50 Reviews! Minecraft Spectacular!I welcome you all to my 50th review. I doubt more than a handful had made this many reviews and it had taken me just a little over a year to reach this many. I know this game speaks for itself in a way, but I figured that it would be a fun game to review and that it would be a good game to celebrate with, especially since there's a huge story behind me and the game.
I hadn't always liked Minecraft, in fact, as recently as last October, I might not have even known what Minecraft was about. It was the start of October, and I had just started watching Markiplier on Youtube, who quickly had became my favorite Youtuber. I was a bit skeptical about his Drunk Minecraft series because I thought it would be boring, but I decided to watch an episode of it and I instantly fell in love with the series. I watched a dozen or so more episodes and I was amazed at all of the things that you can do in the game, and I began to wonder why I'm not playing it.
Sometime during December or early January, I realized that I had to get the game, no matter what I had to do, but I was a bit skeptical about the price, so I downloaded the demo and I dell in love. The demo was only 90 minutes long, but I would do as much as I could within those 90 minutes and then I would start over and do everything again. It was so much fun, but after playing the demo 20 or so times, I got bored about spawning on the same island with just access to that one island and being restricted to 90 minutes. After a while, I found a way to download the single player version of the game for free and I took advantage of it, it was pretty much the same as the demo except for the time limit, but at least I was able to save stuff and come back later.
I kept watching the videos from Markiplier, and later on I realized that the singleplayer was not enough for me. What I had wanted was to be able to play on the server that Mark and his friends play on, so eventually, I got the money for the game and I bought the full version. The game was just under 30 dollars, which is a decent amount for a video game, but I would have thought that it was the biggest investment of my life, even if I had ended up spending hundreds of dollars in donations to various servers.
And that's pretty much how I had ended up with this awesome game, as soon as I got the game I had went on the server that they played on, and until now, it's just one of two servers that I use. Now let's get to the game itself.
GRAPHICS 9/10
Everybody knows about the graphics of Minecraft, most people would say that the graphics are terrible, but of course, the way that the graphics interact with the environmnt is really what allows the game to offer so much, and to some, the graphics could be seen as revolutionary. This is because once Minecraft had been released, so many other games to be released afterwards have been known to use similar blocky graphics, and some games have gone well beyond blocks to make the game much more functional, but pretty much all of those graphics have stemmed out of what Minecraft had conceived of.
Even though every block in the game at the core has one color based on what it is, there is a lot of color throughout the game. Of course, we all know that Minecrafters can arrange and rearrange blocks of any color to make anything they want, so at any given time you can see something that ranges from bland to super epic. In terms of graphics, you can make almost anything that you want from scratch using simple blocks of whatever color, and whatever you make suually looks realistic. You can make a giant castle and put so much detail into it that it looks like it's from a movie, you can make a giant Goku or Charizard and have them look amazing, you can make a life size replica of the Empire State Building and nobody would ever tell the difference.
All of that can be done because even though the basis of the game is single blocks of one color, putting them together can work wonders. The graphics themselves look bland, but what they can do, and the legacy that they have left on future games combined is going to make me give this category a 9 out of 10.
SOUND 8/10
We know the sounds of Minecraft all too well, and some of them are imprinted in our minds because we hear them so often. Some of the sounds are quiet while others are loud, and if you are using a good laptop and headphone combination, the experience can actually be really cool. When I first played the game on my new laptop, the sound blew me away compared to my other laptops and even though the sounds were already awesome beforehand, they were a lot better when I could here all of them.
First off, there is of course the music. I don't know if Minecraft has an official soundtrack, which I think it probably does, but all the music of the game is amazing. There's the music that plays when you first hit the main menue, and there are various other tunes that are played at various points, especially when you are idling on that page. We hear that music all the time, and could probably recite the first couple seconds in our minds at will. The music is good, but the actual sounds of the game, to me, can be even better if you pay attention.
Literally every single action has it's own sound, whether you're mining, digging, chopping wood, or just opening a door, there is always noise all around you, it is inevitable. Then of course there are the villiagers with their own little language who you will always hear as long as you are near one, and of course, it only happens once a year, but there was that april fools joke, where every time you do an action, that action is said in the voice of a villiager. For the sounds of the game, I am going to give this aspect an 8 out of 10.
ADDICTIVENESS 10/10
The game is addicting, if it wasn't, there would be no legacy, and other games wouldn't have small resemblences to it. If the game was not addicting, there wouldn't be millions of fans, or giant conventions, heck, if Minecraft wasn't so adicting in the first place, then Microsoft would have never wanted Minecraft in the first place. Minecraft has a lot of features, we have already mentioned the graphics, and the cool sounds of the game, but neither of those are the reason the game is so succesful, it's not even the story. There are two aspects of the game that made it what it is today, and one of them is the addictiveness.
