And the art is literally the only thing connecting Dungeons to Minecraft, you could swap out everything for Monopoly board pieces and retitle it The Day Uncle Pennybags Finally Snapped and it would work just as well.
Oh, the style functions as intended, sure, but there’s a reason why Minecraft projects only look impressive once they go past a certain size, ‘cos close up everything looks like it’s made from family pack sized boxes of Ricicles.
To base your spin off around something so incidental to the point of Minecraft is to spin right off it, out the garage and down a storm drain.Įssentially all Microsoft has done is slap Minecraft’s art style onto a completely unrelated game, and I’m pretty sure part of Minecraft’s identity lies in how it looks like absolute shit. It’s an isometric hack and slash dungeon crawler for up to four players, and while yes, there are swords in Minecraft, and yes, there are things you can hit with the sword in Minecraft, it was never more than an incidental hassle to make it all the more satisfying when you finally finished your roller coaster shaped like Nicki Minaj lying on her back or whatever your project was. In case I wasn’t making this clear, I believe there’s a fundamental issue with Minecraft Dungeons on the conceptual level.
But, you can’t just buy something and then keep it as it is forever, this isn’t a fucking art gallery, and so Minecraft Dungeons had to be made, a game that is the equivalent of moving your hand in a circular motion and going “ehhhhhh” because you feel obliged to say something, anything, to fill the silence.
Minecraft fans don’t want sequels that just repackage what they’ve already got and fuck up all the mods, they just want the odd content patch to add slightly taller iron fences and giraffes and pastry lamination and that’s a difficult thing to cut a pulse-pounding hype trailer around. It’s the model train set of the 21st century. What you gonna do, make a sequel that has twice as much functionally infinite content? Or built of slightly larger cubes? This isn’t like Halo or Gears of War, you can’t just slowly fade in the logo with an incremented number on the end and watch an auditorium of fanboys drench each other in come. So, the question remained, what to do with Minecraft? Minecraft is a pure sandbox creativity game set in an infinite number of randomly generated functionally infinite worlds. Choices matter except not really episodic adventure games are not the answer to everything, especially not questions like “How is Telltale Games going to unfuck itself.” Telltale Games came along and said “Hey, I know, let’s make a choices matter except not really episodic adventure game!” Oh piss off Telltale Games, you tried to turn my last colonic endoscopy video into a choices matter except not really episodic adventure game. So after Microsoft bought Minecraft they must have said “Ha ha, it’s mine all minecraft, and we got it away from Notch before he went too weird on us, now what shall we do with it?” And in reply the thoughtwaves of the Microsoft corporate hive mind emitted only cricket noises. We have a new merch store as well! Visit the store for brand new ZP merch. Want to watch Zero Punctuation ad-free? Sign-up for The Escapist + today and support your favorite content creators! This week on Zero Punctuation, Yahtzee reviews Minecraft Dungeons.