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Arguably one of Microsoft’s biggest brands, and one of the biggest entertainment properties period, Minecraft has gone from strength to strength in the last decade—the base game has grown bigger and bigger still, there has been a Telltale spin-off, Dungeons felt like baby’s first Diablo, and the film did gangbusters, becoming an unbearable meme hotbed and having its sequel rushed into development.
It’s a money-printing machine, and it’s no surprise that the franchise continues to iterate. Even less surprising, after accruing millions of players, is that Minecraft Dungeons has received a sequel of its own. It appears to be a bigger, bolder effort this time around, but I’d argue the team’s main triumph comes in the improvements to the online experience, which is more seamless and comes with far fewer teething issues than before.
Not having played the original, I was more than eager to experience the core loop and, truth be told, Dungeons might be my favourite iteration of Minecraft. It’s comfort food, forgoing the complexities of the base game’s mining and crafting in favour of the empty calories of hacking and slashing hordes of Minecraft’s notable nasties. It’s simple enough to be able to switch the brain off, but I appreciate a clear objective.
That said, it’d be folly to write Dungeons II off as something basic and lacking depth in an effort to capture the kid demographic. It is that, but some possibilities exist outside of the scope of a more relaxed, arcade experience. If you’re the kind of player who likes to get into the nitty-gritty and min-max characters, then Dungeons II can be that, too. In addition to that, the game now has four armour slots, a new special item rarity, weapon enchanting, and players can equip three talismans, which passively level up and provide buffs.
Any insinuation that Mojang has rested on its laurels with this sequel can be checked at the door; it’s chock full of features regularly requested by Dungeons players. Movement feels more dynamic this time around, with the team adding a jump to complement the dodge roll. This gave the level designers a lot more freedom to explore the vertical and, based on what I played, Dungeons II has plenty of cool cave networks, and presumably many other biomes, that can be explored on multiple planes.
Being a guided and semi-linear experience, the team was cautious not to declare Dungeons II an open-world game, instead referring to it as an interconnected world. With a day and night cycle and more dynamic lighting, all funnelled through Minecraft’s unmistakable block design, it’s quite a nice-looking game.
As I alluded to earlier, it’s really the effort the team has gone to in ensuring that, this time around, the co-op experience is more seamless. Sitting down for a quick four-player campaign, the team is eager to point out that, unlike Minecraft Dungeons, players are no longer forced to endure their co-op partner’s dive into their inventory, which would so often hold up the action. In Dungeons II, there’s a quick toggle that brings up a semi-opaque window that covers pretty much your quarter of the screen.
From there, you can quickly swap things like armour pieces and weapons, both primary and secondary, to others in hand without interrupting the flow of play. It isn’t a perfect solution as the inventory window does still cover enough of the screen that it can quite easily obscure things, but it’s a step in the right direction. I have to expect it’s an issue limited to local play, so in that sense, it’s probably not the end of the world.
In an effort to keep siblings from tearing each other apart, a player’s loot drops are specific to them. It didn’t seem as though all drops were equal; they did still seem random player-to-player, but they’ve made it simple to parse in real-time whose piece is whose. With my character being identified by the colour blue, all of my loot had a glowing little aura of the same colour. It’s a simple, user-friendly way of keeping arguments to a minimum, too many friendships have come to a grinding halt over loot poaching.
Not only am I eager to hop into the world of Minecraft Dungeons II with my kids when the game launches on shelves, but this demo has also made me want to go back and see what I’ve been missing all this time. It’s not going to be this trailblazer dungeon crawler that reinvents the genre, but its pared-back take on games like Diablo is sure to appeal to both kids and players not wanting that kind of hardcore ARPG experience.
