Weekly Game Review: Minecraft

Weekly Game Review: Minecraft

Tristian Richardson, author

Minecraft is a very popular game and is well known among the gaming community. The game was originally put out all the way back in May 2009. When the game was released, it took the gaming community by storm and went through several reworks. The game is almost not the same from original version. Over time, they added different biomes, added different materials, and vastly changed the combat system. All the while, it became a cult classic with a massive following.This game is always updated with more content, which keeps bringing people back.

The game is quite simple. You drop in as a guy named “Steve” by the fanbase. You can get different types of characters but the most common one and well known one is Steve. The game doesn’t really have a traditional save system. You make “worlds” in which you can do pretty much anything. The game is that you get different resources, such as different types of wood, dirt, cobblestone/stone, and much more. Some, mostly ores, you need to refine into ingots in order to use.

After you get 9 diamonds, any type of ingot, or a few other resources you can refine it into a cube to save storage space. A stack is 64 of anything since 64 is the max you can put of the same resource in a space somewhere. So, refining into cubes may not save space sort term, but if you’ve got a few stacks it will save some room. You can place blocks down and make a house out of different blocks of resources you collected. The most common house are made out of wood, sometimes with or entirely out of cobblestone.

Another way to use resources is crafting. You can craft anything from wooden planks, and equipment like gear for journeys or crafting stations that help maintain/improve your gear or simply make new gear. Some gear helps speed up stuff; axes, for example,  help chop wood and pickaxes help mine. You do need certain gear to do certain jobs or variants of jobs. For example, you need a crafting table to craft most stuff, and certain ore can be only mined with certain pickaxes.

You can travel to three places, that all do bear different stuff. You start in the over world, then naturally you can go to the Nether which is a little harder and has different resources to tap into, and the final section is called “The End”. Its an end game zone that harbors the toughest enemies, and has the final boss called the “Ender Dragon,” which leads me to the next section.

The whole time you are gathering resources, you are always preparing for harder creatures. The endgame boss that signals you “beat” the game is the Ender Dragon. Now, this has no story nor end, just the Ender Dragon is the hardest enemy. Realistically, by the time you get to him and win, the world is drained of  most resources besides water, with maybe others such as wood, food, stone, and dirt. This encourages players to do one of two things: either go into creative and get infinite resources, or make a new world and restart.

It’s always safe to have extra gear and resources at your disposal. You do need to secure it and make sure you can always get to it. Since this is a survival game, all of what you are carrying will auto drop upon death and will eventually disappear if you don’t pick it up in a certain amount of time. You do come back alive, besides in hardcore worlds where you have only one life.

Let’s describe some of the worlds. The main world, lets just call it earth, is the easiest place to survive in. It has villages, almost all the resources you can get it and all of what you need. It is basic and simple. It does serve as the middle ground for the nether and the end unless you do cheats or whatever. Next is the nether. You need skill to survive here. It has a ton of lava, and harder enemies. You will need an nether portal to travel back and forth between earth and the nether, which you can build the portal. Next up is the End and it is the end game place. Just getting there will be difficult since you need to find a portal and get a few things to activate it. Once you are there, you are there until you or The Ender dragon is dead. Bring high end gear for that epic battle. The nether and earth are the same size, which depends on what you picked for size starting out. The end stays the same no matter how big you choose the others to be.

This game is a well put together game and does deserve to go further than it has, even though it is among the most popular games of all time. I do play it, but it is not fully my type of game. I kind of just play when I have nothing better to do. This was most people’s childhood game, and loads of people made a ton of friendships here. Hope to see this game still get support far down the road.