'Minecraft Dungeons' aims to be more than 'baby's first Diablo'

Two great games play great together. It works! Mostly.

May 27, 2020

'Minecraft Dungeons' aims to be more than 'baby's first Diablo'

The simple pitch for Minecraft Dungeons goes something like this: Two great games play great together. It works! Mostly.

If you're a fan of Minecraft but haven't heard about Dungeons, an explanation is in order. It's blocky Diablo, a game of crawling through dungeons and striking down monsters in hopes of scoring some sweet, deadly loot. The camera hangs overhead, giving you a wide view of the terrain as you smash and plunder your way to ever-more-powerful heights.

That's the idea. The reality falls pretty close to that, too. If you've ever played Diablo, its sequels, or any of the games like them (such as Torchlight or Titan Quest), you'll feel right at home. This is Minecraft without the mining, or the crafting.

Instead, you fight. There are hordes of blocky monsters, or "mobs" for those who prefer the Minecraft lexicon, waiting to surround your hero and chip away at their health. You'll probably die a fair amount as the game goes on, especially if you don't keep up with all the gear you collect. That's the whole premise, really: Fight, loot, improve, repeat.

Minecraft Dungeons is blocky Diablo.

Death isn't the end in Dungeons. It's not even much of a setback. Yeah, you'll lose all your progress in a particular mission if you exhaust all three of the lives you start with. But the only penalty is having to start over — and crucially, any gear you've looted before that final death sticks with you.

Having to restart does start to feel like a chore later on, as you replay missions again and again. It sucks to exhaust all your lives once you get to the boss and then begin your climb anew. But getting to keep all your loot and all your newly amassed power means you're in a better spot for the next run.

The loot you collect is your ticket to tackling harder challenges. Each melee weapon, ranged weapon, suit of armor, and "artifact" (limited-use items that let you do things like heal or summon lightning) has a score attached to it. Averaging out the scores on all your equipped pieces of gear gives you your character's power level. That, in turn, helps you suss out which levels of difficulty you can realistically manage as you jump into a new stage.

Your first time running through Minecraft Dungeons' 11 missions is meant to be straightforward. You're greeted by a mission screen that shows you a sliding difficulty scale. The recommended power for each mission goes up as you crank the difficulty higher, but so too does the quality of the loot you find.

A mission select screen reveals all of the gear-drop information.

In the early stages of the game, all you need to care about is taking on levels of difficulty that your overall power level matches or exceeds. A first play-through of the story will probably be short, lasting no more than 5 to 10 hours. But as you play, you'll see each mission select screen slowly fill with more info on which gear and artifacts you can potentially find there.

The point is to run through these missions again and again, eventually getting to the point where you're targeting specific destinations because you want to hunt down certain pieces of gear. But experimentation is the key in your march to the eventual loot hunt. You're supposed to use your early experiences try out all the different pieces of loot you get, so you're better equipped to decide what you want to chase later.

The loot you collect is your ticket to tackling harder challenges.

Then there are enchantments, which add another layer of personal strategy to the later stages of the game. Each weapon or suit of armor you collect has one, two, or three tiers of upgrades you can purchase. These upgrades typically have meaningful effects, like healing you by a certain amount with each kill, applying status effects to some attacks, or reducing the amount of damage you take.

It works like this: While you're fighting monsters and gathering loot, you're also earning experience. Earn enough and your character gains a level (not to be confused with the gear-dependent power level). Each character level earned nets you one enchantment point. You then spend those points to unlock (and eventually improve) one enchantment from a selection of them on each piece of gear.

All that gear is meant to be disposable. A "power level 11" sword that served you well early on isn't going to be worth anything once you've got gear dropping at higher levels. So you're constantly swapping in new, more powerful loot. You don't need to dispose of the old stuff. But it piles up fast, and the "salvage" command in your inventory menu gets you some gems that you can then spend on more gear from the Farm — your home base.

