Review #5: Minecraft

 So Minecraft: the best selling video game of all time. Huh. That feels so weird to think about, but it’s true, Minecraft has sold over 200 million copies. Welp, I should probably review it!

So Minecraft is a game about blocks and placing them and fighting creatures made out of blocks. It’s separated into three game modes: Survival, Creative, and Adventure. In Adventure, you just kinda walk around, and you can’t break blocks or anything like that. In Creative (my personal favorite game mode), you just build whatever wherever whenever, using any block in the game (accessible from a menu).

Survival is the real meat of the game, though. In it, you start with literally nothing in some stranded place out in the middle of nowhere. You should probably start with breaking trees apart with your bare hands and melting them into a crafting table, because that makes sense.

Doing this will allow you to produce tools and weapons (made out of wood and sticks at this stage in the game) and use them to destroy blocks. You can use the destroyed blocks to build a house for yourself. Or, if you’re like me, walk until you find a village, ransack it for all its crap, and “borrow” one of the villagers’ houses.

After you’re done building a house, the rest of the game plays out mostly by expanding your base and growing stronger by collecting more powerful materials to craft weapons and armor out of. Eventually, you’ll find obsidian, and you can use it to make a portal to the Nether (aka Hell). Inside, you can find CrAzY cOoL fortresses and kill everything inside to get blaze powder, as it’s called. You can use these to make potions and eyes of ender, which let you locate a stronghold.

In there, you’ll find a portal you must fill with more eyes of ender to ENDter the final area: The End. Inside, you must kill the final boss the Ender Dragon to jump into a fountain to read a trippy credits sequence (it makes more sense in context).

The game uses really neat random generation to make each world unique, but you can also use seeds (not for plants) to enter specific worlds. It’s a neat tool that makes Minecraft what it is.

The actual gameplay of Minecraft is relatively simple, in that you make stuff to kill stuff to make more stuff (incredibly oversimplified explanation). The combat is pretty simple, as all you do is swing, but it’s still fun. Plus, there’s tons of weapon types you can get, which makes experimenting with new equipment more fun!

There’s also two optional bosses you can fight in Minecraft (namely, the Wither and the Elder Guardian), but they’re both pretty easy.

So there was my crappy review of Minecraft. Overall, would I recommend it? Yes! Don’t let the fandom of insane rambling children scare you off, it’s a fantastic open world sandbox game.