This is a super hard game to rate, especially since I believe that the best (and only reasonable way to play on a world for more than 2 hours) is modded. The base game is good, but damn if I'm not tired of it after probably at least two thousand hours of it. Would recommend Material Energy^3 and Questing Mayhem.

update from Several years into the future:
vanilla survival is actually legit maybe like a 4 or 5/10. boring as shit and there's nothing to do. BUT mods make this game really good, and so do all the servers with minigames and whatnot. Adventure maps are great as well, don't know how much those really exist anymore but they're always fun. Everything here is good except the actual "main" game and it sucks that so many devs have taken the wrong message from this game's success and just made soooo many shitty, boring survival crafting games lol

In the dead of a hellish Montreal winter when it was too cold to go out and sit in the park and drink with my friends, my living room was full of me and my boys playing minecraft for like, 12 hours straight every day. Building big dumb outposts and trying to explore our world was fun as hell, and its some of the coziest gaming I have done in years.

Minecraft is great, and I was surprised to see how much it has changed since I had last played in 2012. So much depth! Infinite game play here if you really want to go deep.

It's fucking Minecraft

But in serious real hard hitting critique prose that we all clearly want to describe Minecraft, it's an excellent game despite its roots being not so interesting. What I mean by that, is that the survival game isn't good, at least at its base. It's meh at best, no matter how you slice it, Minecraft survival doesn't have anything interesting to it. Iron armor is busted for most encounters, shields are broken, the progression is incredibly quick, hunger is a complete non-issue.

Does that actually matter though? People aren't generally playing Minecraft unmodded at this day and age, and the vast majority of the appeal for Minecraft is its sandbox. And with that, it's one of if not the best sandbox for creative content out there. It's incredible what the options for everyone are, with the full server list of this day and age spiraling from PvP servers to recreations of massive cities, to full blown mod support that doesn't even need to bring in new assets to work in interesting ways. The command blocks do a lot of that heavy lifting, and the redstone systems in the game have created incredible ingame contraptions.

At its retrospective core, Minecraft is no longer a survival game (because really if it was it would be a shit one). It's entirely what any person can make of it, and that ceiling of what you can create is still being extended. (9/10)

If you're me, Minecraft is a game about spending seven hours getting lost looking for diamonds and then getting bored. If you're a child and have friends, Minecraft is probably your entire life. It is a game whose random number generator and infinite modding scene can sustain a child's attention span for years, singlehandedly.

It represents an interesting anomaly, because to be frank, I truly do not believe that Minecraft's popularity is the result of any remarkable development skill. Like LEGO, Minecraft's appeal does not come from any feats of a toymaker's genius... it just strikes at all of the same critical spots on a young human's brain.

Minecraft's RNG gods are just unfeeling enough to lend authenticity to one's adventures in it. Without that hand of craft, out here in the wilds of chaos, there may exist thrills unrivaled by traditionally crafted ventures. Children love few things more than the absence of supervision, and that includes the tangible presence of a game developer. Minecraft, like Dungeons and Dragons, is more a set of flexible rules than it is anything else... and this is why its community was able to make it into the best video game experience to become commercially available in 2011.

The best playgrounds are built on accident. In elementary school, my friends and I spent our recesses on an old, wooden castle-ish thing with some swings and a tunnel made of tires. That playground is gone now, replaced with brightly colored plastic. The new playground is full of things that have clear and intended uses. The spinning cylinders are for tic-tac-toe. The funnels are for speaking through. I hate it, and I pity any child who frequents it, for a bowl is most useful when it is empty.