With the release of Minecraft Legends, Mojang’s franchise has proven its dynamism and flexibility.

We’ve gone from the classic block-building experience to an episodic narrative adventure, to a dungeon crawler and now a variation of a real-time strategy.

Each iteration has provided something different and enjoyable in the voxel universe, but equally stayed authentic to the source material.

And the same is true with Legends, a fascinating, open-ended approach to a genre that is typically viewed as quite niche. It’s quite a bold undertaking, actually.

The attempt here is to create a real-time strategy game on a scale that anyone can pick up and play. Quite the ask, but one the game actually manages to achieve its aims and run with them pretty well.

Base-building? Check. Resource gathering? That’s here too. Managing armies and sending them out into battle? You got it.

And the twist is you can also craft unique items that feel commonplace in the Minecraft world, like ramps and walls. But equally buildings that can serve you both defensively and offensively, like Arrow and Scatter Towers.

This overview specifically will look at the game’s campaign, which, to be honest, isn’t Minecraft Legend’s strength. This is a game meant for and designed to be played in multiplayer. It’s a game for teaming up with your buds, but equally to let you fight against them in a kind of MOBA style warfare.

That said, there is a campaign here to teach you the basics but also for you to take on increasingly difficult challenges and test your skills against an AI opponent. Or in this case, the Piglins.

See, the Piglins serve as almost a bit part in your fights against each other, but in the Campaign they’re threatening to destroy and take over everything, ripping apart the populace of the skeletons, zombies, and even the creepers.

Their armies plot in the day and attempt to overthrow defenseless villages by night, and so as a horseback hero (or a dodo if you’re so inclined) you have to protect the villages, building armaments to keep the Piglins out and forming a fighting force of Golems to repel them.

Interestingly, as you save certain creatures from the wrath of the Piglins, you can even summon them, creating your own armies of Creepers and Zombies if that’s more your bag.

But the aim is to traverse a semi open-world, moving between forests, peaks, swamps and tundras in a quest to gather up more resources, fight random hordes of Piglins and take on their imposing structures dotted all over the map.

These are shaded in various color types, indicating their difficulty, and as you get closer they’ll also have a skull rating, with the game telling you that perhaps you’re not ready to tackle it just yet.

So the campaign paces things well, trying not to let you jump too far ahead too quickly, but equally giving you just enough to go on to keep your interest, between the cut-scenes after victory over enemy towers, when you save villagers and create allies, and even when you’re roaming the world and encounter hidden secrets.

As a campaign goes, it’s decently sized, robust enough, very active and dynamic with things regularly happening and you’ll have a very good understanding of the game by the time you’re done with it. And of course, it’s better played with friends, of which you can have up to three others by your side and they don’t even need to be on the same platform!

Playing solo however, it will probably leave general RTS fans feeling a bit flat with its limitations and newcomers to the genre perhaps a little overwhelmed. This is RTS in its barest form, no doubt, but equally, for those who aren’t familiar with the grind, there’s quite a bit to take in from the outset.

But ultimately, this is Minecraft in an RTS form and that’s the most impressive thing about the game. Mojang have really managed to adapt it and keep it authentic. And it is so easy to pick up and play as you alternate between the four main building pillars at a tap of the D Button.

Once you’ve decided you’re going to go mining or build your structure, simply hold LT to position where you want your structure to go and release with RT. Frankly, RTS has never felt so comfortable and naturally suited to a controller and this is even accounting for Halo Wars.

But also for universal audiences. This is a great introductory game for those who might have heard about League of Legends or the Warhammer series and want to start simple, understand the flow of how these games work and then build their way up to an Age of Empires or a Smite.

You can even improve upon your own skills by building at your Well of Fate base and expand upon the tools and abilities that you have.

And as for the overworld, you’ll find yourself wanting to go off and explore, delving into its surprising size on the hunt for more minerals so you can build even more complex structures.

All that said, Minecraft Legends shines in multiplayer when you go head to head and into versus. You can host a game with just friends, join public lobbies and really test your skills against the best. And while the campaign has its rules and limitations, here you have the freedom to do whatever you please.

Your bases can be unlike anything you’ve ever seen in an RTS with stairs for days and walls overbearingly high. You and a friend can create just about anything you can imagine and create unique challenges for your enemies. This is the game’s real beauty and where the Minecraft generation will undoubtedly find their fun.

Which makes this an RTS/MOBA unlike any other. The Piglins, as mentioned, essentially serve as your fodder throughout, still dotted around the map, but the aim is still to wipe out your enemy and take out their defenses by any means necessary.

Sadly, I didn’t get to experience much multiplayer in the pre-launch phase but with our guides to follow and much more coverage, we’ll be expanding our thoughts on this in the weeks to come.

Speaking of, there’s one other aspect of the game we haven’t touched on yet – Lost Legends and the wider Marketplace. There’s already promise of new adventures every month, which means this will be a continually evolving and growing game.

The first campaign – The Portal Pile – is a fairly straight forward campaign where you fight off twenty waves of Piglins and protect the portal in your village from their onslaught. Do that, and you get a unique prize.

It just gives a taste of the sort of campaigns we might see in the game down the line. There’s also a marketplace set up ready for you to spend Minecoins on cosmetics and textures, so an ever expanding library of content (permanent and temporary) seems an almost certainty.

Minecraft Legends is a game set up for a long spell. And as it shoots straight into GamePass and has Cross-Play out of the gate with Switch, PC and PS5, it’s a game that’s not going to lose a playerbase anytime soon.

Do yourself a favor, play enough of the campaign to get a good feel for the content, the scope and possibilities of the game, and even to follow the fairly fun story. Then just get a regular band of friends together and play the heck out of this thing.

Minecraft Legends has the potential to be the online game this year and in years to follow. With the full backing of Microsoft and Mojang, a massive license driving it and influencing the genre in its own unique way, the sky is genuinely the limit here.

And perhaps the best part of it all, it could inspire a whole new generation of gamers to get into a genre they may have never considered or enjoyed before and experience a library of incredible games they may have missed. There’s absolutely nothing better than that.

Verdict

Minecraft Legends is a welcome introduction to the world of real-time strategy but equally adds its own distinct spin on things with its iconic style of building and creating. While the game’s campaign is dynamic, robust and generous, and there is a long-term setup for regular content additions, this is a game that lives, breathes, and thrives on multiplayer. Thankfully, with its inclusion in GamePass, brand recognition and synchronization across all formats, community is something it will never have to worry about and will encourage for years to come. 

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Pros

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Minecraft Legends releases April 18 on PC, Xbox, PlayStation and Switch

Code Kindly Provided by Microsoft for purposes of review

Played on Xbox Series X