"Minecraft Legends is a fantastic strategy title that has more layers to it than I expected. When you begin to understand the systems at play, you’re free to be as creative as you want. The interface is easy to get to grips with, and the scale of some of the bigger battles is like nothing I’ve seen before. Mojang has managed to give players of all skills and ages a way to enjoy what many understand about the franchise, yet give a much different twist on the gameplay."
"Strategy games are historically unapproachable for many players. Still, Mojang Studios and Blackbird Interactive worked hard to strip back the strategy portions of the game just enough to make it more approachable for casual players. It works, and the combination of an optional tutorial and plenty of helpful, dynamic tips throughout gameplay ensures that you have all the info you need to play Minecraft Legends."
NME (8/10)
"In truth, the single-player is fun but if you’ve played strategy games before, you’ve seen what it has to offer. It just now has a cute Minecraft twist. You’ll enjoy your time but it’s not exactly deep. After all, it can’t be given its target audience isn’t the traditional strategy gamer. The variety that’s likely to come from multiplayer, however, is where the fun will be had. It’s cute, charming, and just the thing for everyone to get to grips with quickly."
"Minecraft Legends battles to blend its open-world adventuring with the intricacies of real-time strategy, a war that sometimes detracts from the overall fun you can have. Even so, its gorgeous environments and clever world-building inspire familiar creativity that makes up for its growing pains. Where other strategy games feature more profound complexity, Minecraft Legends has heart, and it’s hard to resist its charm. Mojang’s first expedition into this genre occasionally holds your hand too tight. But when its grip loosens, there’s a vibrant world of combat challenges to discover, ultimately making it an enticing endeavor."
IGN (7/10)
"Minecraft Legends is an engaging strategy game that does a great job streamlining a notoriously complex genre without sacrificing the ever-important element of choice and consequence. That said, some genre staples like assigning custom groups of units are casualties of this simplification, which is too bad because it does limit your strategic options a bit in the heat of battle. But Legends uses other recognizable elements like its worker unit Allays to great effect, and it nails the iconic Minecraft aesthetic with some of the best looking blocks around. The difficulty curve does have the potential to make the late game frustrating, but stellar cooperative and PVP play still make this RTS very worthwhile."
"I was hoping Legends would fill in the gaps with heaps of Minecraft charm to sell the rest of the package, but it is mostly surface-level. The creatures are typically adorable, and the world is extremely pretty, but I was looking for more secrets and subterranean exploration. I wanted to develop my hero, find stronger weapons and armour, and maybe access some AOE spells that could change the tide of battle and give me more agency in combat."
"Minecraft Legends has good ideas, but it's ultimately held back by the decision to root its strategy action around a central hero. With a limited field of view, few command inputs, and uninteresting AI, Legends fails to generate compelling combat cycles or opportunities for creative thinking."
Overall then, Minecraft Legends pretty much nails its Minecraft aesthetic — bringing plenty of charm along with it — but the general feeling is that it lacks some of the depth the genre often delivers, which is about what we expected from the title. It's currently sitting at 74 on Metacritic at the time of writing - a respectable score all in all!
