Minecraft has finally, officially, released - after years in development, millions of sales, and millions more hours spent by players all around the world building, crafting, exploring and exploding. If there's ever a time to do an official review of the game, now is the time.



Out of all the games of 2011 - and arguably 2010 - Minecraft is the game that has most consumed my life. At the time of this writing I’ve built (or helped to build) four castles, two mansions, three pyramids, one railway network, one underground obisidian bunker, three farms, two skyway bridges, one landscaped garden in the middle of hell, and one 200:1 scale chess board with pieces so big you can see it from space. Despite this love for Minecraft, despite my overwhelming and stupidly constant desire to generate world after world after world to see what’s in there, I found myself approaching the idea of a formal, official “review” of the game with no small amount of confusion and trepidation.

You could probably count on one hand the amount of people on the internet who haven’t played Minecraft. I mean we’re talking about a game so staggeringly popular that even before its formal release, it sold literally millions of copies, and inspired its own inaugural annual convention. And now the game is “out”. “Released”. What does that even mean for Minecraft? Where does one approach a Minecraft review? Where does one even start?

This hill, of course.



The first thing every person does when they jump into Minecraft is build a castle. Whether it’s the comforting solidity of stone between you and the creepers, the constant saturation of medieval imagery from role-playing games seeping into our collective subconscious, or just some sort of bizarre genetic hard-wiring, the castle is Minecraft’s defining structure. Its one, perhaps only, constant. Everyone builds a castle.

So I built one, too: the fifth castle of my Minecraft career. With the release of 1.0, my friend’s Minecraft server came back up, promising an all-new world - another excitingly blank, undulating canvas of hills, valleys and all-new ravines to explore. A few minutes walk from the spawn, across a little river and next to a massive, tree-strewn swamp, I set my roots down and began construction on what would be another digital monument to my own insatiable lust for ridiculous sandbox games.

I quickly settled back into a familiar routine, slamming together a quick shelter out of dirt to hole up in for the night. Trees were punched down, wooden pickaxes were applied to open coal faces, torches crafted and carefully placed around the inside of this precarious hidey hole. A chest soon appeared in the corner, that all-important safeguard against the inevitability of death at the hands of an unheard-creeper ambush. Soon I had stone tools and was carving a pit into the earth from the safety of my shelter, seeking the boundless expanse of stone I would need to fulfil my dreams. I became a subterranean creature, returning to the surface only to sleep when other players on the server demanded the absence of nighttime to continue their activities unmolested, or to organise a trading deal with a fellow stranded survivor. Steak for stone? Don’t mind if I do.

Hearing the familiar click-pop-click of blocks being smashed, collected and re-arranged, my wife soon joined in and the castle became a collective project. A farm sprung up out the front, with squeals of delight as the animal-breeding mechanics were given a thorough testing, and frowns of concentration as the crop-sowing mechanic pages on the Minecraft wiki were given a reading. A second tower joined the first on the castle wall. Soon we had pointy roofs, and even flags made out of carefully-dyed-wool. The underground tunnels had expanded into a huge sprawling thing, a winding maze of gloomy warrens built in search of elusive diamonds and rattling skeletons. We were playing Minecraft, and it was... well, it was just like before, actually.



But hang on, this is meant to be 1.0, isn’t it? This is the final part of the much-touted Adventure Update, the patch designed to transform arguably the definitive world-building sandbox into a meaningful game. Why do I still feel like a kid in a box full of Lego, pottering around, making my own fun and trying to find things to keep myself busy with?

Probably because Minecraft is still a long way off being a proper game. In fact, if anything, this release version of Minecraft has done nothing but solidify its supremacy in the sandbox genre. These new additions are the bells and whistles, the trimming, the bug fixes, the spit-and-polish that comes from finally making enough money to get more than one person working on a game full time. With the release of 1.0, Minecraft feels complete - but not, really, any different than it was before.

Broadly speaking, the theory behind the Adventure Update was to cater to the people who struggle with a directionless sandbox. To give them an incentive to explore, to fight, to discover things. Unfortunately for those people who are in need of a purpose these incentives still, at their most base, spring from “because I want to” - you have to make your own direction. Minecraft is a world free of any real need or restriction, and direction without restriction makes a sandbox, not a game.



Additions like the Ender Dragon who literally lives at the nominal “End” of Minecraft provide an interesting goal to work towards, but the world hardly ends when the dragon is defeated - in fact he goes ahead and drops an egg (which will inevitably have some crafting use into the future) and since the whole battle is optional in the first place you’ll never have any reason to go there except to satisfy your own suicidal urges. The hunger bar, introduced in 1.8, is only a restriction in the most vague sense of the term, since you can never actually die from starvation, and getting your hunger meter back up to full is criminally easy whether you choose to do it by taking the time to set up a farm or just killing yourself so that you respawn back at your bed a few metres away, hunger bar now completely replenished.

NPC villages now inhabit the world, but they don’t do anything that would give you any reason to discover them. More crafting recipes and items are available than ever before, but the game’s continued abject lack of a tutorial system or the hinted-at-but-never-delivered quest system means that you will in all likelihood never discover them because Minecraft still, at its most fundamental, relies completely on the existence of third parties like wikis and YouTube “how-to” videos to stop players rage quitting out of frustration. The tutorial system (or lack thereof) is a huge problem: for a game which has, from day one, been criticised for its lack of player support, the fact that this still remains unaddressed in the final release years later is a massive failing on Mojang’s part.

In building my castle I had tried to play the game naturally, to start from scratch, to work my way through the game’s complex multi-layered progression tree of technology and discovery. I tried to put myself, as much as possible, in the shoes of somebody who has never played the game before, and yet all I found was that I fell into the same routine: think of something I want to do, look at the Minecraft wiki for a guide on how to do it (if I didn’t already know), and then chip away at it until it’s done. Rinse and repeat.

And for me, that’s okay - in fact, it’s more than okay. I love Minecraft. Every time I think I’ve found a new favourite game, something to sink hours into, it comes along and steals my heart away. For people like me, who enjoy it for what it is, this is the best release of Minecraft yet. Nearly everything works as intended, crafting mechanics are easier (mass production! yes!), combat is deeper and more tactical, and the game feels more complete, more polished, more whole than it has ever been before. And while I will probably never be able to identify with the sort of people who need direction to enjoy a game, I feel bad that this official release, which promised to create a real sense of purpose and “adventure” for them, has unfortunately failed to deliver.



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Texture pack used in these screenshots is Jolicraft - find out more in our Texture Pack Spotlight.