A good strategy game is ultimately about choice: deciding which units to create, where to allocate resources, and which strategies to implement. The right decisions lead to victory, while the wrong ones force you to adapt—or risk bitter defeat.
These moments are common in Minecraft Legends, Mojang and Blackbird Interactive’s simplified take on action RTS. While it doesn’t always succeed in fully opening the door to this often-intimidating genre for a wider audience, its ability to streamline gameplay without sacrificing key tactical moments is what makes Minecraft Legends stand out. Simplicity is one of its greatest strengths.
The Piglins from the Nether are invading—because, well, that’s what evil Piglins do—and it’s your job to gather forces and drive them back. To do so, you’ll gather resources, find allies, and uncover secrets, all while destroying Piglin bases and defending friendly settlements. The story is minimalistic, with no levels or complex plotlines. It mainly consists of cutscenes announcing the arrival of larger Piglin forces, with the gameplay offering the primary sense of progression.
Once you clear the Piglins out, victory is yours, and you can start again on a fresh, procedurally generated map. Minecraft’s iconic blocky style is faithfully reproduced here. The world feels straight out of the main Minecraft series, but the vibrant color palette and excellent lighting give it a fresh, appealing look. As with Minecraft tradition, nightfall brings added danger from aggressive enemies, but it’s hard to dread their arrival when it’s preceded by gorgeous sunsets over stunning vistas.
Unlike games like Starcraft or Command & Conquer, where you occupy the role of a far-off overseer commanding a complex army, Minecraft Legends puts you directly on the battlefield. You control a hero who fights alongside a small squad of summonable units, each with a very specific role to play. Cobblestone Golems have high health but are slow at dealing damage, Mossy Golems heal, and so on. The commands you give your soldiers are simple—go kill enemies over there, or follow me—but that simplicity is a strength. It makes it easy to jump into the action without a steep learning curve or the need to memorize complex controls.
That simplicity does come with some drawbacks, however. Notably, there’s no way to create custom groups of mixed troops, which limits your strategic options. It would have been great to combine a squad of skeleton archers, protected by spongy zombies, to counter the massive flail-wielding portal guards, but that level of fine control isn’t really feasible, which is a shame.
Fortunately, the direct participation in battles offers plenty of opportunities for clever choices. As the hero, you’re significantly more powerful than any individual soldier, always mounted and armed with a sword that swings in wide arcs. This allows you to create swarms of Cobblestone Golems for an invasion, directing them to focus on destroying buildings while you protect them. You can also assign units to guard one side of a friendly settlement while you cover the other. It’s this mental push and pull that makes strategy games so engaging.
This wouldn’t be a Minecraft game without gathering resources and building, and Minecraft Legends translates these mechanics in a slick and intuitive way. Small, fairy-like creatures assist with these tasks. One type focuses on resource gathering, stripping resources from trees or quarries, while another carries out building instructions, quickly assembling structures like golem spawners or arrow towers, as long as the required resources are available. The system is exceptionally easy to use, allowing you to go from idea to construction with just two button presses.
The Piglins don’t sit idly by while you build up your forces. They produce their own bases and outposts, which increase in complexity over time. What starts as simple pillaging of a few buildings soon turns into long sieges of intricate fortresses that can take multiple in-game days to complete. At night, the Piglins will invade friendly settlements, creating a constant mental struggle about whether to push your offensive advantage or shift your attention to defend vulnerable areas elsewhere. This provides a nice sense of tension.
The independent operation of your allies adds an interesting layer of strategy. You can assign one group to build walls, another to harvest wood, while you focus on combat, creating an engaging multitasking dynamic. However, the Piglins will actively target these fragile allies, preventing them from becoming overpowered.
Your primary home base is the Well of Fates. This is where you start, respawn when you die, and perform most of your upgrades. Destroyed Piglin structures drop Prismarine, which is used to build upgrade structures that allow you to command more troops or store more materials. However, there’s a limited number of places where these upgrades can be built, forcing tough decisions about whether to expand your army, mine specialty ores like coal or redstone, or speed up resource gathering with more allies.
Unfortunately, the last few hours of a playthrough can slow down as enemies with massive amounts of health—like armored Pigmadillos—join the fray. It’s great that enemies with unique designs and attacks still appear, but the sheer size of their armies can become a slog. This is especially frustrating when attacking an enemy base on a high plateau. Assembling an attack force only to have half of them fall off a cliff due to poor pathfinding can be incredibly annoying.
Minecraft Legends loses some of its potential as an entry point to the strategy genre due to these endgame struggles. Fortunately, good construction options help mitigate some of these frustrations. Siege tools, like the Redstone Launcher (which acts like a long-range cannon), can clear a landing point, and crafting bridges or stairs to cross gaps and ascend hills is straightforward. The Cure Netherrack ability, which slowly transforms the corrupted ground under Piglin bases, is another standout feature. It allows you to build structures and Golem spawners inside enemy territory. These additions help turn the tide of battle, but it can feel uncharacteristically daunting that making the most of every tool in your arsenal often feels like the only viable strategy to overcome the toughest outposts.
Minecraft Legends is fun solo, but it excels in multiplayer. You can play the entire campaign in co-op with up to three friends, where resources are split but everyone has full autonomy to act independently. Dividing tasks like resource gathering, base building, and combat alleviates many frustrations, and it’s simply more fun to charge into battle with friends. Sharing in the elation of victory never gets old.
PvP also adds an interesting twist. Two teams face off, each controlling a hero while sharing resources and Golems. In one match, my team focused on destroying Piglin bases early to afford upgrades quickly, aiming to create the most powerful army possible before engaging with other human players. In another, we were wiped out when our opponents stealthily built a Redstone Launcher within range of our base, defending it while it destroyed our structures. The strategic decisions that human players bring to the table are much more engaging than facing off against the CPU.
In conclusion, Minecraft Legends is an engaging strategy game that does a great job of streamlining a notoriously complex genre without sacrificing the all-important elements of choice and consequence. While some genre staples—like the ability to assign custom unit groups—are casualties of this simplification, Minecraft Legends uses other familiar mechanics, like its workers and allies, to great effect. The game nails the iconic Minecraft aesthetic, boasting some of the best-looking blocks around. Although the late game can become frustrating, stellar cooperative and PvP play make this RTS very worthwhile.