Find The Best Free Online Games on Poki. Start Playing Now! Minecraft Games - Play Online for Free on Poki
- Popular Games
The Most Played Games
Fun Free Online Games
- All Our Categories
Over 200 Different Game Categories
Make Your Choice!
- See All Our Games
Browse the Complete Collection
New Games Every Week
- Build & Crush
Action Games
by Ctrl4ltDel
- Noob Archer
Puzzle Games
by Vanorium
- Skill Games
Practice Your Skills
Learn by Playing
- Popular Games
Search results
A subreddit for games descended from Rogue - a sub-genre of RPG games involving things like permadeath and randomized levels. This community is mostly centered around traditional roguelike games which are turn-based, grid-based and single character focused, but discussion of "roguelike-like" games is still allowed.
Part 2 (1.18) is coming later this year, with previews already out. This will include the massive world generation changes and add the mountains and caves and all that good stuff. You can try the previews . Ah yes, they split the "Caves and Cliffs" update into two parts, with part 2 containing the Caves and Cliffs.
- The latest addition to the Minecraft universe is wonderful, although it's more strategy than action.
- Minecraft Legends: Performance and stability
- PC performance and controls
- Minecraft Legends: Visuals and world
- Minecraft Legends: Campaign and story
- Minecraft Legends: Action and strategy gameplay
- Strategy gameplay that just makes sense
- A Hero that steadily becomes less heroic
- Minecraft Legends: Co-op and multiplayer
- Minecraft Legends: Additional and post-launch content
Reviews
By Zachary Boddy
published 14 April 2023
(Image: © Windows Central)
Not to spoil the next section, but Minecraft Legends isn't attempting to be the most visually or technically impressive game in the world. It isn't pushing your system to its utmost limits. Instead, it focuses on offering a similarly fantastic playing experience on every platform, even aging consoles and PCs or the Nintendo Switch. Minecraft Legends needs to maintain stable performance even with literally dozens of NPCs on the screen at once, and it does so with no complaints.
Swipe to scroll horizontally
During my time with Minecraft Legends, I never experienced a dropped frame, stutter, or slowdown on my Xbox Series X, even during the most intense battles and scenes. It loads quickly, plays smoothly, and seems well-equipped to handle everything you can throw at the game. I was impressed and had no complaints on this front.
Stability is a slightly different matter. I wouldn't describe Minecraft Legends as buggy, but it's certainly not bug-free. Some of the bugs I encountered during my playthrough included the Masonry (which upgrades nearby buildings to stone instead of wood) randomly stopping working after a while, the animation showing the Protector's defensive auras not appearing, and the controls in the map randomly and temporarily inverting.
I also had an issue with the AI pathfinding. Generally, your units follow your steps exactly, meaning they will all make the same mistakes you do. If they do encounter a situation where following your steps exactly doesn't quite work, the AI can struggle to find a safe path to take.
Finally, while I encountered no hard crashes, I did experience one game freeze. Shortly after defeating the Horde of the Hunt boss, I fast traveled to a nearby village to collect some units. However, the game froze while rendering the environment, leaving me suspended in a white void. After a long time, I finally had to restart the game, resulting in me needing to restart the entire boss battle. I believe this issue may have been caused by my trying to open my map before the game was fully loaded, but I can't be sure.
The performance of Minecraft Legends on PC in-game is just as smooth and stable as the Xbox version, as I was able to maintain a steady 144+ framerate throughout all types of gameplay without any screen tearing or stuttering. With that said, I did experience an odd quirk with the PC version, as well as a few issues with the resolution settings. Every time I used the Alt+Tab shortcut to back out of the game while playing in fullscreen mode, the game screen would rapidly flicker behind my other opened programs instead of minimizing like it was supposed to. This isn't a huge problem, but it makes tabbing out to check things like Discord messages annoying. Windowed mode, meanwhile, wouldn't correctly scale the game window to match my chosen resolution. Also, for whatever reason, I couldn't get options for resolutions other than my monitor's native resolution to appear.
