Minecraft Review

Minecraft is a difficult game to begin to explain. It has no clear story or narrative to carry the gameplay, it’s graphics aren’t up to the shiny standards of most PC titles, you have no (helpful) entourage of NPC’s in which to support your single player adventures and no two worlds are the same due to the game generating uniquely random maps.

Such minimalism begs the question of how has this game become so massively popular? Thus far Minecraft has sold over two million units and netting creator Markus ‘Notch’ Persson a small fortune, and all through a game that was only released as a Beta four months ago and is still in the development phase.

What’s the secret to Minecraft’s success? The ability to allow you to do absolutely anything your imagination desires. Want to build a wooden Alpine lodge? Go for it? Fancy making a scale replica of the USS Enterprise or Titanic? By all means. Do you feel the burning intensity to craft a fifty metre high statue to celebrate male fertility and masculinity? Of course you do, it’s usually the first port of call to men of any age when put in a free rein environment.
The only real restricted limits that exist are the strength of your imagination, coupled with your graphics card and in ironic fashion, the sky.

One disadvantage of Minecraft still being in the development phase is that there is no tutorial, so as you spawn, you have a whole world at your fingertips, but no idea how to use it. Luckily, Minecraft has a dedicated community that is kind enough to have established an array of websites to solve this problem, the most significant site being the Minecraft wiki website which contains all the vital information you need to getting started.

Once you become aware that you hit trees with your bare block fists to gather wood, which can be refined into wooden panels, which in turn make a craft bench that allows you to create tools to make your harvesting quicker and easier and more efficient, you are away. Soon enough, you have a set of rudimentary tools and hopefully a wooden shelter.

Compared to most of the evil genius’ and double crossing team mates that are the bane of most contemporary video game protagonists, Minecraft’s most dastardly foe bears an uncanny resemblance to a cock and balls with a case of onset gangrene. No joke. The first run in with appropriately named ‘Creepers’ leaves an explosive impact as they silently glide over the landscape with the sole intent of ruining your time trying to find a shelter to hide from all the other assorted nasties hiding in the darkness.

However, Minecraft is not all about being beaten about by anti social creatures. The main purpose is to mine for materials that allow you to create better tools, a better home, better armour and generally cause you to spend anything between 4 and 12 hours holding down a left mouse button in order to get that last piece of diamond you need to finish off that incredibly shiny fireplace you’ve spent weeks working on.

Minecraft is a hugely complex game even if the premise is relatively simple. As mentioned above, the community for the game is huge. A leading reason why Minecraft is so popular comes down to the level of activity in the community towards modding. Minecraft can be seen as a pick and mix type of game with users freely able to give their in game avatars custom skins, select the most impressive looking texture pack and include a wide variety of extras from airplanes to pixies and dragons. Creator Notch utilizes such modding as a method to aid developing the quality of the game by incorporating fan-made elements such as a lighting mod and an upcoming piston mod into the nearly finished game to increase what users can accomplish.

Users can also share their homemade maps to show the world how they flexed their creative muscles and display what oozed out. The community has an expanding number of adventure role-playing maps that consist of mini adventures that the main game lacks. Shared through the main Minecraft forums, players can explore haunted villages, abandoned mines and even escape vast labyrinths. Most survival maps have back-stories which shows how a blank slate of a game can be harnessed by it’s users to create original narratives and build a world around them by hand and hard graft. And probably a few sneaky mods to speed up the process, but shh, it helps.

Minecraft is a video game that is unlike most other contemporary sandbox games that claim freedom, but secretly shape your real path behind the scenes. Minecraft throws those conventions out the window and leaves you to do whatever you want like an uncaring parent. You learn from your mistakes. If you burn yourself on lava, well, that’s your own fault don’t do it again.

The game has also manifested a few celebrity figures that use the game for making entertaining tutorial videos and full on adventures, namely Machinama’s Seananners, Captain Sparklez and British duo, The Yogscast whose videos can be found by rattling the above names into Youtube.

Minecraft isn’t a revolutionary game, but what it has succeeded in doing is offering a hugely impressive product that allows unlimited options on what you can do. Minecraft doesn’t condemn creativity, quite the opposite in fact. The game functions to make you work for the good stuff, no free rides in Minecraftia.

You can’t ‘complete’ the game in a traditional style similar to FPS’s or other narrative driven products. The objectives are simply what you make for yourself. It can take hours of hard mining and scouring to stumble across some of the rarer, more desired materials and you can lose even more hours to it if you feel like learning how to use the games red stone mechanic. The secret is to come prepared, have big plans and wild ideas and you can be guaranteed through the community mods and the vanilla version of the game you can make your deepest, most ambitious projects come true. Or make a giant dick sculpture, your choice.