Do You Know? Minecraft Legends Needs More Depth Than Minecraft Dungeons

Minecraft Dungeons was a spin-off of the popular sandbox survival game Minecraft. Minecraft Legends is another spin-off, but hopefully it has more depth than Minecraft Dungeons.

Minecraft remains one of the most popular video games despite being released more than a decade ago, with a large audience on a variety of consoles, mobile devices, and personal computers. Minecraft’s calming, cozy atmosphere is ideal for any mood, while the game’s intricate crafting and survival systems offer additional depth for those seeking it. This level of accessibility and depth has not been quite present in Minecraft’s previous spinoffs, but hopefully the forthcoming Minecraft Legends will reverse this trend.

Minecraft Legends, announced in June during the Xbox and Bethesda Games Showcase, is yet another Minecraft spinoff game, but this time the series is moving into the action-strategy genre. The action-strategy genre combines the best elements of a third-person action game and a tower defense, with the player controlling their troops while also participating in the action. This shift in genre should provide Minecraft Legends with the necessary depth to stand out.

Minecraft Legends requires additional gameplay depth compared to Minecraft Dungeons.

The most recent spinoff, Minecraft Dungeons, got a lot of criticism for not having enough depth. On the surface, Minecraft: Dungeons appeared to be a simple Diablo clone. Players were tasked with hacking and slashing their way through a series of dungeons, defeating monsters, and acquiring loot along the way. Unfortunately, this was all there was to the Minecraft Dungeon’s surface layer.

Minecraft Dungeons was incredibly easy to play. The game’s controls were reduced to simple button presses, and defeating the enemy AI required little strategy. Although an excellent addition, the co-op mechanic was not nearly as complex or well-thought-out as the game’s primary inspiration. The loot in games like Diablo and Minecraft Dungeons didn’t offer anything that players hadn’t seen before, with weapons and items that are typical of the dungeon-crawler genre. After a few hours, players had experienced everything that Minecraft Dungeons had to offer, and there was little reason to continue playing.

Simply put, Minecraft Legends requires improvement. To truly stand out from the crowd, Minecraft Legends must implement more complex game mechanics and systems. This should be relatively straightforward, given that the action-strategy genre is inherently more complex than the hack-and-slash gameplay found in Minecraft Dungeons. In addition to engaging in combat themselves, players are tasked with managing their vast forces, including buildings and soldiers.

This is already a solid foundation for Minecraft Legends, and it should be simple to add more depth to this spinoff with a few mechanical tweaks. With different kinds of buildings and upgrades, Minecraft Legends should give players a lot of different ways to play. The game should also feature a variety of skill trees for both the player’s units and the player. Also, Minecraft Legends should have a lot of different enemies, each of which needs a different way to beat. Even the simplest approach to strategic combat, such as Halo Wars’ rock-paper-scissors system, can add a great deal of depth to a strategy game’s combat by making each enemy type vulnerable to a particular unit type. Even though each of these systems is pretty simple on its own, putting them together could make for a great, complex action-strategy game that would make Minecraft Legends stand out from the rest.