Minecraft Legends' keyboard and mouse controls are comfortable and intuitive overall, as the game's main four menus for resource gathering, mob spawners, building, and improvements are assigned to the easy-to-reach ZXCV keys, respectively. Movement is handled by the usual WASD, and attacking, camera rotation, and menu selection is done with the mouse and its various inputs. Micromanaging your units is a little awkward since you have to hold the CTRL key and then cycle through unit types with arrow keys before directing them with your mouse, but you get used to it quickly.
I hinted earlier that Minecraft Legends isn't the most graphically impressive title, and that's true, but it's by no means an ugly game. Far from it, Minecraft Legends perfectly captures the look and feel of Minecraft, with wonderfully designed characters and mobs (especially among the Piglins) and crisp, cubed visuals that leave no room for misinterpretation. This is a Minecraft game, through and through, and it looks good.
It could be more colorful and bright (the lack of HDR support, at least on console, may contribute to this), but I was never bored looking at Minecraft Legends. My only genuine complaint is that the world itself feels lacking in diversity and detail at times, leading it to slowly grow repetitive as you play. Minecraft is brimming with varied biomes and environments, so it's odd that Minecraft Legends' entirely procedurally generated worlds aren't pulling more from that region roster, with less than ten unique biomes on offer. Even the Nether contains multiple distinct biomes, yet Minecraft Legends doesn't take advantage of them beyond the classic netherrack and lava look (and the black and gold of Piglin structures).
Minecraft Legends is built on the same Bedrock Engine that powers Minecraft, so the ability to generate more variety is certainly there. Minecraft Legends also doesn't always compare favorably to the older Minecraft Dungeons with its lovingly crafted, surprisingly detailed environments. You can't directly compare the two (one is an open world, the other linear), but ignoring the differences is difficult. Minecraft Legends' graphics are solid but not overly impressive, just as its world is perfectly functional but occasionally bland.
None of these complaints can be levied against Minecraft Legends' cinematics, however. The game features dozens of cutscenes spread across three different visual styles, and they all look fantastic. It's like a Minecraft animated movie in the best possible sense and adds a lot to the world and its story. To be frank, some of my complaints regarding Minecraft Legends' base visuals may be entirely due to their proximity to the high-quality cinematics peppered throughout, which are lush in vibrancy and detail at every turn.
Having the most in-depth, complete story of any Minecraft game isn't really a high bar to cross, but Minecraft Legends comfortably crosses it. Minecraft leaves all its lore in the hands of players, while Minecraft Dungeons' campaign featured a nameless, bodyless narrator and a handful of cinematics. Minecraft Legends features the franchise's first named, fully voiced mobs in the Hosts (named Action, Knowledge, and Foresight) and plenty of complete, feature-film quality cinematics and cutscenes.
The story is straightforward, but at the same time is a fantastic continuation of the Minecraft universe while adding heaps of new lore for players to pore over. Minecraft Legends is set in a distant past and even possibly a different universe than the Minecraft we know and love today. It features an Overworld united in peace and tranquility, where even the hostile mobs of vanilla Minecraft, like zombies, creepers, and skeletons, are friendly pacifists.
Unfortunately, war is introduced to the Overworld, changing it irrevocably and permanently, when portals to the violent Nether region tear into the world and unleash countless hordes of brutal Piglin armies. The Piglins wish to subjugate the Overworld and drain it of its resources, turning into a mirror image of the Nether; no one is safe, and everyone in the Piglins' path is slaughtered unceremoniously. It's dark and spells doom for the entire region, but the Hosts — magical beings that live in a place between worlds, decide that a hero is needed to save the day.
Enter you, a player in Minecraft. Yes, I mean that Minecraft. The Hosts call upon you from the Minecraft familiar to hundreds of millions of players, pulling you into a new world and gifting you a series of tools and a wealth of knowledge to help you in your battle against the Piglins. You are the Hero, and you must save the Overworld, uniting and protecting the people within while fighting back the Piglins and banishing them to the Nether, where they belong.
