Minecraft Legends review 2024: unleash creativity and adventure

In the end, a good strategy game is one that lets you make choices. How many units to make, where to put resources, and what strategies to use. When you make the right choices, you win, but when you make the wrong ones, you have to change or lose badly. As we Played Minecraft Legends, Mojang and Blackbird Interactive’s simplified version of an action-RTS, we had to make these choices over and over again. It doesn’t always do a great job of making this often intimidating genre more accessible to a wider audience, but what makes Minecraft Legends work is how it mostly simplifies things without losing most of the important tactical moments.

Minecraft Legends: Description

One of the best things about Minecraft Legends is how easy it is to play. Evil Piglins from the Nether are invading, because that’s what evil Piglins do, and it’s your job to build up the forces needed to push them back. You’ll do this by exploring a procedurally generated continent for resources, allies, and secrets while destroying Piglin bases and protecting friendly settlements from invaders. There are no levels, and most of the story is just cutscenes that show when bigger Piglin forces are coming.

Once you have gotten rid of all the Piglins, the game is over, and you can start over on a new map. The famous blocky style of Minecraft has been used in a lot of spin-offs and adaptations by now, but it’s still done very well here. The landscapes, NPCs, and ore blocks are all the same as in the main Minecraft series, so the whole world looks like it was taken right from there.

Minecraft Legends: Pros and Cons

System Requirements

Minecraft Legends: Strategic Retreat

Legends doesn’t call itself a real-time strategy game. Instead, it calls itself a “action strategy” game because I control my own hero character and command my units from the ground, not from a godlike RTS point of view. In the end, Legends has a style of combat that is bad for both action and strategy. It requires a lot of micromanagement but doesn’t have much depth in terms of strategy.

The only “action” in this fight is pressing a single button to swing my sword back and forth, tickling piglins away from my defensive structures. The strategy part is worse: it’s a never-ending escort mission where I have to take care of my own armies like a helicopter parent. To start controlling the units we have built we have to stand near them, press Q, and wave my command flag to get creatures in a small area around me to follow me. we can “lure” up to 15 monsters at once, and I can tell them to attack a single target or gather in a certain place.

We can make orders that are a little bit more specific by telling only ranged mobs to attack an enemy with a lava launcher and telling my cobblestone golems to defend a hole in my outer wall. However, both orders only work for the few units we have already lured to me. If we want to send them in a different direction, we have to ride over, wave my flag to get as many of them as I can, and then ride away. There is no way to speed up this process that can be seen from above. Many small piglin outposts require me to build ramps so that my mobs can get to enemy structures. When they get knocked off a platform, they often stand around aimlessly under a ramp, so we have to lead them back to their target.

Rally Your Troops and Fight

After building walls and putting up defenses around the buildings, it’s time to stop the Piglins from coming in. Allays can also build spawners that make different golems that players can control and rally. Each golem is unique in its own way. For example, stone golems are strong and can be used to bring down big buildings. In the same way, wood golems are archers who can fight from a distance.

As the game goes on, players unlock more golems to help them in battle, such as moss golems, which remove debuffs from your unit, and iron golems, which charge at your enemies. At first, all of the players can only build a total of 20 golems. As the game goes on, though, this number goes up. But you have to make changes at the “Well of Fate” to make the same thing happen. The game also lets players bring together classic Minecraft mobs like skeleton archers, farmer zombies, and even creepers. And, later on, even set up their own spawners.

Minecraft Legends: Gameplay

In many ways, Minecraft Legends seems more ambitious than Minecraft Dungeons, which was inspired by Diablo. Even though it’s easy to see how Minecraft Dungeons got its ideas from other games, Legends is much harder to explain. It’s a lot like Pikmin, with some Dragon Quest Builders and StarCraft elements thrown in for good measure. But Legends only mixes genres on the surface level; it doesn’t do any one thing well.

It’s too bad, because the game gets off to a good start. Action, Foresight, and Knowledge, who are always around, pull your avatar into their world to help fight the Piglins, who have started attacking the Overworld. All of the voices of the celestial beings are done in a nice way, and they take you through a short tutorial where they teach you how to build, gather resources, and summon Golems to lead into battle. Soon after that, you fight the Piglins while protecting villages and learning how to build walls and weapons for defense.

With these basics in place, Minecraft Legends just stops helping. It’s not that Xbox Game Studios took off the training wheels. Instead, they barely put them on before loading the player into the car and leaving them on a grassy hill. Not only does the game not explain important parts of how to play, but it also keeps throwing new information and requests at you without telling you what they are for.

Minecraft Legends: Unsound foundations

Kingdom Under Fire 2 was one of the worst MMORTS I ever played. Even though KOF2 had a lot of problems, I liked how it mixed mob-mowing like Dynasty Warriors with a simplified strategy system. I could zoom in for action hotbar combat or zoom out to quickly give orders to my units across the battlefield. I really wish that Minecraft Legends had tried to add a command view for strategy. Even though I didn’t have many tactical options, I might have had more fun if I didn’t have to give so many orders.

I haven’t even talked about how to upgrade structures because there is not much to it. At the center of the map, I can spend resources to build structures that increase the amount of different materials I can store, the number of mobs I can build and lure, and the number of area-of-effect towers that will freeze or knock back enemies. None of these things make the action more fun or the strategy smarter, though.

Minecraft Legends also has co-op and PvP modes, so I brought in fellow PC Gamer writer Mollie Taylor to help me destroy Horde of the Bastion fortresses. Unfortunately, co-op Minecraft Legends only fixes the game’s problems in the same way that most co-op games do: by giving you someone to talk to when things get boring. Together, we had a little more control over our mobs, but we still had to play stressed-out preschool teachers, and being a team didn’t change the fact that we both didn’t like how simple the combat was.

Final Words

At best, Minecraft Legends on Switch is an average game, but the controls are hard to use, the AI is bad, and the gameplay is repetitive. All of these things make the game feel much worse than other Minecraft games. Even though we applaud the creators for trying something new, this is by far Mojang’s worst Minecraft spinoff. Only the most dedicated Minecraft fans should get this one, and even then, only if they choose the PC version. If you don’t have a PC or don’t want Minecraft there, we don’t think it’s worth your time or money to buy Minecraft Legends for the Switch.

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