered very little real threat as long as you just fought at range. Speaking of fighting at range, I found this to be the best way to play the game, which is a shame, because as I outlined in my positives, the melee weapon variation is actually really good and fun to mess with, and unless I had a hammer or spear I felt that melee fighting was often now worth engaging in, at least until I got my dual daggers on my apocalypse difficulty playthrough, which just happened to be absurdly good. Enemy design is also one of the reasons I think running speed boots when playing solo is necessary as well, there are so many things to dodge at all times, that being able to get a burst of speed just felt so much better.
I’m going to take a moment to talk about the big non-boss enemies here, and the final boss. Geomancers, while not big enemies according to the game, were easily the biggest threat in the whole experience, they summon explosive towers from a pretty long range, forcing you to be constantly vigilant. Paying attention in a video game is expected, but any interaction with geomancers involved instantly warped into me trying to find the best way to reach and kill them, easily my least favorite enemy I’ve ever faced in this genre of game, too gameplay warping. Endermen are extremely easy to beat and just take time, and that slowness really hurts the gameplay pace, because it isn’t even an engaging time consuming battle. Redstone Golems are massive damage sponges that offer virtually no threat, you just kite until they stop to summon traps, then you run in and whack them three or four times depending on your weapon, before you run away again, and with Endermen, they damage the gameplay pace. Summoners just throw walls of weak enemies in your way, I found that you can just stand between them and a wall and hit them constantly while the area of your attack wipes out all the summons, I will say that this might be a key enemy in idle leveling, but I haven’t tested that myself. Evokers are the hardest big enemy, they deal high damage at range, and summon fairly damaging faeries. Ultimately I found rushing them down with high damage to be the best option, and the faeries blocked arrows. Lastly, the final boss, who I found to be pretty easy when just dodging his really projected attacks and shooting arrows, and sadly, I found melee weapons to be a death sentence, which was disappointing, but almost all bosses played that way and are fairly easy.
Lastly, I would like to touch on map variety, or lack thereof, Diablo 3 is not a shining beacon of variety, as often times things are fairly predictable, but I found when playing levels multiple times that not only is the layout the same every time, but the enemy placement is too, except on apocalypse difficulty, which has slight layout differences from the easier difficulties but is otherwise the same every time within its own difficulty. This lack of variety really discourages replaying content as it just feels the same every time, and because muscle memory to a degree that I feel this kind of game should never quite reach.One Neutral Thing:
The last thing to touch on, that my feelings towards are neither here nor there, is the hub area. This little farm-tavern area is pleasant enough to go to between levels, and I like the target dummies that let you test out your dps between levels to find your best build, these are always appreciated. There are two merchants as well, one for gear, and one for abilities, each one gives items at a power level range based on what your character level is, and price scales similarly. The downside with the merchants is that every purchase is entirely random, so to get something specific that you are looking for could require a number of purchases, although with fairly low prices for buying, and fairly good monetary return for destroying unwanted items, I never had money issues. That said, this area felt a little too empty to me, I think adding more npcs every time you complete an area would have been a really great touch, not salespeople, just generic npcs, somebody in the tavern, somebody farming, a guy sitting under a tree, just so it feels less lonely. I am holding off on immediately naming this as a downside though, as I have a feeling more npcs will likely come with patches or dlc, although they may just not be catering to solo players and assuming the area will feel lively to everybody playing in groups.
Conclusion:
I know I have a lot of critiques for this game, it probably sounds like I am overshooting by giving this game a 6, and that I really feel that it is a 3 or a 4, but I genuinely had fun playing this in spite of all my issues. I think the enemy design is the real black hole in the experience, as it trickles over into my issues with different parts of the games. Specifically, if enemy design was better certain gear upgrades might not feel so necessary, and allow for more variety, and melee combat could be more viable, even ability variety may be easier to lean towards. I will say that I think the developers leaned way too far into the expectations that gamers would be playing this in parties, as this genre appeals to a lot of solo grinders, and I think that’s where some of the imbalances probably come from. I am prepared to raise this rating in the future however, as I do have a feeling that patches and dlc could really help this game reach the potential that I believe it has.Was I too harsh? Are geomancers really the worst thing in the genre? Did you find an awesome build with a single dagger? Let me know, I would really love to hear your thoughts and these topics and the game in general, and check back for more game reviews, other gaming content, and of course, kpop articles.