It's a simple tale, but one with beautiful writing for the Hosts, lots of humorous moments, and plenty of treats for Minecraft fans. In this version of Minecraft, the Overworld once had eternal day thanks to two suns until one was corrupted by the Piglins and crystallized into the moon. Thus, the day and night cycle was born, giving the Piglins the darkness under which they thrive. Minecraft Legends also suggests how the pillagers came to be, showcasing how a small subset of the peaceful villagers was traumatized by the war and the grief of their losses; driven by their anger and desire to change things, and these villagers asked the Hosts to give them the weapons they need to fight.
After the credits roll, though, it's still up to the player how much of Minecraft Legends' story they wish to be a part of Minecraft's history. As the name suggests, this is a legend, possibly one that has been passed down by the villagers, inevitably shifting and altering over time. It may be true, but it may also be embellished or changed from the truth. Mojang Studios is leaving that for the players to decide. At the end, it's also hinted that this won't be the last we see of the Hosts, as other Minecraft worlds need their help.
In my Minecraft Legends preview, its gameplay ultimately won me over, pushing my excitement levels over the edge until I could hardly wait to dive into the full game. The first two hours shocked me with the depth of the gameplay and the finesse with which Mojang Studios and Blackbird Interactive were executing their dream to craft a unique game blending action and strategy genres. Now, after having finished the full game and sampled all of its content, my expectations have been tweaked but not missed.
Minecraft Legends is so much fun, but its two halves are not perfectly matched. Minecraft Legends combines facets of action and strategy games, but both by necessity and for approachability, the developers had to pare back these halves deliberately. On the strategy side, this means Minecraft Legends doesn't contain the dozens of buildings, scores of mobs, and countless upgrades of full strategy games like Age of Empires II Definitive Edition. This leads to a more compact, focused experience, but it doesn't mean there's a shortage of available tactics or an abrupt end to the strategy fun.
The strategy genre is home to some of the most complicated, meticulously crafted games in the industry; it's challenging to make a good one, and it's even more difficult to make a great strategy game that works on every platform and with controllers. Mojang Studios tapped strategy experts Blackbird Interactive to help it make Minecraft Legends a reality, and the result is a genuinely fantastic strategy game that feels comfortable and natural to play even on a controller.
The control scheme takes full advantage of every button, with the D-Pad and triggers being used to expertly split all the controls for building, collecting resources, and commanding your units and troops into three separate tiers. It can be complicated to learn at first (please play the tutorial and listen to the helpful tips), but once the controls click... It all just works. Well done, Mojang Studios and Blackbird Interactive; you can now join the Age of Empires teams — Minecraft Legends plays amazingly, thanks to these controls.
As far as the gameplay itself, Minecraft Legends tasks players with managing build and gather Allays to collect various resources from the world, build offensive, defensive, and supportive buildings, construct Improvement towers to upgrade your abilities, and create spawners that allow you to build up your army. You can command nearby units to follow your footsteps, charge in a direction, and focus on specific targets, divide these commands between single units and groups based on their type (melee, ranged, special, and legendary), and even specific varieties.
It never gets old watching your armies swarm into Piglin strongholds and dismantle their fortifications. Minecraft Legends does capture that delectable, hard-to-describe feeling elicited by a good strategy game when you're in charge, and your commands result in a resounding victory. It feels great, and the entire world and the upgrades are balanced around this gameplay. At first, you're only able to command a small army of basic units and build simple defensive structures. Still, eventually, you'll unlock the ability to gather rare resources that unlock more powerful units (and eventually more powerful buildings), as well as improve your Allays' numbers and abilities, your storage, and how many units you're able to command and spawn.
This is the core of Minecraft Legends, and it's amazing across the campaign (solo or in co-op), multiplayer, and the challenges. Of course, it's not entirely perfect, so I'll quickly rattle off some improvements I'd like to see made to this formula: I want to be able to build gates and towers into existing walls; I want to be able to remove multiple existing structures quickly; I want to be able to quickly switch between options in a respective building menu using the bumpers without leaving that interface; I want to be able to quickly retake control of an army after giving it a command without having to round everyone up manually; I want to be able to dismiss individual units from my spawned army, opening up space for new units.
