Minecraft is an incredibly popular open-world building adventure game with stylishly blocky graphics. It’s become a bit of a phenomenon since its release a few years back, especially with kids. And now, point and click experts TellTale Games has crafted an adventure based on the Minecraft universe called Minecraft: Story Mode.  It is split up into five episodes, like most other TellTale titles, and this is a review of the fifth episode.  It’s available for nearly all current home consoles, PCs, and tablets, but reviewed on PS3 here.

What’s weird is that the story actually concluded in Episode 4, but the group of builder friends you belong to in the game end up becoming the new Order of the Stone, a band of legendary heroes. So in the fifth installment, Jesse and his friends become the target of jealously from their rival building group, and end up leading them to a floating city in the sky for a new adventure for The Order of the Stone.  This episode also sets off a big surprise: TellTale will do three more bonus episodes that will have staggered releases in the coming months.  If I get to review those, too, you’ll see them here as well!

Like most TellTale games, Minecraft Story Mode is told in episodes, each one releasing a month or two after the last. You can download them separately, or buy a season pass so you can have them when they are ready. You can also buy a disc that acts like a season pass, too.  However, the game plays more like a kid-friendly Walking Dead title (another popular TellTale entry) rather than a true point and click adventure.  Most of what you do is listen to people talk to each other, and every once in a while you can choose what you want to say.  But be quick because you are timed, otherwise you’ll just go with the ‘silent’ option.  Choose your words wisely, though, because people will remember how you react to them later on.  This encourages a little bit of replayability as you can try different dialog options in another playthrough.

Every so often, you’ll get a chance to move around on your own. You’ll control main character Jesse directly with the left pad, and can move around a cursor with the right stick. You can highlight items to look at, pick up, or talk to certain people.  These parts of the game are most like a point and click adventure, too bad they don’t last very long.  Finally, sometimes you’ll have to do quick time events, where you must press buttons prompted on screen quickly to dodge obstacles in action sequences.

The main problem with the game is the same as always, in that it’s just leading you around by the nose, and there is hardly any actual gameplay involved. I know that the Walking Dead style of games proved popular for TellTale, and that’s why they probably went that route with this one. But I miss the ‘old’ TellTale games like Sam & Max, Wallace & Gromit’s Grand Adventures, and Tales of Monkey Island, which all felt more like ‘true’ point and click adventures.

At the end of each episode, you can see how many other people who played it made the same choices you did, which is kind of neat. The voice acting and storytelling are certainly top-notch, and while the game has blocky graphics, they are still charming and expressive. Another good thing is that you don’t have to play Minecraft to enjoy this game, but I think fans of Minecraft will get the most fun out of it.  I imagine the future bonus episodes will be just DLC and probably more of the same, but we’ll just have to see!

Kid Factor:

Minecraft: Story Mode is rated E-10 with ESRB descriptors of Fantasy Violence and Mild Language. You can attack monsters with swords and other weapons, but they just disappear when defeated. There are times when you can die, but the screen just fades out and you can start back over shortly before you made your mistake.  Plus the blocky visuals keep the violence from looking too graphic anyway.  Reading skill is helpful for the text, but I think young Minecraft fans will still enjoy this one, especially since it is so simple.  After titles like The Walking Dead and Game of Thrones, it’s nice to see TellTale working with a family-friendly license again.

Tags: Game Reviews