The Piglins have found their way into the Overworld and it is up to you, a lone hero, to defend it by destroying Nether portals and pushing them back into The Nether. This is Minecraft Legends, a new action strategy game where mining, crafting and spawning takes place on the fly, where you can make new friends and find old ones while exploring the procedurally generated island world. Minecraft Legends is a story that has been passed down through generations of villagers and therefore is not strictly a part of the Minecraft universe, so let’s take a closer look at Mojang Studios and Blackbird Interactive’s latest Minecraft adventure.

Blackbird Interactive is a new development team founded by former Relic Entertainment employees, known for real-time strategy games such as Homeworld, Company of Heroes and Warhammer 40,000. They’ve been working on Minecraft Legends for more than five years and now that it has finally arrived, it’s important to remember that this is no ordinary Minecraft game. You don’t mine blocks and craft tables. You’re a hero. You get someone else to do that for you. Enter allays – little spirit mobs that you would usually find at pillager outposts in the base game. In Minecraft Legends, they are your miners and crafters. They spawn at your beck and call to do your bidding while you roam the open world in search of your next battle with the piglins.

Minecraft Legends begins at a giant structure called the Well of Fate. After introducing your hero to three god-like characters called Foresight, Action and Knowledge, you set off on an adventure to rid the Overworld of piglins and anything else that comes out of the many Nether portals that have opened up. There are several villages or outposts to find and assist, and not all of them are occupied by villagers. One cool feature of Minecraft Legends is that every world is uniquely generated, meaning that although the island you play on is roughly the same size, biomes, outposts, chests and other points of interest will all be located in different areas of the map.

Like any open-world game, at first the world seems vast and almost endless, but after discovering villager outposts you can then fast-travel to them, and later in the game you can build a fast-travel structure, making bouncing across the map easy. Exploring the map is essential for locating ores needed to craft new buildings and spawn allies. Wood and stone are quite easy to locate, while iron, diamond, coal and redstone will require a bit of extra searching. Minecraft Legends not only involves attacking piglin bases and destroying their Nether portals, but the piglins will also assault friendly outposts at night. Luckily, you can craft walls, gates and a variety of towers and defensive buildings to protect your outposts. We found some of the defensive buildings were actually quite expensive to build, even in late-game, particularly if you also wanted to spawn mobs that cost the same resource e.g. redstone.

Further into the game, crafting becomes an offensive tactic. Though the piglins have spread their netherrack across the world, you can use those spritely allay mobs to cure the netherrack and make inroads towards the portals. This becomes vital in the late-game of Minecraft Legends, and we found the best offence was indeed a good offensive defence, per se. Spawning and controlling mobs is the other vital part of an offensive, and as the game progresses you can spawn a variety of familiar Minecraft creatures including zombies, skeletons and creepers to fight by your side. We found the control system a bit awkward at times though, and it wasn’t exactly clear which mobs were helping and which were standing around doing nothing. This becomes even more apparent in the late-game when you can spawn over 30 and control over 50 mobs in what becomes a mini army, and we felt that Mojang and Blackbird could have made the mob control more direct and purposeful.

Minecraft Legends has four difficulty settings and will automatically be on the second easiest, but fortunately you can change it on the fly. We found the game got easier as we mastered the mechanics of crafting and spawning, and players that want to venture online and verse others might want to consider playing on the harder difficulties to learn how to act and react with greater speed. One of the final piglin mobs in the game almost destroyed one of our heavily defended iron-walled outposts by running quickly through it, so the singleplayer campaign is certainly worth playing through before you jump online.

There are multiple ways to play Minecraft Legends including solo or co-operative campaigns, competitive PvP matches of 2v2, 3v3 or even 4v4, or casual PvP against friends or other matchmade online players. While the gameplay possibilities in Minecraft Legends are nowhere near as endless as the base Minecraft game, the limits placed on this action strategy game mean that strategies will need to be developed and refined to take on players with other gameplay styles. It’s anyone’s guess as to how big the online community will be for Minecraft Legends, so playing at launch may be a good idea, particularly if you can take advantage of a Xbox Game Pass subscription to play it for free.

Minecraft Legends is easily the most visually impressive Minecraft game to date, and it certainly doesn’t have demanding requirements seen in other games released in 2023. PC requirements include just 8GB of RAM, a core i5-650 (that’s first gen!) and an Intel HD 520 (integrated) graphics card. Recommended requirements boost the CPU up to a core i5-670 and a GTX 1060. This is a game that will run well on not just older computers but also newer tablet devices, though we are interested to see how it handles on the Switch, particularly when there are more than a hundred mobs battling on the screen at once.

Composer Crispin Hands (Gears of War, Metroid Prime) joins Mojang Studios and Blackbird Interactive in creating the beautiful music used in Minecraft Legends. Minecraft games have always been known for their peaceful music that transitions from biome to battle, and Crispin Hands has done an amazing job in keeping this tradition going. A diverse range of voice actors including Cristina Valenzuela (Hyrule Warriors: Age of Calamity) and Brock Powell (Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice) have been used to voice both friends and foes, and Minecraft fans can expect to find many familiar sound bites throughout the game.

While Minecraft Legends is available for free on day one via an Xbox Game Pass subscription ($49.95RRP otherwise), fans can also purchase the Deluxe Edition from retailers for ~$74.95 which includes four mounts, six in-game skins and an additional mount skin which will become available at a later date. There’s also the bonus of having a physical copy. With the game available on all platforms and cross-platform playable, there are plenty of ways to play against friends and strangers alike. If anything, Minecraft Legends is a great introduction to action-strategy games for players that may not have experienced this genre before.

Developer: Mojang Studios & Blackbird Interactive

Release date: 19/04/2023

Rating: PG

Rocket Chainsaw reviewed Minecraft Legends on Xbox Series X and Windows 11 with review code provided by Microsoft. Minecraft Legends is also available on PlayStation 4 & 5 and Nintendo Switch. For more information, head to the official website.