Minecraft Dungeons is my favorite game this year that I had almost no interest in when it was first announced. I typically don't care for Diablo style action RPGS and while I enjoy Minecraft, I don't have a strong affinity for the franchise. I only tried the game because it was on GamePass, if not for that I would have never played it. Despite all that Minecraft Dungeons is a game I beat four different times and if I didn't lose my save file I would still be playing. What makes Minecraft Dungeons resonate with me is it's simplicity. Similar games can be somewhat overwhelming with their constant loot, skill trees, and character classes.
Minecraft Dungeons dumbs down almost all of those systems where if you are a veteran of the genre might find it too boring but that's what makes me appreciate the game. Loot in the game trickles in but when you do get a new weapon, armor, or ability, you actually get excited and not just because a new drop is a higher gear score. There's only two types of weapons, a melee weapon and a ranged weapon, two armor types, and while there are a multitude of different abilities each one is unique in its own way that allows you to play with different builds without feeling overwhelmed with options. The weapons and armor have modifiers that can vary from increased movement speed, health replenishment, stunning/slowing down enemies, etc. These can make drops more interesting but also forces you to try new abilities if you get a weapon you like but with new abilities, or vice versa. This makes it so loot isn't just about getting something that's the exact same just with higher numbers attached to it. It's more about experimenting with the limited but varied loot that you find.
The difficulty in Minecraft Dungeons was another big reason why I enjoyed the game so much. There are three difficulty settings to the game and you can increase or decrease the difficulty slightly before jumping in to a new level. Difficulty is tied to the loot you get, when you play the game on the hardest difficulty, you can get new weapons with new abilities that you couldn't get when playing on lower difficulties. Also, while the enemies get stronger as you increase the difficulty, the reason the difficulty works so well for me is the sheer number of enemies the game throws at you in harder levels. Instead of having to fight one enemy is a boring bullet sponge you instead fight 20 easy to medium enemies. I get very bored when games throw enemies at you that take five minutes to kill and call it "difficult". Mostly because games that have enemies that take a long time to kill but pose no real threat to the player are boring as hell. Minecraft Dungeons breaks this trend by throwing massive amounts of mobs at you to defeat. The challenge comes in the form of crowd control and evasion, where maybe you need to travel behind enemy lines to defeat a wizard who is buffing all the weaker mobs, but they are surrounded by a wall of said weaker mobs.This then requires you need to break through the enemy line, defeat the wizard, and then try and retreat before you get ganged up on. This style of combat is fun, frantic, and rewarding.
While I truly loved the combat in Minecraft Dungeons, the level design, while not terrible, left a lot to be desired. There is rarely any reward for exploring each level, beyond the occasional secret level that you need to unlock by finding a different exit in a level. Once you do this though, going off the beaten path often just leads to a dead end with no reward waiting at the end.
The only other complaint I have about Minecraft Dungeons is the gear enchanting system. As you level up, you get enchantment points to level up your gear. The base level of this is very interesting as each piece of gear can have up to three different ability slots, with each slot having up to three different choices. After you pick one ability from a slot, you can't pick any others from the same slot, but you can level up the enchantment that you choose. My issue with this system is you can't get those enchantment points unless you completely salvage your gear which gives you your points back, but destroys the weapon or armor they were attached to. I really wish you could just remove the enchantment points without destroying the weapon. Once you start to get legendary gear, it really sucks to not be able to switch back and forth between different gear unless you use the new gear with no enchantments. For all I know this system could have changed, since I haven't played the game in many months but it still dampened my enjoyment of the game when I played through it.
While initially I was just surprised at how much fun the game was, I never expected to love Minecraft Dungeons as much as I did. While that initial surprise would have been enough to get it on my GOTY list, it was the fantastic gameplay that kept me playing again and again and again until I beat the game four times and got all the achievements. That just goes to show how much I enjoyed playing this game because I hardly ever replay games or get all the achievements. Even though there are plenty of games I would like to replay multiple times, Minecraft Dungeons was good enough for me to follow through with playing it again and again.
