Minecraft Legends Review: A Nostalgic Game Gets A Strategic Makeover – SlashGear

The fundamentals of “Minecraft” were well honored and implemented in “Legends.” There are familiar NPCs, that beloved chunky landscape, and colorful sweeping environments aplenty. There’s more than enough familiarity to prevent that sense of betrayal when a well-established franchise tries to rustle up another profit stream with a poorly-executed sequel, remake, or addition.

This newest member of the “Minecraft” family adds a novelty and new challenge to the franchise that may reinvigorate the interest of players who perhaps aged out of the game in its over a decade of existence. It’s also easy to view “Legends” as a real-time strategy game for beginners to the genre; if you’ve found “Starcraft,” “Age of Empires,” and the like to be exhausting, “Legends” offers a less intimidating RTS and legion-building or base-building experience. However, “Legends” brings some surprisingly difficult late-game combat, so be prepared for an RTS challenge. 

“Legends” has all of that deliciously brain-scratching challenge, that delicate harmony between decision and consequence, that appeals to RTS lovers: Deciding to gallop into battle or stay in your fortress on the defense, cease fighting efforts to tend to vulnerable communities, choosing when an army of quick-fingered archers is better than one of the beefy but slow heavy-hitters, visualizing the best camp defense based on terrain, choosing to be resource-heavy or soldier-heavy. It’s a game that dually appeals to longtime “Minecraft” players and those who are brand-new to the franchise because it offers the sort of fresh-faced familiarity that we all can’t help but find remarkably compelling.

You can purchase “Minecraft Legends” for Xbox One, Xbox Series X and S, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Nintendo Switch, and Windows PC for approximately $40 starting in April 2023.