Minecraft Legends captures the standard Minecraft flavor well. It's an action-strategy spin-off with a new but familiar art style, a colorful world filled with creatures, and procedural maps to explore. It's an action-strategy spin-off, with a new but familiar art style, a colorful world filled with creatures, and procedural maps to explore. However, it doesn't bring the substance of Minecraft, resulting in a genre mashup that is disappointing as both an action game and a strategy game. [Explore a variety of biomes, including forests, badlands, swamps, and tundra. Instruct your array mates to mine for coal, iron, or redstone, and your resource meter automatically fills up. One array may collect 500 timber logs at the edge of a nearby forest and use them to build a fence around the village, while another array may collect iron deposits on the surface to build stone buildings and upgrade the fence to stone.

My main goal is to craft my own minecraft mob army to defeat the three factions of piglins who have fled the Nether to take control of the overworld. Each night, I will defend the world's villages from the attacks of the Piglins. At noon, I will rebuild the defenses and launch an assault on the Pigrin stronghold.

Building fortifications and village defenses is more practical than aesthetic. Arrow towers are placed unevenly to match the attacking forces, carpenters' huts for repairing other structures are squeezed between the pre-built houses in each village, and air missiles and redstone launchers are jettisoned where they can reach the most. They abandon their loyalty to symmetry by stringing defensive walls at ugly angles, knowing full well that by nightfall they will be battered by hordes of pigs. I even welcome it. I would leave the demolition work to the enemy, as the only way to remove the misplaced walls is to painstakingly erect them one by one, pillar by pillar.

The day passes steadily. Even while playing solo, I am not allowed to pause in the menu, so it goes by faster than I would like. I make sponers for my golems and skeletons, ready to build new units as needed. As night falls, waves of enemies come in and overwhelm the village's defenses, and it is at this point that I realize how disastrously bad the combat in Minecraft Legends is.

Legends avoids calling itself a real-time strategy game, opting instead for "action strategy." This is because I control my hero character and command my units from the ground, rather than from a godlike RTS perspective. Ultimately, Legends ended up with a style of combat that didn't work well with both action and strategy.

The only "action" in this combat is to use a single button to swing your sword back and forth and tickle the piglins off defensive structures. The strategic aspect is even worse. In endless escort missions, I am forced to parent my own helicopters. To begin controlling a unit I have created, I must stand near it, press Q, and wave my command flag to call creatures within a small radius around me to follow. The maximum number of mobs you can initially "lure" is 15, and you can tell them to attack a single target or to gather in a certain location.

A more specific order can also be created. You can instruct only the ranged mobs to target the lava launcher enemies and tell the cobblestone golem to defend the hole in the outer wall. If you want the enemy to change direction, you must physically get in, lure as many units as you can reach by waving flags, and have them head in a new direction as they get in and out. There is no overarching strategic view to make this process quicker. Many small piglin outposts require ramps to be built so that mobs can reach enemy structures, and I often find mobs standing mindlessly at the bottom of the ramp after being knocked off the platform.

In every battle, I become more of a preschool caretaker than an army commander, zigzagging between my base and the enemy's fortifications, holding the hands of infant warriors. I am constantly losing track of where I have placed them, as my own defensive walls block my view of the battlefield and my HUD's compass is no substitute for a proper minimap.

Thinking of interesting strategies feels pointless in "Minecraft Legends" because it lacks the tools necessary to execute all but the simplest of plans. I had hoped that an assault on each faction's largest fortress would provide an interesting challenge, and that I would need to use alayz to turn the netherracks into regular blocks so that I could build my structures on top of them, but otherwise the battle, like any other, would just drag on.

I was reminded of a particularly bad MMORTS I played a few years ago called Kingdom Under Fire 2. There were many sins, but what I found admirable about KOF2 was how it combined Dynasty Warriors-style mob mowing with a simplified strategy system. I could zoom in and enjoy the hotbar combat, or zoom out and quickly direct units throughout the battlefield; I really wish Minecraft Legends had a strategic command view. Even if the tactical options remained limited, I might have enjoyed it more if giving orders wasn't so tiring.

I don't even bother to mention the structure upgrade system, because it's not a big deal. Spending resources to build structures in the center of the map increases the storage capacity of various materials, slightly increases the number of structures and mobs you can lure in, and unlocks several area-of-effect towers that freeze and knock back enemies.

Minecraft Legends also has co-op and PvP, so I dutifully dragged fellow PC Gamer writer Mollie Taylor along to destroy the Horde of the Bastion fortress with me. Unfortunately, the co-op in Minecraft Legends, like most co-ops, only alleviates the game's problems. Playing together made the mobs a little tougher to deal with, but it didn't change the fact that I was playing the role of a troubled kindergarten teacher, and being on a team didn't alleviate my frustration with simplistic combat.

Worst of all, there was no common sense that "Minecraft Legends" was an obvious dumpster fire. There were no issues with frame rate, multiplayer connectivity, bugs, crashes, or control layout. But it's a disappointing game; Minecraft's values of creativity, intrinsic motivation, and player choice were absent from this shallow spin-off.