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GoldenfoxxPrime
145,858
TA Score for this game: 478
Posted on 11 May 12 at 19:35, Edited on 11 May 12 at 23:07 |
This review has 22 positive votes and 27 negative votes. Please log in to vote. |
Others have spoken about Minecraft as a whole, so I will not focus on the overall game. Rather, this will merely be my impressions based on having played the PC version for awhile... thus, this is more for players used to the PC version.
I first got into Minecraft only a couple of months ago (around March 2012), so in many ways playing on a v1.6 build is like going back to the dark ages. There doesn't seem to be a hunger bar yet. I'm only assuming that merely eating directly restores health in this environment, which is fine, but since food doesn't appear to stack, carrying around more than a few porkchops might well encumber any spelunking attempts.
The sprint function is also notably absent. My usual method of killing Creepers when I don't have a bow and arrows is to charge swing and then back up out of range. But without being able to run, I feel like I'm intentionally walking into a death trap even being around Creepers here.
My biggest complaint, however, is being unable to configure my controller buttons. I've never been a mouse-and-keyboard kind of player on PC, so I've used Minecontrol on my PC version so I could use my 360 gamepads when I play. My default configuration has been to set Y to jump, X to drop, and Right Joystick Button to Inventory. As a result, I'm constantly entering Inventory on the 360 version rather than jumping. This is the kind of game that absolutely necessitates a controller configuration option, as what feels right to Player One may not feel right at all to Player Two.
Another big problem is that, with the absence of a mouse, Mojang apparently felt it would best serve the player to have a crafting menu rather than a drag-and-drop box. One of the results of this is that the game flat out tells you what you can create at a given moment. This may take a good deal of fun out of the game for some people, the surprise of accidentally finding new constructs is a large portion of the fun of the game. But the bigger issue is that you have to go through a series of what feels (after playing the PC version for so long) like a series of extraneous motions just to create the simplest of items, such as sticks. And even then, there doesn't seem to be an Xbox equivalent of the shift click, either, which on the PC version automatically creates as many of an item as the player has ingredients to make. So if you have 64 pieces of wood and you want to make 4 stacks of sticks, you have to click for each set of four sticks you want.
Also kind of annoying is the tutorial tip box. Upon your first encounter with anything, from dirt to ores to cows to tools, a box pops up telling you what to do with it. Again, this may take some of the fun out of the game for new players, as learning what you can do with what items is part of the fun. But for anyone who has played the PC version for any length of time, the pop-up is in the way and slowing you down. I cannot understand why there wouldn't be an option to simply turn that off.
Another nugget of the PC version that I would like to have seen in some way incorporated here is the use of character skins. I've downloaded a considerable collection of custom skins from Marvel and DC characters to Muppets to Star Wars outfits to use in my PC versions, and I enjoy changing them up often. There doesn't appear to be any means of integrating it here, though, so it appears we're stuck with plain ol' Steve. At least this is merely a cosmetic issue, but since there are entire smartphone apps and websites dedicated to custom skin creation, a lot of potential players may be turned off by the seeming absence of the feature here.
Other than these issues, however, the game appears to be a mostly-intact port. It's certainly worth playing just so I can play Minecraft on my 50" flat screen rather than a computer monitor. All of the most basic things that make Minecraft so much fun to play are still here, and it would have been a difficult task to screw up so badly than Minecraft just ceased to be fun. This game is proof positive that great graphics aren't required to make a great game (in fact, much of the charm comes directly from the cheesy, pixelated 8-bit look--higher resolution might even ruin characters like the Creeper). Mutiplayer is present, although I haven't tried it yet, and this is massively important as the real reason I got into Minecraft was to be able to hang out with a large group of friends in a shared world. I believe this version only supports 8 players), but the restriction isn't game-breaking unless you're wanting to incorporate your entire 20-player PC server group here.
In short, if you're already playing the PC version, there isn't any great reason to move over to the 360 version, unless you have a separate group of friends with whom you wish to hang out. For new players, I'd still probably recommend just trying the PC version instead, at least until this version is caught up with the PC's current build. But it's Minecraft, and it's merely an earlier build and not a bad port, so I give it four stars just because of it's potential.
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