This legend leaves out Minecraft’s spirit of invention and creativity.
Minecraft Legends captures the flavor of standard Minecraft well: the action strategy spinoff has a new but familiar art style, a colorful world full of creatures, and a procedural map to explore. It doesn’t bring along Minecraft’s substance, though, and the result is a genre mashup that’s disappointing as an action game and as a strategy game.
I start out in Minecraft Legends as I would in normal Minecraft: exploring different biomes—forests, badlands, swamps, and tundras, but no caves, sorry—and collecting resources for things I want to build. I direct my Allay friends to mine coal or iron or redstone, which automatically fills my resource meters. One Allay chips away at the edge of a nearby forest to collect 500 wood logs that I’ll use to build a perimeter wall around a village while another gathers a surface iron vein so I can erect a masonry building to upgrade those walls to stone.
My main goal is to defeat three factions of piglins who have escaped from the Nether to dominate the Overworld by crafting my own army of Minecraft mobs. Each night we defend the world’s villages from piglin attacks. By day I rebuild the defenses and then set out to make my own assault on piglin bases.
Building forts and village defenses is more utilitarian than aesthetic—sorry Minecraft build artists, this isn’t the game for us. I distribute arrow towers unevenly to meet attacking forces, squeeze carpenter huts for repairing other structures in between the pre-built homes of each village, and toss down my air missile redstone launcher wherever it can get the most reach. I abandon any remaining loyalty to symmetry by stringing together defensive walls at ugly angles, knowing full well that they’ll be battered down by piglin hordes at nightfall. I welcome that, even: the only way to remove misplaced walls is agonizingly post by single post so I’d rather leave the demolition work to my enemies.
The day ticks steadily away, faster than I realize at times because even while playing solo I’m not allowed to pause while in my menu, and each night the piglins may choose to attack one or more of the villages on my map. I prepare by building spawners for golems and skeletons which I can build new units from as needed. Waves of enemies arrive at night to overwhelm my village’s defenses and it’s at this point I realize how tragically bad the combat in Minecraft Legends is.
