Reviewers Liked
- A new way to experience the world of Minecraft
- Approachable RTS gameplay
- Gorgeous visuals
- Full-scale battles are excellent
- Strong multiplayer
Reviewers Didn’t Like
- Sometimes it’s a little too frantic as a solo player
- Controlling mobs can be awkward
- Less creative than mainline Minecraft
- Room for UX improvements
Direct Competitors and Related Products
Our editors hand-pick these products using a variety of criteria: they can be direct competitors targeting the same market segment or can be similar devices in terms of size, performance, or features.
Expert reviews and ratings
By Destructoid
on
70
Your enjoyment of Minecraft Legends will come down to three questions. 1: Are you in love with Minecraft and its extended universe? 2: Are you hankering for an RTS-style game playable on a console? 3: Do you have a minimum of three friends who are eager to play this game too? If you answered yes to at least two of those questions, you’ll have a good time with Minecraft Legends. For everyone else, Minecraft Legends offers a fairly unique experience and not much more. Just don’t expect to get any mileage out of the campaign.
By tsa
on
80
Minecraft Legends captures the magic of Minecraft in a wholly new way. It’s chaotic, it’s creative, it’s competitive and it’s an absolute blast.
By IGN
on
70
Minecraft Legends is an engaging strategy game that does a great job streamlining a notoriously complex genre without sacrificing the ever-important element of choice and consequence. That said, some genre staples like assigning custom groups of units are casualties of this simplification, which is too bad because it does limit your strategic options a bit in the heat of battle.
By EuroGamer
on
70
Sadly, the answer seems to be that Minecraft Legends is for Microsoft to sell DLC. The menu screen has four big, bold buttons emblazoned across it and the last is for the marketplace, which already has a ten quid skin pack available and is the only way to customise your hero beyond the ten skins available at the start, or to customise your mounts at all. Lure the kids in with the brand and sell them as much stuff as possible before they realise that there’s nothing of what makes Minecraft special on offer here.
By GameInformer
on
70
Minecraft Legends battles to blend its open-world adventuring with the intricacies of real-time strategy, a war that sometimes detracts from the overall fun you can have. Even so, its gorgeous environments and clever world-building inspire familiar creativity that makes up for its growing pains.
By God is a Geek
on
90
Minecraft Legends is a surprisingly deep strategy title that embodies what people love about the franchise, adding much more along the way.
By PCGamesN
on
70
It isn’t complex enough to satiate veteran RTS players and doesn’t offer mountains of content, but Minecraft Legends delivers the basic loop of attacking and defending territory and finds the odd inventive way to use its iconic IP.
By DigitalTrends
on
70
Minecraft Legends does a great job at making the real-time strategy genre more approachable, even if its campaign gets repetitive.
By VG247
on
60
All that matters at the time of writing is the launch experience, though. Minecraft Legends is gorgeous-looking, and is thrilling in how it presents the Minecraft world from another angle. It also has a solid backbone for a captivating RTS. It just doesn’t go far enough, however – and the final result is a game that struggled to hold my attention the deeper in I got. It’ll be decent Game Pass fodder – but I can’t help but feel like this should’ve been so much more. It certainly won’t be for everyone, though I expect Minecraft-obsessed kids to have a blast regardless.
By Polygon
on
Minecraft Legends is a charming portmanteau of genres that manages to simplify the RTS formula while still demanding a fair amount of concentration and strategy. I’m interested to see where the game goes in the future; players might use its mechanics to create truly terrifying multiplayer strategies that escalate in amazing ways.
By Kotaku
on
It’s stunningly pretty, it lets you make friends with the Creepers, and the cutscenes are brilliant. And it matches those new pyjamas. Should they ever finish Minecraft Legends, allowing you to instantly gather your spawned troops from anywhere, fixing the atrocious UI, giving your units some vestiges of pathfinding, and hugely increasing the mission variation, I think it could be a great place.
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Joan Haslett