Minecraft Legends brings a fairly unique mix of action and strategy to Mojang’s famous cubed universe, in which you must defend the Overworld from a ravaging horde of interdimensional Piglin invaders. It’s quite fun in short bursts, too, but simplicity and repetition quickly set in, meaning those looking for an engaging strategy experience should probably best look elsewhere.
Where Legends shines is in the presentation of its roughly 15-hour-long single-player campaign, mostly incomprehensible from a plot perspective but full of cutscenes which are incredibly easy on the eyes. The Minecraft universe has come so far since its inception, and Mojang knows its audience well; the young and young-at-heart will happily play for hours on end, entranced.
Where it falls down (at least, for us) is in its simplistic gameplay. Outside of a simple melee attack, your avatar can’t directly influence combat. Instead, you guide them around the battlefield, recruiting troops and ordering them about. You need to be standing right on top of units to select them, which can be chaotic in the heat of combat. There is also no way of creating command groups or quickly selecting specific troop types, which compounds the issue.
Once wrangled, you can order your minions to attack an enemy structure or just point them in the right direction, and they will merrily fight on until they succeed or die trying. The forces under your command each have specialised roles (like destroying structures or healing allied units), around a dozen all told.
Once you get the hang of things, you will be besieging massive Piglin fortresses in some truly large-scale assaults, with all the tools at your disposal to drive the invaders out. It’s fun for a while, but the level of difficulty is relatively low, and the shine wears off quickly. Multiplayer provides more of a challenge for those so inclined, but again, control issues stop this from being anything more than a brief distraction.
Minecraft Legends lacks the strategic depth to entice genre veterans but could be a great place to get newcomers or younger audiences interested. It has a lot of heart and can be a good bit of fun, provided your expectations are properly calibrated.