The game is addicting because there is so much to do, you can build whatever you want, you can fight, you can do practically anything at all. I had already mentioned some of the awesome things that you can build, but that's just the start. Building a giant castle, or maybe something even bigger could take many hours and days if not longer to build, and it needs patience and time. People put up with their designs and fight through the hours because when they are finished, they have some giant thing that they can be proud of, and then they can blow it all up with TNT in the end.
Next up, there are the battles. The game is fun because you can go up against all different types of monsters from creepers and spiders to skeletons and more. It's always fun to take a sword and chop down a spider, or to use your bow to shoot down a creeper. It never gets old because this is something that we would never be able to do in real life, but here on a computer screen, we can do it as much as we want and then we can reset everything so it's as if we had never done it in the first place, and then we start off doing it all over again.
The next aspect of the addictiveness is mining. To some, mining would probably be a chore, people at the start just mine to get simple resources. At the start, gamers have to mine to get stone for their decent tools and to make a stone house that's a step above a wooden one, and for the coal to make torches. That's what the beginners do, but once you have played the game a lot, you know that there's a lot more to mining than just that. There's the thrill of explroring caverns, and falling into lava pits, there's tons of redstone, iron, gold, and more to find, and there's the escitement of findin diamonds. All of this contributes to the feel of the game, but wait, there's more.
Lastly, there's multiplayer of course. You can play witha friend and work together to do everything i had already mentioned, but with a friend of course, or you can join any one of the thousands of Minecraft servers where you can join all sorts of civiliations and more. Of course, this is all just the tip of the blocky iceberg, because there's so much more to the game and a lot more appealing features. My overall grade for addictiveness has to be a perfect 10 out of 10.
STORY 8/10
There isn't really a story to this game, it's just a building and mining free for all, but there are a handful of makeshift "stories" that some people have made. There's that guy on Youtube who has been trying to reach the end of the Minecraft world. That would count as a story, even if this nobody may ever try this again, or even think about wanting to do it. Another potential story would be to complete all of the fundamentals of the game. A story such as this would consist of gathering all of the resources that you can and making tools, and then making a suitable sized house with a mine and a sustainable farm.
Of course, ypu can also do Hardcore mode, which is basically the same as what I had just mentioned, but once you die, the game is over. This can be viewed as a story because you have to survive as long as you can without getting killed by a creeper or drowning or something just as scary. So, overall for the story, there isn't much but you can use your imagination to make any kind of story that you want. My grade for the story of this game is going to be an 8 out of 10.
DEPTH 10/10
Earlier I had mentioned that there were only really two features that are important when you are talking about Minecraft, and the depth is the other one because there is simply so much. First, there is the map, which you can always change, and it's huge. There's literally must be hundreds of trillions of blocks to travel accross, and even beyond the map, there is still so much for the game to offer, and that's not even including all of the new features that were released with the new
update a while back. In addition to the map, there are the skins, you pretty much have unlimited customization of your skins so you can practically look like anything you ant as long as it fits. Next there's the creatures, there are so many mobs across the game whether they are neutral, passive, or aggressive.
On top of all that, there are all the blocks that you have to work with. There are basic blocks, then there are advanced blocks, and then there are all sorts of other blocks that interact with each other to do pretty much anything. On top of all these blocks, there's much more, there's a variety of tools, food, and much more.This literally has to be one of the best games in history when it comes to depth, if not the biggest,a nd because of that, it would be nowhere near fair if I gave this game anything less than a perfet score, and if I could, I would give this category an 11 out of 10 or maybe even higher because this game deserves that good of a grade.
DIFFICULTY 5
There isn't really anything that's difficult as long as you are able to take the time to work through your creations and build. If you are in creative mode, then there is nothing difficult about the game aside for maybe working on a really hard building project, so Creative mode would probably get a 1. Survival mode is a challenge if you try to go up against mobs, so this mode is a bit more difficult because you will almost always die if you don't know what you are doing, so this mode would get a 5. Hardcore mode is the toughest of them all because once you die, the game is all over, so you have to be very careful and build a very strong structure that you can survive in. This more is challenging and would get a 7. Overall, the game is pretty simple and difficult based on what you do, and an overall grade for difficulty is going to be a 5.
OVERALL 9.5/10
Overall, this game is a thing of beauty, and that is why millions of people like this game. It is one f the few games to have so much appeal throughout the entire course of the game and then have much more, and it has so many features, each of which is just as fun as the last. If you are reading this, you have most likely already played the game a lot or at least have watched other people play the game, but hopefully a few people who have ot played Minecraft will be able to read this and get a better idea of what the game is about. There's only a small percentage of people left who have not played the game or don't know much about it, so I suggest it because this is one of those games that can pretty much change your life and it is definintly not worth the price, it's actually worth a whole lot more. Overall, I love the game and many others love it as well and would give it a high score, so my overall score for this game is going to be a 9.5 out of 10.
Graphics
9 Sound
8 Addictive
10 Depth
10 Story
8 Difficulty
5
User Notice 
