Minecraft Earth Early Impression: A Very Solid Minecraft Experience

Minecraft Earth is a brand new, mobile-exclusive Minecraft experience in which you’ll physically travel around the real world, collect resources, embark on adventures with your friends, and, of course, put up buildings with the power of augmented reality.

Ever since it was first announced back in May, the game has received a lot of attention from the gamer community. Many have been wondering what it’ll be like, so we thought we should sum up our early impressions and thoughts to give those that don’t have access to it at the moment an idea of what to expect.

When we first opened the app, we were presented with a character creation menu that gave us plenty of options to customize our character. We could choose different hairstyles, beard styles, clothes, and more. The majority of these were available for free but there were also a couple of premium ones that we did not pay much attention to.

Then… we were thrown straight into the game with basically no idea of what we were supposed to do. This is the biggest problem we’ve had with Minecraft Earth so far: It’s not exactly what you’d call an obvious experience and there’s no tutorial to speak of. We did not know what a Buildplate was, or what an adventure involved. Sure, seeing things for yourself could be fun, but some direction would have been nice.

Minecraft Earth is a well-designed game that successfully delivers a Micro-Minecraft experience

Thankfully, our previous experience with Pokémon GO really helped us out. We looked around the neighborhood to find objects that were highlighted, and tapping on them yielded tons of resources. Most of these were the typical Minecraft rocks, sticks, and dirt, but did manage to find a couple of farmyard animals.

The animations are incredibly well-done as well. The game runs perfectly smoothly and collecting stuff was so satisfying that we just wanted to tap on everything to pick up as much as we could.

Soon enough, we found our Buildplate. This uses augmented reality to allow you to put your own mini Minecraft world anywhere you want in the real world.

It does indeed feel like a mini version of Minecraft. You can break down stuff by tapping on them or place things that you’ve crafted into this world. Crafting happens in a separate interface and works just like in Minecraft. You’ll have different recipes with which you can create materials, furniture, buildings, and more.

And the best thing about the Buildplate is that you can bring it with you anywhere you go. You can work on it at your home and then bring it to a friend’s place to show them. If you want, you can ask them to help with the building too!

So far, our only problem with the game is the lack of tutorial

You’ll also get a bunch of daily challenges that you can take on for additional rewards. They are all pretty easy and for the most part, they’ll ask you to do what you’ve already been doing anyway. That said, some might still have you go a little bit out of your way and do things that you normally wouldn’t have done such as finish an Adventure.

Speaking of Adventure, this is where you’ll find the rarest resources, so we highly recommend that you do them as much as you can. If you so wish, you can bring a friend along as well.

All things considered, our early impression of Minecraft Earth has been a positive one. It looks nice, runs perfectly smoothly, and offers plenty of activities to do. So far, our only problem is that there is no guidance in the early game. It could really benefit from a short tutorial that shows players the basics so newcomers don’t feel lost.