Minecraft Legends Review: Gameplay Impressions, Videos and Speedrunning Tips

Minecraft Legends from developers Mojang Studios and Blackbird Interactive is the latest entry in the legendary series.

The fourth spinoff of the core Minecraft experience, this one takes an action-strategy slant to the series' ecosystem, tasking players with saving the Overworld through familiar-feeling ways.

Along the way, Legends offers a robust campaign experience, co-op capabilities and even a promising competitive multiplayer scene in the same package.

It's the most ambitious Minecraft spinoff yet, and one that has a serious shot at establishing some long-term staying power for players of all interests and skill levels.

Graphics and Gameplay

Legends leans heavily into the expected Minecraft style visually, going for colorful, diverse biomes with blocky cel-shading, great shadow work and bold black outlines to characters.

Minecraft veterans will feel right at home in this sense, though newcomers (if that's still possible considering the original launched in 2011 and had sold 200 million copies by May 2020) will surely leave impressed at the expressive, eye-catching approach.

The sound design follows the same track, with some poppy sound effects and plenty of familiar audio cues.

An action-strategy game, Legends is not a RTS (real-time strategy) effort in that it steers away from the traditional RTS top-down, all-encompassing view and puts the players in third-person perspective and leading the charge. The effect is outstanding—RTS games often feel detached and it's hard to buy into the story beats and threats.

Within this framework, players will explore a procedurally generated map farming for resources, building traversal items and bases, destroying camps and liberating cities, to name a few of the big-ticket items. Don't forget just exploring on the hunt for new mounts and secret chests.

The gameplay loop feels a little Pikmin-esque in nature with an emphasis on combat, which is a great-feeling development. Players start by building spawn locations to start crafting troops, then navigation enablers like bridges. Allies will handle resource scavenging, which might turn off some Minecraft players, but it's up to the player to strategize how and why this happens.

Legends smartly layers the rollout of useable allies and actions in a way that is very new-player friendly.

Players start with only a handful of allies to order about and the actions are basic. Golems are especially important, as specific types can only do certain things. Those capable of functioning as healing units eventually open up, to give an example of how much depth the game eventually reveals.

It's a fun overall mix up of the usual Minecraft formula. The player's sword can't damage towers they need to destroy, so a specific type of unit has to handle it. Ditto for that mining of resources. Craftable defenses like walls and arrow towers can be upgraded, the latter earning exploding arrows, for example. Naturally, proper resource finding and mining is required.

There are a surprising layering of gameplay elements, classes and scenarios that give this effort more depth than expected. By the time players have a grasp on many of the mechanics and controls, it starts throwing challenging scenarios out that are truly rewarding to overcome.

It's this smooth layering that enables Legends to really test a player's skills. Some of it happens without realization, too, which is a testament to the design—players will throw out quick builds and strategy on near-auto-pilot once the campaign really gets rolling.

Of course, players can also just ignore the story and zip off into the procedurally generated world and enjoy the dramatically different biomes. There's something relaxing about doing that in a way that really captures the spirit of the original game—and it sure doesn't hurt that the map feels plenty big enough.

As expected, controls are snappy. Like the original game, one could argue a mouse and keyboard on PC makes more sense. Just picking from one of eight assigned buttons while building on the fly puts players at an advantage. But gamepad inputs are strong too and no matter which way a player chooses, there is a pretty steep learning curve.

Story, Multiplayer and More

The story surrounding Legends is...all in the name, funnily enough.

It skirts the "canon" conversation by functioning as a story passed down through the generations. A legend, or so to speak, which is a nice touch that furthers the sense of each player taking part in the universe. Sounds almost silly, but MMOs, for example, have always struggled with this.

To keep it short, the piglins from the Nether have invaded Overworld and the players have to stop it. They will meet Hosts who assist in the journey and animals of all sorts and even former enemies will join the fight against the piglins.

The story takes a "make friends" beat as opposed to the generic leveling up and finding new weapons and armor pursuits players might expect. It's not going to strike an Avengers: Endgame "Avengers Assemble" portal scene vibes or anything, but it's a nice for-all-ages compromise that gives reasoning behind the skirmishes over what is quietly a very long campaign.

Progression isn't handled in a traditional leveling-up sense, either. Over time, resources help the player build "improvement structures," which means access to new defenses, upgrades and units.

In a great sign for the game's longevity, the competitive multiplayer aspect of the game has serious potential.

A showdown between two teams of four does have RTS vibes similar to League of Legends and others in that both teams start from nothing and must build up, the ultimate objective for victory destroying the opponent's base.

It's almost a PvPvE experience, too. There are computer-controlled bases of piglins who retaliate in kind when a player attacks them. Taking out these bases becomes a risk-reward gamble, all while keeping track of the other team.

Multiplayer is fantastic. At least when players can communicate. It's a blast to have someone stay back and build up the defenses while the others do some combination of gathering resources, fighting the computer and prodding at the opponent's defenses to find an opening, to name a few possibilities.

It's the chaos that makes it so great. All those careful strategies go out the window when the opponent attacks. Or when the opponent has the perfect counter to a player's defenses. There's an ebb and flow to battle, plus the surprises of a 20-minute match, that has really captured a fun niche.

Adding to this, while the multiplayer map isn't as big as the campaign one, it's certainly big enough and no two maps are alike. That's a fun random element. It's blatant streamers and otherwise will get massive legs out of this mode and a serious PvP community is bound to keep it alive for a long time.

Unfortunately, there is no in-game chat, a restriction that makes sense given the younger target audience of the game and simply in general these days. But it's worth pointing out it does hamper the strategic possibilities for a team of randoms not chatting in a service such as Discord.

There is also no local co-op. It makes sense given screen space concerns in this specific instance, but remains a point worth raising.

Like its predecessors, Legends comes equipped with plenty of options and useful details.

The journal is a key and impressive part of the experience. It's like an encyclopedia of everything in the game, which is helpful when players need to look up what an item does. It also provides options, such as changing hotkeys for button inputs.

At launch and also like its predecessors, there are plenty of plans for future support. Lost Legends is a highlight already, with this variation a fun little base defense iteration of the experience.

Speedrunning Tips

Legends should be one of the more interesting speedrunning games to watch in 2023.

This isn't a typical speedrun romp where would-be runners can route optimal strategies, outlining the best areas to tackle first, what loot or missions are skippable and how to take down bosses while severely under-leveled.

So it's hard to perfectly suggest tips, but keep an eye out for a beetle mount—it allows scaling certain walls instead of finding specific pathways. Runners will also likely find early success by giving an emphasis to unlocking the healer units that will help reinforce the fighters.

While traversing, a mount can cross pretty much anything, but building bridges remains critical to get troops moving fast. Speedwheat boosts sprint speed, so always aim for that while traversing.

Besides that, aggression is key, especially after memorizing what resources craft which items. That's something players can control, which will influence which biomes they hit on a given map and why.

Conclusion

Legends is the best Minecraft spinoff to date with some serious legs.

Thanks to superb depth of systems that get a gradual rollout, this is not strictly a My-First-RTS experience. For players who put in the time, it's an experience with unexpected depths that rewards investment.

Typically, a buzzword like procedurally generated is a thing capable of making gamers groan with indifference. But it's used to great effect here, even making replaying the campaign a joy, as its marriage with the Minecraft format is like none other.

There will be a segment of players who consider Legends a campaign-only game. Others will view it as the campaign serving as a tutorial for a multiplayer experience with very, very long legs. Both sets of players emerge as big victors here

That's a testament to the sheer fun, addictive and rewarding release that is Legends, an effort that manages to exceed lofty expectations given its namesake.