The ability to salvage obsolete pieces of gear is also important because of those enchantments I mentioned. You can get back all the points you've invested in one item or another when you destroy it. So as you're forever swapping in new, more powerful equipment, you're also forever recycling your pool of enchantment points. It makes experimenting with new combinations of gear and enchantments that much more appealing.

The inventory screen in 'Minecraft Dungeons' is clear and easy to read.

You can only pick one enchantment for each tier — it locks once you do. But you can refund all your invested points by salvaging old gear.

If this sounds like it's getting a bit too complicated, don't worry. The most complex systems in Minecraft Dungeons don't become necessary until later on, and getting a handle on all of it is fairly intuitive and learn-as-you-go. Menus that seem confusing at first quickly become familiar thanks to brightly colored button prompts and easy-to-grasp iconography.

That means when you feel like you're hitting a wall even though your overall gear level is at the right number, it will seem natural and not at all scary to try out new equipment. The same kind of need also drives you toward enchantments, or even replays of earlier missions where you can hunt down improved versions of your favored gear, all thanks to highly visible and clearly marked information on each menu.

Like any Diablo-inspired game worth its 1s and 0s, Minecraft Dungeons is meant to be replayed. The first time you clear all 11 missions, a higher "Adventure" difficulty unlocks, ratcheting up the power-level requirements — and the quality of loot drops — across the board. Clear out the 11 missions again on that higher setting and you'll unlock the final "Apocalypse" difficulty that once again scales up the overall level of challenge and rewards received.

(For Diablo fans specifically, Adventure and Apocalypse are analogous with the Blizzard game's "Torment" levels.)

The overall framework comes together well enough, but in its launch form it feels like the risk/reward levers could use some tweaks in post-release patches. The missions in Minecraft Dungeons are just too long compared to the relatively small amount of loot that drops as you play. You can offset that limitation by spending your gems on random gear and artifacts from the Farm. But those gems disappear quickly even if you're on top of cleaning out your inventory regularly. The invisible string-puller responsible for doling out your rewards feels a bit too stingy.

Minecraft Dungeons also runs into another problem that's common within this sub-genre: The combat lacks complexity, thanks to what feels like a limited number of weapons, artifacts, and enchantments that seem to actually be useful. Yes, you're meant to experiment. But one of the big things you learn from that process is what to ignore. Not because they don't fit your particular play style, but rather because there's not enough depth in the very button mash-y combat to make certain weapons, armor, and upgrades genuinely useful.

That's not to say there's no fun to be found; just that much of the supposed depth in the long-term investment game is actually an illusion. There's a whole segment of the loot pool that you'll simply ignore, and only after you discover it yourself through repeated, frustrating failures.

Even still, the best way to approach Minecraft Dungeons as a first-timer is to just play. The basics of hitting and shooting an array of familiar monsters is plenty entertaining on its own. It's great that the higher-level stuff is present (even if it needs some work), but none of it is necessary for basic enjoyment of the game. You just won't get as much out of Dungeons in the long run if the replay value isn't appealing.

But then, that's the whole point here. Minecraft Dungeons is very specifically riffing on a sub-genre of video game RPG that's meant to be replayed again and again. If that basic concept doesn't appeal to you, this isn't your kind of game. It's not enough to just like Minecraft; you've got to be into the package that Dungeons is peddling.

If your kid, or any other young one in your life, has played a ton of Minecraft and is ready to graduate to something a little more advanced, this is a great bridge game. It introduces one of the more popular and approachable RPG genres in modern video games, and it does so against the backdrop of Mojang Studios' familiar blocky landscapes.

Add to that the fact that you can get up to four players in a single game, online or off, and you're left with a compelling "baby's first Diablo" that also offers all-ages appeal. Minecraft Dungeons doesn't do much to change the game, and it stumbles in ways that threaten to push away longtime fans of the genre. But it's a compelling and entertaining mash-up that's hard to put down once you get into the groove.

Minecraft Dungeons is out for Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4, Windows, and Xbox One on May 26.