Also, the world of Minecraft Legends is filled with wildlife, like wolves, foxes, rabbits, turtles, llamas, and much more. Early trailers suggested that you could also unite these animals against the Piglin invaders threatening the Overworld, but this was misleading. Yes, you can add these animals to your army, but you can't command them, and they can't fight alongside you, including more aggressive animals like wolves. Most animals immediately run away in terror, abandoning your army and leaving the battlefield. Sure, this makes sense for an animal, but why let us recruit them in the first place? I can't tell if this was a feature that didn't make the final cut or is planned for a post-launch update, but let me command a pack of vicious wolves against the Piglins, please.
When you begin Minecraft Legends, you play as the Hero, a valiant warrior and commander tasked with uniting the Overworld and stopping the Piglin invaders. At the start of the game, you can battle alongside your armies, taking advantage of your decent attack damage and regenerating health to aid your forces and battle Piglins directly. You're the core of your army, directing the flow of the battle from within your ranks. It's fantastic and feels vital to success — You have to protect your soldiers while they focus on the primary targets, like buildings and towers.
However, the Piglins progressively become more diverse, numerous, and dangerous as time goes on. Eventually, it's not reasonable to be in the midst of the battles without risking frequent, untimely deaths. This is especially true against bosses and stronger Piglins, which can annihilate you in moments if you're not careful. This would be fine if you could upgrade your Hero alongside your army and other abilities, allowing the player character to grow to meet this evolving threat, but you can't.
There are no player-specific upgrades. Every single upgrade is for the strategy half of the game and naturally places more importance on these mechanics the further into the campaign you progress. You can't upgrade your attack damage and speed or health amount and regeneration speed. You can't add armor for damage reduction or improve the size of your banner area to recruit new units to your command. Every upgrade targets Minecraft Legends' three primary pillars: buildings, units, and resources.
Because of this, Minecraft Legends' halves feel increasingly unbalanced as you approach the end, with its strategy elements dominating the gameplay while you avoid the most intense of the action. While the opening hours make it clear your armies can't succeed without you, the latter half of the game sees you remotely command your units, only entering the battlefield to frantically regain control of them and give them a new directive. You can't even damage buildings as the Hero, further reducing your use when you're unable to stand up to the Piglin forces threatening your army. This is undoubtedly even more true at higher difficulties.
Minecraft Legends can be entirely played by yourself and offline (if you're actually offline, else the game will want to be connected to the internet), but it's designed from the ground up to be played with friends. The campaign is perfectly playable solo, but it can be tedious to manage everything on your own. Play with up to three other friends (the host's platforms dictate if two or four co-op players are supported), and take on the entirety of the campaign together. Yes, there's full cross-play powered by your Microsoft Account so that you can play with friends from any platform. Just bear in mind that there's no in-game party, so switching game modes means reinviting everyone, and there's no in-game chat.
Everyone shares resources, spawned unit pools, and upgrades but gets their own banners (to recruit units outside of the spawned army) and Allays to build and gather. Thus, you can divide responsibilities and tackle every obstacle as a team. It works fantastic and can be a lot of fun. My only suggestion? If you're planning on playing the campaign with friends, start on a greater difficulty setting. The default "Fabled" difficulty feels perfect for solo players that like a bit of challenge, but it's entirely too easy with multiple players.
Higher difficulties give you larger maps, more Piglin bases and armies, and generally more challenging and harder-hitting opponents. It's an excellent way to help balance the greater capabilities and larger armies afforded by online co-op and can make the game more interesting in the long run. Sure, it's fun to completely annihilate a base in a matter of minutes once or twice, but it's no way to play the entire game. Overall, Minecraft Legends is just as good as Minecraft Dungeons, or Minecraft to play with friends. That is to say, it's the best way to play if you're able.
Mojang Studios didn't stop there, though. Minecraft Legends is the first Minecraft game with an official, competitive player-versus-player (PvP) element with an online multiplayer game mode, and it's also awesome. Smaller, procedurally generated maps, additional building types, and sweeping balancing changes to the core gameplay ensure reasonable match lengths (around 30 minutes), but it's more or less all the fun of the campaign condensed into short, chaotic multiplayer matches.
