Difficulty:

Just Right

Time Spent:

100 or More Hours

The Bottom Line:

"Highly addictive"

If adventure genres are your taste, then you will get highly addicted to Minecraft. Venturing in an endless world, finding your way out inside an abandoned mineshaft, or even surviving in Hell. There are a lot of fun things to do in Minecraft, and it will keep you entertained… for a certain time atleast.

Now if you're tired or bored of exploring, you can always use your creativity and build structures of your liking. Minecraft offers a lot of different building blocks to create replicas of famous landmarks, or to just build a shelter for you to last the night. Its up to you to experiment combinations of blocks to make something very epic.

Minecraft also offers items that you can use or interact with. When your character's inventory is full of what seems junk to you, you can always experiment crafting those "junks" on the crafting table. And then realizing soon that they were not junk after all. In the latest versions like 1.2.5, Minecraft offered a hunger bar, armor bar and an experience (XP) bar. Now your character will get hungry over a period of time. It will give you a reason to make a continuous supply of food like a farm or an animal farm. When your character is dying of hunger, and the only eatable food you have is rotten meat; you can always try your luck with the rotten meat and hope your character doesn't get poisoned. So ALWAYS bring food. You can also make different kinds of armor to protect you from harm. Different kinds of armor has different durability and different amount of protection. ALWAYS wear leather armor because it will prevent you from many deaths.

Speaking of deaths, there are various ways to die in Minecraft. Like falling into lava, falling from a high place, drowning like an idiot, and getting murdered by mobs. What in the Minecraft are MOBS? There are two types of mobs. Hostile mobs and the other is for you to find out. Hostile mobs are monsters that spawns at night. They also spawn in dark caves even though its daytime. Hostile mobs basically tries to kill you on sight and make life in Minecraft more difficult than it is already. The difficulty of mobs aren't that bad, though they become difficult in numbers. Of course you can kill and defend yourself from hostile mobs. That is why you should ALWAYS bring shovels with you to ward off hostile mobs.

Now going back to the XP bar; you thought I forgot didn't you? Everytime you kill a mob, they drop XP orbs that fills up your XP bar. When your XP bar is filled, you get 1 level. So the more you kill mobs, the faster you level up. Now what are levels used for? One is to show it off with friends, and the other is for you to find out.

Now lets look at the more technical side of Minecraft. The controls to move are the famous W,A,S,D. It is very comfortable and quite relaxing. You can tell that you're hooked on Minecraft when your fingers are placed on the W,A,S,D, keys when you're not playing Minecraft. Minecraft's graphics may seem odd and prehistoric, but it requires a good gaming specs to run smoothly. Lacking of gaming specs will have a lot of spike lags, hangs and crushes. If your PC doesn't reach the requirements for Minecraft, there is still a little hope. You can download mods to improve Minecraft's performances, or you can actually play Minecraft on the Xbox 360. It was only released this year, 2012.


Minecraft offers 3 types of game modes; Survival, Creative and Hardcore. Survival is the main game mode of Minecraft. You start in the middle of nowhere, bare naked and nothing to use. You harvest, build, survive, respawn and explore. It's a lot of fun and challenges. The main challenge of Survival is the huge free exploration. You don't have goals, missions, assignments; you pretty much make your own goals in Minecraft. You only have a side achievements to spice things up. In Creative, it's a game mode to test your creativity. You have infinite blocks, items, levels, health; and you can fly by double-tapping the SPACE bar. There's only 1 way to die in Creative mode, and its up to you to figure it out. Finally, we go to Hardcore mode. From the name itself, Hardcore mode are for "Hardcore" players or in other words, "Addicts". Hardcore mode is exactly like Survival, only it is locked on the hardest mode and you only get 1 life. When you die in Survival, you only go back to the respawn point; but in Hardcore mode, your world gets permanently deleted along with all the things you've done inside it.

A world in Minecraft without friends is very lonely and melancholic. You will eventually get bored when playing solo. So Minecraft offered the Multiplayer feature! Besides being a Billionaire, what's better than playing with friends online in Minecraft? You and your friends build stuff together, survive together, help each other and even prank one another. What's better than pranking a friend online in Minecraft? What this feature really contribute on Minecraft is when players starts making groups or organizations. One group that I personally like is called FYRE UK. They build huge epic structures and precise replicas of great landmarks! And whats more to it, they are around 50-60 players! Fyre UK is truly amazing. But enough of them, the downside of multiplayer is the technical part. It is quite difficult to set up private servers to play with friends online. More often they cant log in, its very laggy or they keep getting disconnected. However if you and your friends has a fast wifi and awesome Pcs, multiplayer wont be a problem for you.

That's pretty much all the topics I can review without giving out too much spoilers. Minecraft is basically an RPG, Sandbox, Adventure game. I had loads of fun playing it, and I already have around 100 hours of gameplay. Out of 10, I'll give Minecraft an overall score of 9.5. If you're reading this review to decide weather or not to get Minecraft, then stop reading my friend and buy the game. When looking for Diamonds underground, you always say "One last block, and I will resurface from this mine". And what happens is you just keep on mining and mining for hours. =)