Analysis of Minecraft Legends – AnaitGames

I don’t know what niche it covers Minecraft Legends, if you want to cover a niche, but the proposal is morrotuda: with the hyperpopular universe of Mojang as a base, Blackbird Interactive —a study raised by two of the founders of Relic, the study of Homeworld, Company of Heroes, Warhammer 40,000— Ride a real-time strategy game where you simultaneously explore a vast open world and lead something like an army to help the villagers fend off the increasingly insistent Piglins of the Underworld. For a few seconds, Minecraft Legends seems a bit more complex or even confusing than it should; as soon as the tutorial itself ends, the pieces start to fit together at great speed and suddenly you understand everything: if anything, maybe you miss an extra bit of complication, if that were the most direct way to reach the level of depth that seems to be expected in a real time strategy game.

The campaign, and almost any game for that matter, is easy to understand: basically it’s about finding and neutralizing enemy bases, initially harmless enough that you have all the time in the world to organize and mobilize your units (and to confuse you, if applicable; Minecraft Legends, more than most strategy games, leaves a lot of room for error, probably because it is aimed at a younger audience, although in general I think this extra friendliness is positive for all ages) but little by little harder to crack, with more elements to take into account when planning your strategy. You soon discover that sending all your units to slam at the same point, even though the interface tells you explicitly that this type of unit is better at destroying structures and that another works better against Piglins, is not a strategy; it’s a functional approach to the game for quite some time, yes, but it makes for painful and very unexciting games. If you give it a little attention, Minecraft Legends knows how to take its pieces in interesting directions from time to time; never a lot, never in a very brave way, but it does end up having a solidity that I personally did not expect: it gains weight without ever introducing more variables or pieces of the account. It has something of that purity of good multiplayer games, those that seem infinite without being more than jack, horse and king; it is far from the best for pure execution, but the intention seems to go there. Creativity remains in the background: here the thing is about squeezing, optimizing, taking advantage.

But it also has enough weak points so that they do not end up marking the experience more than necessary. Most of the solutions that have been applied to adapt the visual style to the new gameplay They seem more than enough to me; the most explicit could be that kind of cell shading with which you want to better differentiate the units, for example, to prevent them from blending into the environment when there are many, when the confrontations become massive and Minecraft Legends has a little sweat on its forehead to achieve the appropriate balance between the readability (necessary to be able to play, to understand what you are doing) and the chaos that the setting or the comic tone of the tanganas demand. Other ideas work much worse. The interface, far from facilitating interaction with the game, is confusing, uncomfortable and, forgive me for being vulgar, very ugly; using it is cumbersome, almost all of the processes are crude and imprecise and require your attention without really giving you anything in return, because you don’t even have the feeling that the shortcuts with which it tries to facilitate the execution of the most common actions are really useful nor do you It gives tools to micromanage your units at will. I’m reluctant to blame the controller, which has never been the best device for controlling a game of this genre: I’ve played enough of the equally recent GrimGrimoire OnceMore to know that there are more adventurous ways to design a controller control scheme in a game that is not exactly the same, I know, but not so different that you don’t think about it.

The idea, of course, is for Minecraft Legends to be played for a while: after the days that the campaign gives you, the competitive or cooperative games and especially the extra scenarios that are published, which are not campaigns as such but If they can afford to experiment and twist the game bases (there’s only one available right now), they have the potential to keep the flame alive for a while. It is uncomfortable, therefore, the feeling that the game comes out less polished than necessary, with rough edges that do it no good or help you become fond of this particular clash of universes or formulas; there’s a stark contrast between how much the RTS translations of some iconic Minecraft elements seem to have been thought through and how much they’ve been polished. I said about the niche at the beginning precisely for this reason: the point of complexity that it ends up reaching Minecraft Legends It requires a dedication that, without being overwhelming, would be much more appreciated if you didn’t notice how it scrapes every menu scroll, every Minecraft-inherited clumsiness, every questionable translation. And at the same time, there is the paradox, it is not so neither deep nor so brilliant as to make these weaknesses end up giving you the same. Thus, Blackbird Interactive’s game remains in an intermediate step that is always a little uncomfortable: I can’t help but find many of the things it does very pleasant and interesting, but at the same time it never takes them that far or develops well enough to be able to say that they have hit the target.

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