You've probably heard about a game called Minecraft. About the incredible things people have made in it. About the blocky, pixellated landscapes. About the tens of millions of euros that its rockstar developer Notch has earned from it.
Well it's finished. After about two years of development, huge amounts of media attention, and a business model that let people pay less cash to get an alpha or beta version that wasn't feature-complete, or even in some cases stable.
But if you're reading this, you probably don't care about any of that. You want to know whether it's worth shelling out £17 for. The answer is unequivocally yes. But it would cut the review rather short to stop there, so allow me a moment or two to convince you.
[Note: This is a review of the desktop version of Minecraft, available on PC, Mac and Linux. The mobile version, Minecraft Pocket Edition, is available on iOS and Android, and only includes the game's highly-limited creative mode.]
Mechanics
On a basic mechanical level, Minecraft is about two mouse buttons -- one breaks blocks, the other places them. You're dropped in a random spot in a procedurally-generated landscape, and tasked with surviving. To start with, that's not too tricky -- your pastoral paradise is full of shady trees, languid pools, rocky coastlines, herds of sheep and cows, and mountains that soar into the sky. But then night falls, and things change.
At night, aggressive zombies, skeletons and other monsters start to appear. If you're out in the open, the odds of you making it through the long, long night are slim. Instead, you need to spend the hours of daylight building a rudimentary shelter and creating tools to help you survive.
A basic technology tree begins to take shape -- collecting wood lets you make a crafting table, which lets you make a pickaxe, which lets you mine stone, which lets you create a furnace, which lets you smelt iron ore into iron, which lets you make a better pickaxe, and so on. I say "and so on" like the rest of it isn't worth worrying about, but it is -- the tendrils of Minecraft's complexity stretch as wide as circuit design, animal breeding, Indiana Jones-style raiding of sunken strongholds, cake-baking, and the construction of
huge, incredible structures (and their subsequent sharing on YouTube).
What makes Minecraft distinct from so many other videogames is that the vast bulk of your time is spent creating things, not killing and destroying. I'm as keen a fan of shooting aliens as any hardcore gamer, but Minecraft scratches a very different itch. There are enemies, but mostly they're a nuisance -- something in most cases to be avoided, if possible, rather than slain for points or progress. Occasionally they're a resource: You need to kill skeletons to get bones, to get bonemeal, to help grow trees. Perhaps there's a subtle environmental message to be found there.
In many cases, the real enemy in the game is the dark. What will kill you, more often than not, is running out of torches but just poking a little bit further down that tunnel. It's running for your paltry little shelter as the sun begins to set, and knowing you're not quite going to make it before the moon rises.
Stories
Minecraft is a game about stories, and every Minecraft player has them, from their very first night. You might know someone who's a big fan of the game, and they're constantly babbling about "that time when...".
Give Minecraft an hour, and you'll come away with 20 of those stories of your own.
That's a compliment for two significant reasons. The first is that a randomly-generated landscape can produce so many things that are worth talking about. Skyrim's vast open world is incredible, but it's a playground that someone has built for you. In Minecraft's open world, you're handed the tools, and you design the playground of your dreams. That can mean epic treehouses, sunken cities in glass domes under the sea, forts built into the side of a mountain, or even a house built in the shape of an enormous sheep.
The second reason that's a compliment is that a mere hour of play yields so much fun. Minecraft expands to fill the space available to it, so if you can only dedicate an hour or two a week to the game, you'll still be able to get some useful work done -- maybe reshaping the roof of your house, adding a conservatory, or exploring a small cave. A common misconception is that it takes over your life. It doesn't. It merely fills the bits of your life that you've got spare, and leaves you pleased you spent them that way.
Blocky
The graphics shouldn't be a turn-off for anyone. The blocky representations of sheep and pigs are far cuter than a real sheep would be, and the zombies are more scary. The game's most terrifying baddie -- the Creeper -- wouldn't be so scary if it was made of 10,000 polygons. Instead, your mind can fill in the gaps -- if you asked 20 Minecraft players to draw a more photorealistic Creeper, each would come out with a different idea, fuelled by their own internal terrors. The Creeper you see in your head is your own, and yours alone.
There are still the odd rough edges -- two in particular. The first is that there's a bit too much forced wandering around, hunting for scarce resources, to reach the endgame -- where you hunt down a final boss in an entirely different dimension, providing an end point if you want one. The other problem is that there's no in-game guide to how to create different objects, and few hints (beyond an achievements system) as to what it's possible to create. You need the Minecraft Wiki not only to find out how to play the game, but to find out what game there is to play.
Still, there's no suggestion that Minecraft's creators are going to stop or even slow down further development of the game -- its release merely represents a milestone in that process, where they feel that they're happy enough with it to call it "done", and where reviewers like me can finally assess it.
Finally, it'd be unfair not to mention Minecraft's incredible piano soundtrack, created by German electronic musician
C418. Most of the time, you won't hear it, you'll just hear the game's ambience -- moos, lava fizzles and the steady thud-thud-thud of a block being broken.
Occasionally, though, just as you're sailing along a broken coast, or climbing a hill at sunset, or returning to the surface after a tough day down your mine, the twinkly piano will kick in and there's no feeling like it. It's one of the touches of genius that will make you come back to the game again and again.
Conclusion
So should you buy Minecraft? Yes. If you don't, you're missing out on a real fairytale of indie videogames -- of the triumph of one guy, an
open design process and meticulous editing over the hundred-strong teams, focus groups and secrecy used in the development of triple-A titles. Great art invokes feelings, and Minecraft has feelings in spades -- you'll come away with shock, fear, pride, calm and a sense of incredible wonder at the your new blocky world. There's nothing else like it. Pick it up now.
Wired
Incredible open world with so much to do
Will inspire hundreds of stories
Beautiful twinkly soundtrack
Tired
Requires frequent reference to third-party information sources
Endgame isn't quite fleshed-out yet
Don't miss: Careers advice: What to do next in Minecraft and
Minecraft: Pocket Edition review
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
