Minecraft: Xbox 360 Edition

I had absolutely no intention of playing Minecraft but when I was between games, I thought I would pick it up and hammer it out in about an hour – that was the impression I was given by the really low difficulty that people seemed to indicate came with it. Plus, it only had 400 points as an arcade release so I also thought I wouldn’t have to review it. But thank you Mojang for proving me completely wrong.

Firstly, the premise. It’s one I don’t really understand. You are a blockheaded character in a block world and you have to harvest your environment by constantly punching things until they turn into smaller collectible blocks which you can then use to build other stuff, turn into other stuff or cook in a furnace to turn into other stuff. And all to do... nothing really. That’s it. There is no real end goal that you explore the world to find. There is the Ender Dragon but unless I missed something tragic during my time playing, it’s not clearly advertised as an end goal, even though I suppose it is? I don’t know, I guess I would need to be more invested in the lore in order to get it.

The music is the most horrendous aspect of the game by far. It’s a real ‘kill yourself’ theme. There is no get up and go to it. You are just aimlessly wandering around and the music makes you feel like there is no real reward to survival. Dying makes the music stop. Winning.

I don’t really have a lot else to say about the game. The mechanics are simple enough and anything that isn’t clear is well explained in the tutorial, I just don’t get it myself.

Achievements – 1,000 Points – 50 Achievements

So when I first started playing, I thought I would be done in five minutes and I would have been if I had a friend who was willing to help me. However, without a friend, it takes a very long time to get the On A Rail achievement as you have to collect enough resources to build 500m worth of train tracks. Unfortunately Iron doesn’t grow on trees and it takes a long time of exploring, building pickaxes, mining coal, mining iron ore, mining gold ore and mining redstone in order to build all of the materials required to craft a mine track of 500m. Oh, and you will need a mine cart as well.

There are 19 other achievements but they are all fairly straightforward and despite what some guides say, you can earn them all in the tutorial world.

There is not an achievement for killing the Ender Dragon in the original 20 Achievements

Downloadable Content

It’s a free DLC which will make people happy and it comes with 30 additional achievements for playing the game. There is more of the same stuff to do and chances are if you like Minecraft you have probably done it all already. However, there are a few ones that are problematic and I would probably still be playing the game if not for Deathdealer108 and Destroyer675000.

The first one is Sniper Duel which you get for killing a skeleton from 50 meters away. This is ridiculous. From 50 meters, you cannot even see the skeleton. This is where my friends come in to play. They have managed to capture a skeleton in a room and created a 50 meter long archery range. You had to aim somewhere in the sky in order to get your arrow to drop on to the skeleton and you had to do this twice with a normal bow to kill it. Doing it in the woods? Impossible. Another guide stated the best way to do it was to get 50 blocks of cobblestone and build a cobblestone tower directly below you after you find a skeleton, then simply shoot downwards.

Another one which I wouldn’t have got without help was the Zombie Doctor one. Deathdealer108 had managed to capture a zombie villager in a hut and had a convenient save slot and the right equipment to get the achievement, but I can imagine this would be a big ball ache trying to do it from scratch.

Selected others include killing the Ender Dragon and entering an End Portal. Joining someone who had already found the End Portal made this loads easier than it otherwise would have been.

The last one worth mentioning, as other people seem to have struggled with it, it is killing a Ghast with its own fireball. I think I got lucky with this. I used my potion of fire resistance and dived into some lava. The Ghast followed me in and I just hovered trying to swim out of the lava, level with the Ghast and just hit his fireballs until he died. This was also a lot easier than some of the videos I watched for it!

The last achievement I unlocked was for the playing the game for 100 in-game days which is the equivalent to 33 hours and 20 minutes worth of play. I did this after I finished my rail track and simply left it running over night for several nights until the achievement unlocked. I understand that this unlocked instantly after getting the DLC for most people as they had already invested this much time in it before. I’m not sure what they would have been doing though.

The only scenario in which I will play Minecraft again is if they release more DLC for it just to keep the 100%. I’m not one of these people who will invest time in it for ‘fun’ as I simply don’t see the ‘fun’ element. I can now officially say that after giving it a go.