Minecraft is kind of a hard game to review. But, it's out there, with a 15 dollar entry fee, and I feel obligated to weigh in on its polygonal expanses. For the uninitiated, Minecraft is a first-person sandbox game almost completely without a point. Seriously. This game ain't got no point. Framed in the primary single player experience you are Block Blockington, dropped in a mysterious world where skeletons and exploding zombies rule the night. During the day you rely on just your square fists and kickass goatee to harvest materials that will let you craft tools, harvest more materials, and build. Most of that is made up because I need some kind of context or else everything seems completely inconsequential.
Is... is the whole game this dark?
And that's pretty much Minecraft's M.O. throughout. You get only what you put into it and not a single block log or block pig more. It's probably the truest to the whole "sandbox" concept I've yet to see a game get short of MS Paint or, heck, an actual sandbox. No matter what, Liberty City will always be a sprawling cityscape, Sims will always be their yammering vapid selves, and the Wasteland will always be a blasted wilderness populated by mutants. But whatever world you're randomly dropped into in Minecraft will be just a bunch of trees and a beach unless you put fist to tree and begin to make your own story (my story took a while to get started, it took me a whole hour before I realized that you need to punch trees before you start actually making progress. I know. How silly of me.).
But seriously, the whole 15 dollar package here is pretty sparse. Granted, the game is currently in Alpha, but its also been that way for months. Any instructions, goals, and stories have been generated by individuals and the community that has taken this thing and ran with it admirably.
Seriously, some of the things I've seen while researching the game are fucking magnificent.
I've never really enjoyed the sandbox style approach to video games. Partially because I see it as a lazy way to extend the length of a game (unless used well like Just Cause or Oblivion), but mostly because I tend to find the freedom paralyzing. When the given the option to do literally anything, I can't choose and end up doing nothing. Whatever this says about me as a person, it keeps me from enjoying Minecraft. Could it be that this stems from a distinct lack of imagination or patience? It's certainly better than some ADD Call of Duty regurgitation, but that's really two ends of the spectrum, either too much story or none at all. Can't there be a happy medium?
It really bothers me that the thing keeping me from enjoying Minecraft is its greatest appeal. But at the same time, it also bothers me that Minecraft isn't really more than a 3D sprite editor at the moment. I need purpose. I need goals. I need something to make me care about this or my brain writes it off as a waste of time. I like the design and I like the concept presented here, but I just can't enjoy what amounts to shifting sand in a sandbox.
But it's one hell of a sandbox.
Minecraft gets a zero out of one.
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