Minecraft (PC)

Minecraft is a strange little title. There’s no real objective or endgame, it doesn’t have to be played competitively online if you don’t want to, and it comes with no instructions whatsoever about what you’re supposed to do.

Surprising then that nearly three million people have paid to download the beta version, and the game isn’t even finished yet. There’s clearly something more to it than meets the eye.

At first Minecraft appears to be a very simple FPS that uses a disarmingly basic blocky graphical style. You’re dropped in the middle of a randomly generated landscape armed with nothing, and no idea of what you’re supposed to do. In frustration you may end up repeatedly punching a tree, which rewards you by dropping a block of wood at your feet. Collecting that wood places it in your inventory, where you’ll find a little 4x4 grid that’s used for ‘crafting’. Drop the block of the wood in there, and you can turn it into planks. While you’re congratulating yourself on working this out it’ll get dark, and then you’ll be eaten by monsters.

That, in a nutshell is what Minecraft is about, and it’s precisely that simplicity which makes for a horrifically addictive experience. It’s perhaps best described as Lego role-playing, where all the blocks are there but you just have to put them together in the right order. As such the crafting interface is at the heart of the experience.

Crafting is the process of placing things you’re collected into a grid in the correct combinations, and then picking up the resulting item. Over time the items you make will then provide a stepping stone to making bigger and better things.

Example: if you place a block of wood into personal your crafting grid you get four planks. Placing one plank in each slot in that grid (four in total) makes a crafting bench. Place the crafting bench on the floor and right click it, and you’re given a 6x6 crafting grid so you can start to make weapons. Two sticks topped by three planks makes a wooden axe, which will allow you to start mining stone. Craft another axe using the collected stone instead of planks, and you get a much tougher axe that’ll work for longer before it breaks

You can carry on making and discovering items right up to electric cables, levers, minecarts, trapdoors and all sorts of sophisticated stuff. You may have to go hunting for some of the rarer elements, but they’re all out there. Unfortunately they’ll probably be down in the bowels of the earth, which tend to be populated by all manner of meanies AKA ‘Mobs’. Skeletons fire arrows at you, zombies knock you about, creepers approach you and explode, spiders move quickly and jump attack, ghasts chuck fireballs over very long distances, and slimes can split when thumped.

How far you go into this is determined by where your interest lies. You can happily just mine materials if you want and build a place to live, from a simple hut to a sprawling castle. Alternatively you can build weapons, arm yourself to the teeth, grab a handful of torches and head down into the caves to seek out the rarest elements and kick some mob botty in the process. If you’re if a particularly creative mindset you can use the gameworld to sculpt replicas of real world places or objects (witness the full-size Starship Enterprise on Youtube) or use the interactive elements to make vast machines – one person is building functioning parts of a 16-bit computer in game!

So the question is - are you prepared to pay for a beta? You’re effectively taking a gamble on the game ever being finished in return for a free copy once it is. To answer that, you only need to spend a few minutes playing - the game is already perfectly playable with new features being added all the time, and can only get better. The developers have a superb wiki dedicated to useful in-game information, tactics and crafting, and they maintain blogs to publicise what they’re currently working on, and what’s expected in future.

I reckon that if you don’t mind watching your free time vanish into thin air, it’s a no brainer.

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