Minecraft Dungeons was actually a really promising idea to me. When it first came out I was asking friends who had played it on GamePass if they enjoyed it and they said it was alright but I really did not hear much more. I see now why after playing and I don't think it takes much to see the flaws in the game.
I bought this game for the Switch because it was cheap, had some of the DLC and I wanted to play local multiplayer since I knew it was multiplayer. Little did I know the Switch version is actually broken. The game would crash randomly, have constant slowdown issues and it was just a pain to play sometimes. I had to play a single level three times because of the crashing problem with this game. It's one thing to not port a game to another console because it cannot handle it, it's another to allow the game to exist and do nothing to fix its issues.
Outside of general graphics issues that really bogged down my experience. The game just does not understand how these kinds of games work. The leveling system is incredibly dumb because it's based on the level of your items, not of your character. Effectively, it's better to play items that are stronger in level, whether or not you like them, and whether or not they are actually optimal for the battle. So you can either play the game levels below where you actually are and play on baby mode, but at least you get to play with the items you want, or you can play with items that you don't like and play at a difficulty that will actually challenge you. And of course, they can't allow you to upgrade your old items, because that would be too simple a solution to this problem. Even though making your old gear better is a focal mechanic of Minecraft, we couldn't bother to add anything like that here. Well of course there are options to play at higher levels with weaker items but I would strongly advise against that seen as the game has no idea how difficulty scaling works. My girlfriend and I ran through this game with variances in difficulty everywhere. Some levels we would cut through like butter and others we would get stuck on one boss or group of enemies that would tear us apart, even though we played on the same difficulty rating all the way through.
So now we come to what I believe is the most egregious fault in this game, the level design. The levels are very vibrant and beautiful. There are some places that I really wanted to explore that were just out of reach and at first, it was so fun to run through each area and see what we could find. So why is this a problem? Well because Mojang's developers don't actually want you to look at the different places they developed, they just want you to get to the end. There are so many dead ends in this game that lead to nothing, it became tiring to walk down long corridors only to come to nothing. Occasionally there would be a treasure chest with some emeralds and a few enemies in those halls but most of the time, you would walk down a route way off the beaten path, find nothing, and have to turn back around. This made it really tedious to enter a new level knowing you were most likely going to run through, get nothing you like, scrap all of your old stuff for emeralds in hopes that one of the villagers at camp would give you something better.
To be fair to the game, bosses and enemies are interesting to fight, designs are good, weapons are diverse, the soundtrack is meh, and all--around the presentation is what you come to expect from a Minecraft experience. It's just hard to justify calling something good if it just looks pretty.
Minecraft Dungeons was an alright experience because they did the bare minimum and allowed multiplayer but if you have no one else to play this with, I would not give this a shot. Decent multiplayer game if you have someone as dedicated to it as you are, but it's a sub-par experience everywhere else.
I bought this game for the Switch because it was cheap, had some of the DLC and I wanted to play local multiplayer since I knew it was multiplayer. Little did I know the Switch version is actually broken. The game would crash randomly, have constant slowdown issues and it was just a pain to play sometimes. I had to play a single level three times because of the crashing problem with this game. It's one thing to not port a game to another console because it cannot handle it, it's another to allow the game to exist and do nothing to fix its issues.
Outside of general graphics issues that really bogged down my experience. The game just does not understand how these kinds of games work. The leveling system is incredibly dumb because it's based on the level of your items, not of your character. Effectively, it's better to play items that are stronger in level, whether or not you like them, and whether or not they are actually optimal for the battle. So you can either play the game levels below where you actually are and play on baby mode, but at least you get to play with the items you want, or you can play with items that you don't like and play at a difficulty that will actually challenge you. And of course, they can't allow you to upgrade your old items, because that would be too simple a solution to this problem. Even though making your old gear better is a focal mechanic of Minecraft, we couldn't bother to add anything like that here. Well of course there are options to play at higher levels with weaker items but I would strongly advise against that seen as the game has no idea how difficulty scaling works. My girlfriend and I ran through this game with variances in difficulty everywhere. Some levels we would cut through like butter and others we would get stuck on one boss or group of enemies that would tear us apart, even though we played on the same difficulty rating all the way through.
So now we come to what I believe is the most egregious fault in this game, the level design. The levels are very vibrant and beautiful. There are some places that I really wanted to explore that were just out of reach and at first, it was so fun to run through each area and see what we could find. So why is this a problem? Well because Mojang's developers don't actually want you to look at the different places they developed, they just want you to get to the end. There are so many dead ends in this game that lead to nothing, it became tiring to walk down long corridors only to come to nothing. Occasionally there would be a treasure chest with some emeralds and a few enemies in those halls but most of the time, you would walk down a route way off the beaten path, find nothing, and have to turn back around. This made it really tedious to enter a new level knowing you were most likely going to run through, get nothing you like, scrap all of your old stuff for emeralds in hopes that one of the villagers at camp would give you something better.
To be fair to the game, bosses and enemies are interesting to fight, designs are good, weapons are diverse, the soundtrack is meh, and all--around the presentation is what you come to expect from a Minecraft experience. It's just hard to justify calling something good if it just looks pretty.
Minecraft Dungeons was an alright experience because they did the bare minimum and allowed multiplayer but if you have no one else to play this with, I would not give this a shot. Decent multiplayer game if you have someone as dedicated to it as you are, but it's a sub-par experience everywhere else.