Scariest Hostile Mobs In Minecraft
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Minecraft Dungeons is a capable all-ages dungeon crawl that, while doesn’t use its license to anything like its full potential (see Dragon Quest Builders 2 for how to do it right), is still good fun once it gets moving. The variety of enemies keeps you on your toes, and the various skills and weapons make for plenty of experimentation in figuring out the best way to take them on. Each level has at least a couple of secrets to chase after, ranging from obvious to head-scratchingly obscure, and finding everything while collecting all the gear will keep players busy for hours whether fighting single- or multiplayer. Just be aware that if you’ve got any experience with the genre, the difficulty selections on the levels are there for a reason. The younger crowd deserves a good intro to the world of dungeon crawling and Minecraft Dungeons provides that nicely.
Minecraft Dungeons is a hack & slash action-RPG in the vein of Diablo where you take a character, beat on monsters, find better gear, and use the new toys to beat on bigger and tougher monsters. The paper-thin plot is that an outcast villager was corrupted by an evil orb of power and down came the smiting, and only a hero etc etc etc. The story is “hit monsters, get loot, search out secrets,” which really is all this genre needs.
Daggers, for instance, are fast but weak, while a halberd is noticeably slower but better for slicing enemies at range. The Spelunker armor comes with a pet bat that flies out to attack enemies for you, but the hunter’s armor gets a bonus ten arrows per pickup. Equipment also comes with a number of abilities, further complicating the selection. Abilities such as weaken enemies or lightning strike are only rarely pre-equipped, but rather must be chosen. A sickle might have two ability slots with three options each, but once you’ve chosen one the other two go away. There’s a hard choice to be made between “move faster for five seconds after dodge roll” and “heal allies in small radius” and it can take a surprising amount of thought to pull the trigger. Each ability also can be upgraded twice and this is where character leveling comes in.
Players can choose to venture through the hostile, prehistoric wilderness solo, or team up with others (even form large tribes online). Each mode has a unique dynamic — but both prove fun and exciting in their own way. Ark players have to deal with a fairly steep learning curve and ample grinding, though Minecraft fans are no strangers to either. And really, the vulnerabilities early on just make Ark that much more rewarding when overcoming t
Minecraft has been around so long that it’s easy to take it for granted. The decade of its existence has seen it explode from an indie project to financial juggernaut, but at the heart of all the licensing has been a Xbox Game Pass addictive games that’s never stopped growing its list of features. One of the biggest parts of Minecraft’s longevity has been its multiplayer options with endless servers available almost since the beginning. The reason for this is simple — it’s fun to build things with friends. Whether or not that means everyone works together on a massive project or people go off and do their own thing in a communal area doesn’t matter, so long as there’s something new to see. Working with a group where everyone’s online, working alone or just tooling around the world sightseeing, it’s all better when doing it in a shared world. The thing about Minecraft, though, is that it’s become so generic it’s easy to forget how entertaining it is. Over the years I’ve obsessed over Minecraft, walked away for extended periods of time, come back, then left again. I’ve explored single-player worlds and gotten involved in multiplayer servers, and the one constant is that each time I play there’s something new to do. There are endless worlds stretching on forever made of giant blocks that, despite their size, are still enough to suggest the shape of almost anything you want to create, and the nice thing about Minecraft’s ubiquitous nature is just about everyone is already familiar with it. Now may be the best time to dig out an old log-in and see what huge, inspiring, strange, ridiculous, epic creations you and a group of friends can come up with.
On the plus side, once you’re in the Minecraft world the sense of scale is truly fantastic. Everything seems bigger somehow, more immediate and solid. A pit in a cave that would be little more than a hazard to plop a staircase onto is all of a sudden an ominous presence waiting to see you fall into its depths. Hills are more imposing, cliffs shoot dangerously into the sky and canyons are massive rifts in the earth, and the oceans go down forever. Even the standard block has a sense of mass, with its one meter cube transformed into a substantial chunk of scenery. Another side effect of the new sense of scale is that combat has become a little easier because the strike distance is so obvious. The move to VR has done a great job of freshening up an experience I’ve been done with for several years now, which is an impressive feat. While I’m still not completely sold on the viewing solution, it’s something that works for now until a better idea is implemented.
