Minecraft Legends gameplay preview – the next Game Pass co-op classic

pcgamesn.com:

Minecraft has been transplanted to another genre. With the Minecraft Legends release date right around the corner, PCGamesN went to GDC 2023 in San Francisco to see how the world’s biggest PC game plays as a strategy game, and we can report that it’s a surprisingly seamless fit.

Built on the Bedrock engine and using similar procedural generation tech as its originator, Minecraft Legends follows a similar gameplay trajectory: you collect resources, build a base, forge equipment, and eventually take off to handle Piglins and mobs.

The first big difference is in scale. Rather than doing everything yourself, in Minecraft Legends you’ll use allays to farm resources across a whole area, erect walls and buildings in the blink of an eye, and spawn armies of defensive mobs at a much faster rate. To anyone familiar with the base game, it’s disorienting to see so little friction, so little that breaks, in this gap between toiling over your personal creations and mass producing them. To have them then work not only on a larger scale but in an entirely different genre is nothing short of a marvel.

But it’s important to manage expectations. Setting up your defences around a village to fend off piglins and commanding your troops doesn’t have the scale or depth of a Total War game, and Minecraft Legends wouldn’t be worthy of its franchise if it jettisoned its core tenets of mining and crafting. The creativity they offer you when building your bases and armies absolutely makes up for the more streamlined feel of this real-time strategy spin-off.

To this, you can add the joys of exploring the open world, in which you’ll find chests filled with resources and new mounts for your character. A far cry from the frantic APM rates of something