Minecraft Review
Platform: PC, PS4, PS3, Vita, Xbox One, Xbox 360
Developer: Mojang
Publisher: Mojang, Microsoft, Sony
Author: S.G.
It’s hard to ignore the cultural phenomenon that is Minecraft these days. It has transformed from a modest little indie game about exploring and building your own world, to a gigantic multimedia entity. Everywhere you look you can see Minecraft. There are keychains, t-shirts, toys, Legos, Minecraft guides, magazines, and countless other merchandise being sold every day. There are extremely successful YouTube channels dedicated to Minecraft. There was even an album released from the composer who worked on Minecraft featuring music from the game. Minecraft is seemingly producing an endless flow of revenue for those who have learned to profit from the game. Millions upon millions of dollars are made off of this game every year. But why? Why is this simple game, with no boss fights, no power ups, no story (unless you are talking about the recent spinoff adventure title developed by Tell Tale Games, but I am not), so damn popular? Why have millions of people latched onto this game, investing thousands of hours of their lives into it?
Minecraft is a simple game in many ways, but entirely unique. The game starts by dropping the player into a randomly generated world of pixels. At this point, the first thing you notice are the graphics. Minecraft has (at least at the time of its release) a very unique visual style where pretty much everything you see is composed of blocks. The trees, the hills, even your own avatar are made of blocks. This seems very simple, and even possibly dull, but within the game it works. It’s such a simple style, yet there is a serene beauty to it. It’s also nice and colourful, which is kind of a rare thing in games these days, unfortunately. Minecraft graphics almost have a child-like feeling to them, but that doesn’t mean the game can’t be enjoyed by adults. The visual style lends itself perfectly to a game about using your imagination to build anything you please.
Did someone just build a whole space station?
Now that you are in the world of Minecraft, you may ask yourself what to do exactly. There is no arrow pointing you to a location, no objective marker on a map, there isn’t even an objective. This may boring, but the point of Minecraft isn’t to complete objectives to work your way towards an endgame, it is to create. You create by gathering resources (by using a pixelated fist to smack things like trees into smaller pieces of wood) and building things. Minecraft uses a very simple crafting system where you open your inventory, and you drag individual resources into a certain shape to build things, such as a pick axe. It sounds a little confusing on paper, but it works wonderfully. Once you get going building tools like your pickaxe, shovel, sword, and axe, you can keep gathering resources and building other things. The only limit to Minecraft is the player’s imagination. It’s astounding what people have built in the game. It goes far beyond building a simple house out of wood blocks. That is where the true beauty in Minecraft lies.
The audio design in Minecraft is also superb. It was developed independently by a handful of people, so there aren’t sweeping orchestral scores to heighten the mood of the game. Instead, there’s a calming and beautiful sounding ambient background music, fitting perfectly with the tone of the game. Simple, yet effective. Notice a theme here? The music was composed by a single man named Daniel Rosenfeld. Despite being composed by one person, the music doesn’t seem repetitive at all. In fact, you don’t really notice it on the surface. It exists in back of your mind, relaxing you as you explore this wonderful pixelated canvas.
By the power of Westeros…. is that King’s Landing?
Being a game that has basically no limitations, other than your imagination and ingenuity, Minecraft has infinite replay value. The more you play, the better you will get at building things, and the grander your creations will become. Gamers have built scale models of entire cities, such as King’s Landing from Game of Thrones; other have completed working mechanisms, skyscrapers, spaceships, even a rudimentary calculator that could calculate simple addition and subtraction problems. I am endlessly blown away by human ingenuity. That may seem a little dramatic when talking about a video game, but people have gone from using a few pieces of pixelated wood to make a wooden pickaxe, to crafting gigantic, working calculators. It is absolutely insane.
If you are the type of person who used to play with Legos as a kid, Minecraft is for you. If you like to build models of famous landmarks, Minecraft is for you. If you are an aspiring architect, Minecraft is for you! Minecraft isn’t just a little video game you play to pass the time. I mean it is, but it represents something much bigger than that. It represents the human desire to CREATE. You can make anything you want. It doesn’t matter what you make, as long as it is special to you. You will spend hours laying brick after brick, and at the end you will stand back and look at your piece of art, and you will feel fulfilled. And that is beautiful. It isn’t something video games accomplish very much, but when it happens, it is amazing. So to everyone who says video games can’t be art, I urge you to go pick up Minecraft and create something, just for yourself. And if you don’t feel anything when you’re done, then I don’t think you quite understand what art is.
