MUST WATCH Minecraft: Story Mode Episode 1 review - Has Telltale succeeded where others have failed?
HAS Telltale Games succeeded in making a story mode for Minecraft?
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| Minecraft Story boasts top voice acting and music |
Minecraft:
Story Mode is following the episodic format that Telltale games is best
known for and episode one is now out for Playstation 4, Xbox One, PC
and iOS.
Minecraft has never had a single player narratively driven campaign, Minecraft: Story Mode, is that game.
For
complete transparency I have not played much Minecraft. Not because I
dislike the gameplay but just that creating worlds is not for me. I
prefer it when it has been done for me.
Since
the dawn of Gaming, companies have tried to adapt film and TV shows and
the majority of them have been terrible such as ET and Superman 64.
There
has been some good titles, like Spider-Man 2 on the Playstation 2, but
typically if you see a game based on an already established popular TV
or film franchise it will typically shovelware.
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| Jesse has some work to do in Minecraft: Story Mode |
However,
Telltale games have broken this mould and produced many great games
based on TV shows and films such as The Walking Dead and Back to the
future. Furthermore, they have also had success in adapting existing
game franchises to their adventure game framework with Tales from
Borderlands.
Minecraft: Story Mode is an adequate experience but lacks any exceptional gameplay.
Story
Mode has brief moments of gameplay elements that franchise is known for
such as crafting, but overall building of things is done by repeatedly
pushing one button. In this episode you are not allowed to build
something unique.
The majority of
the gameplay is the same as other Telltale games which is not a bad
thing. Players collect items, solve puzzles, and talk to non-player
characters through conversation trees to learn about the story and
determine what to do next. Like other Telltale Games, decisions that the
player makes will impact events in the current and later episodes.
In
the game you play as Jesse, a newcomer to minecraft, who attends a
convention with his friends, when a terrible evil is unleashed on the
world and is up to you to track down the “Order of the Stone”, a fabled
group of adventurers who could help.
I
did find that the choices given to converse with other characters
allowed the user to identify themselves with Jesse. You could have all
of his conversations as arrogant, aggressive, optimistic or reserved.
The
music for the game is great, and sets the tone of each part
wonderfully. Voice acting is exceptionally done with Patton Oswalt,
Catherine Taber, Ashley Johnson, Brian Posehn, Martha Plimpton and Scott
Porter bringing life to the block characters.
The
game is very funny and endearing to players of all ages. The developers
were influenced by Indiana Jones, Ghostbusters and Goonies in making
this and there are subtle references to the films throughout.
However,
this chapter game is incredibly easy and I hope this is just a tutorial
chapter and the existing games get better more complex because it is a
very linear experience.
At
times this feels like you are watching a machinima and not actually
playing a game, the whole thing took about two hours to complete, but it
didn’t feel as though I had achieved as much as I had done in other
episode one games from Telltale.
At
one point in the game I came across what I thought would be the first
puzzle where you have to get passed a bouncer, a classic trope of Lucas
Arts adventure games. Solving this did not require any thinking,
however, as the options were straight in front of me and I just had to
press a few buttons to continue the game.
The
game feels more linear than previous Telltale games, I didn't have that
feeling of choice being presented that my actions would result in
completely different results.