Two teams of players of up to four players square off, each defending their Stronghold while attempting to destroy their opponents. You have to collect resources, build upgrades and defenses, and command armies as a team. There are also Piglin outposts that attack all players indiscriminately (yes, it's actually PvPvE), and it's necessary to battle these Piglins to collect valuable resources for upgrades and unit spawning. It's pure, messy fun, and I could see many players spending a lot of time in this game mode. Nothing is off the table, which means every match should be different.
You can also play custom private matches that even support 1v1 games and jump into a training session to help you and your team prepare for multiplayer. It's well thought out, and I hope it finds success so it can grow in the future with new content and improvements. If I could make one request, though, Mojang? Please, we don't need constant notifications every time either team does literally anything. That got old fast.
Is a beefy 18-hour, highly replayable campaign with co-op support isn't enough for you? Wait, the frenetic, competitive online multiplayer still isn't enough for you? Okay, how about optional, tailored, challenging scenarios that throw you into unique situations and can grant special rewards? Well, that's Minecraft Legends' Lost Legends & Myths mode, and it's one of the key ways I think the game will continue to be interesting after launch.
There's only one Lost Legend in the game right now, Portal Pile, which challenged me to defend a single village from 20 waves of Piglins emerging from three nearby Nether Portals. Each wave successively defeated granted me extra resources, new upgrades, and a short cooldown to build more defenses and prepare for the next wave. It didn't take long for things to get ridiculous, and I had a good time filling every available space with defenses while hundreds of Piglins at a time threw themselves at the village. By the end, I was commanding an army of 100 zombies and warriors, and my 30 minutes of effort got me a new skin for my Hero. Neat.
Mojang Studios will add new monthly challenges for the Lost Legends mode after Minecraft Legends releases, giving players reasons to return and test their skills. More is clearly coming to Minecraft Legends in the future, though, as the game also has the Minecraft Marketplace. Yes, the same Minecraft Marketplace in Minecraft: Bedrock Edition, complete with the same Minecoins currency (my tiny balance showed up in Legends, too).
It's presumably here because Legends is built on the Bedrock Engine, but it opens up exciting possibilities for the game. Right now, there's only a skin pack and one free Lost Legend (which rewards its skin through the Marketplace), but what else could appear here in the future?
- Staff Writer
- zacharylboddy@outlook.com
- Build Battle. This one does what it says on the tin, but can be a real blast with some like-minded friends. A timer is set, and in creative mode, players must quickly build the most impressive structure they can.
- Hide and Seek. You can’t beat a bit of hide and seek. This childhood game inevitably made its way to Minecraft, and it works brilliantly with the large open worlds, especially with the cliffs and coves added in later updates.
- Hunger Games. One of the most popular Minecraft games of all time, Hunger Games in Minecraft was a viral phenomenon back when it first hit the scene in 2012.
- Bed Wars. 16 players in four teams of four stand on floating islands and must work to be the last team standing. Here it’s a game of defending your beds so players can respawn, while cautiously building platforms and collecting resources like diamonds to make or buy armor and buffs for your team.
Aug 29, 2024 · The first Last of Us venture was hardly lacking in themes of humanity and morality, but number Two dials those levels up to 11, and is all the better for it. You can read our five-star The Last of ...
Explore your own unique worlds, survive the night, and create anything you can imagine! Watch the sample video of Minecraft gameplay above, or select "watch the trailer" to see the full video on YouTube. Learn More. Watch the trailer. Discover an action-adventure game inspired by classic dungeon crawlers. Watch the sample video of Minecraft ...
People also ask
Can you play Minecraft legends solo?
Is Minecraft a good game?
Will Mojang Studios add new challenges to Minecraft legends?
Is Minecraft Legends a good game to play with friends?
Is Minecraft Legends a good game to play on PC?
Are there any good single-player games?
Jun 8, 2021 · Watch the fun launch trailer for a look at what to expect with Part I of Minecraft's Caves & Cliffs update, available now. The Caves & Cliffs Update: Part I brings fun mobs, blocks, and items.
