At first glance, it can be difficult to pinpoint just what Minecraft Legends is or what to expect from it. It has all the familiar elements that fans have come to expect from Minecraft, including its resource-gathering and building gameplay core, blocky-but-beautiful landscapes, and procedurally generated underbelly that fuels the whole experience. But that is all simply the foundation of what Mojang considers to be an “action-strategy” game with Minecraft Legends.
“Action-strategy” is certainly a niche genre, with few titles to point to as pillars. As a flag-bearer of sorts for this smaller subset of games, Minecraft Legends will have players wage war on The Nether’s forces and stand side-by-side with an army of classic mobs that they built up in a series of grand battles. Players will also spend plenty of time planning, building, and strategizing their war effort to save the Overworld from the invading Piglins, much in the same vein as popular RTS games like Command and Conquer. Minecraft Legends attempts to do a lot with the influences that it's taking from and manages to be a compelling action-strategy game in its own right, but it does feel like it could have done more with its Minecraft foundations.
Like Minecraft Dungeons before it, Minecraft Legends keeps things light regarding the story. In short, the forces of The Nether have overrun the Overworld, and it's up to the player character to unite the Overworld’s citizens in the fight against the Piglin invaders. The story’s cast is small and comprised of three main characters named Foresight, Action, and Knowledge, who aid the player with brief exposition and general warnings about what is coming next in the Piglin invasion. As always, Minecraft is about the story that players tell organically, and Minecraft Legends does a great job of getting out of the player's way, so they can focus on those emergent story-telling moments.
In order to stave off the Piglin, players will have to bring the fight right to the enemy's bases by raising an army and creating an offensive front. There exists an almost Mount and Blade: Warband feel to Minecraft Legends, as players travel the world and turn former enemies into friends in an attempt to recruit them to their ranks. Zombies, skeletons, and creepers are all available to the player once they help each faction defend their homesteads against the Piglin invaders. The whole process of uniting the Overworld against a common enemy is tons of fun and makes for an amusing twist on how Minecraft fans interact with these once-dreaded mobs. It all comes together in a great way when the player puts this rag-tag army into action.
Moments like leading a huge charge against a Piglin base always feel like players are living out a scene from the Lord of the Rings. Or in other instances, players will nervously hunker down at a village in preparation for an incoming attack, hoping that everything they built to fortify this village holds through the attempted Piglin raid. Moments like these are constant in Minecraft Legends and regularly ground the player into the world without ever needing a narrator or NPC to tell players that the stakes are high.
As our time with the game progressed, we found ourselves genuinely caring about these now-familiar villages that we helped build, fortify, and defend day in and day out. All the while, we traveled between these towns and walked across old battlefields where the friends we made helped us take the fight to the Piglin bases. There are times in Minecraft Legends that felt truly epic in every sense of the word, and those instances are punctuated by moments that will make players feel proud and accomplished as they look back at the work they have put into saving the Overworld. It's quite a gratifying game to play and especially so once the credits roll and players can reflect on their time with it.
In terms of strategy, Minecraft Legends relies on the franchise’s staple gameplay loop of resource gathering, crafting, and base-building to outwit the Piglin invaders. The Piglin are a crafty bunch, consisting of three different hordes featuring different enemy types and architecture styles that players must consider when planning an attack. Players won’t be approaching the Horde of the Spore’s towering spires the same way they would the Horde of the Bastion’s multi-walled citadels, forcing players to think creatively about how and where they build while also considering the strengths and weaknesses of their militias. Players win by building the right things at the right spots and sending the right mobs at the right enemies. Discovering what works and what doesn’t and getting into the strategic groove of Minecraft Legends felt as good as any other real-time strategy game would.
As in-game days go on and players fight back the Piglin hordes, The Nether's invasion gradually begins to escalate. Bases get progressively more challenging to attack, and nighttime invasions grow longer with even more formidable enemies spawning at the tree lines. Minecraft Legends’ gameplay loop, which consists of this constant back-and-forth of enemy escalation and player response, does a great job of keeping the game fresh and interesting throughout its first half. However, throughout the closing chapters, it felt like Minecraft Legends had exhausted everything it had to offer, and the game was coasting on what it had taught the player in its opening hours.
A lot of the core gameplay loop of Minecraft Legends boils down to building walls, making sure those walls don’t break, and then directing an army to destroy a base and kill a boss. While the core of Minecraft’s traditional building and crafting mechanics are ingrained in Legends' DNA, it all felt very limited and like the development team could have dug deeper to make an even better strategy game. Once all the tools were unlocked and the full scale of the game became clear, there was a feeling that Legends missed an opportunity to incorporate some of Minecraft’s rich lineup of blocks, weapons, and Redstone mechanics to flesh out the game’s systems and create more things to build, see, do, and strategize over. All of this could have added layers of complexity and replayability in what feels like a very simple single-player experience.
Moreover, Minecraft Legends always felt like it was on the edge of growing its mechanics as players began to master them, but it never did. Players can't actually build any structures that aren't walls, gates, or ramps, and Minecraft staples like its various Redstone contraptions and terraforming are missing--effectively killing a lot of the imagination that the franchise is known for. Given what a traditional Minecraft experience is and how simply bringing up the name Minecraft evokes thoughts of an endlessly playable platform where anything is possible, the limited scope of Legends feels off.
However, Minecraft Legends' strategy mechanics do manage to flex their muscles in the game’s PvP offering. Multiplayer is where the game’s strategy elements shift from being a more leisurely affair into a frenzy of building and gathering where players engage in what is essentially a full-blown arms race between two teams. In our time with the multiplayer portion, we saw players strategize and develop metas as they quickly split up into roles. Some players were designated as resource gatherers, others designated as base-defenders, and others designated as general chaos-makers in a bid to stall the other team from making progress. Here, gears started to turn in ways that the single-player portion never inspired.
Suddenly, some of the more bland portions of the single-player, like the automated resource farming, became crucial to success as both teams worked like well-oiled machines in a race to build fortifications and destroy one another with everything they had. Learning how to divide and conquer as a team while planning strategies, both on the fly and long term, was a ton of fun--even if some balancing issues currently exist in PvP, like the dreaded Redstone Launcher. Minecraft Legends’ multiplayer will undoubtedly evolve in the coming months, but it is in a good spot and a highlight of the whole package.
But in spite of its few shortcomings, Minecraft Legends is still a bold and exciting new direction for a franchise that continues to stand the test of time. It's a game that understands why Minecraft is so compelling in the first place and then twists those elements into an action strategy experience that can be hard to put down. Its only missteps come from its limited scope and how it leaves players wanting more because its core gameplay loop is so good. Minecraft Legends is approachable, captivating, and just a really good time.
Minecraft Legends releases on April 18 for PC, PS4, PS5, Switch, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X|S. Game Rant was provided an Xbox code for the purposes of this review.
Minecraft Legends
Reviewed on Xbox Series X
Within Mojang's Minecraft universe, a story is told about a hero who once protected the Overworld from a Piglin Invasion and the Nether. Minecraft Legends brings this tale to life in the form of an action-strategy game.