Minecraft Review

Many a time has the Sarge recommended Minecraft to a friend and many a time has it been dismissed as "a stupid Lego game." But it is so much more than that.
You see, Minecraft is not only a game, it's your very own world. You can cultivate crops, explore dungeons an build anything you can imagine. As a matter if fact, the only limits the game has is your imagination. So to help clear the air, I decided to write about my experience with Minecraft, and how it is so much more than the sum of its parts.

When you first start Minecraft, you are simply dropped in the middle of nowhere. The cube like environment may seem alien at first, but what appears to be a simplistic graphics engine hides a much more intricate game. If you're going to survive, you are going to need to craft. Crafting works much like how you would expect it. Grab some wood, make a sword, make a pick axe and start digging your shelter out. To start, this is a survival game. Once the sun sets, the monsters come out and if you're not in shelter, you're in for a hell of a fight.

After a few nights of survival, you start to understand how things work and start branching out by exploring the vast, random generated world. Soon the survival aspect fades and it becomes a construction game. You start dreaming up a house, which then becomes a base, then a fortress. If you can think it and have the patience to mine the materials, the sky's the limit. After building, the game becomes a farm management game, or a hunting game. The versatility in its gameplay is one of Minecrafts many strengths.

Which leads me to the graphics. The blocky 8-bit style of the game can be seen as both a strength and a weakness. The strength is that it allows you to create your own world block by block, the weakness is that some may find it off putting. This leads to what I perceive as Minecrafts main problem, it's unique style leads it to be judged by its cover, not so much it's substance.

This is a shame and what I try to tell my fellow gamers. Drop the Lego attitude, Minecraft is a perfect way to drop the browns and greys of the war games, and add some color into your game world. It's not about fighting on the ground or blasting away the sky. It's about letting the inner child in you come out while appealing to your adult gamer.

It's great to see a game that's not limited to the system you play it on, it's only limited by what you can dream up.

So What's it Like?

Well I would say Little Big Planet + The Sims + Skyrim + Lego = Minecraft

I give it 8.5/10

Time to lock down before the creepers come out!

-Sarge