Minecraft: Pocket Edition – Review

Review by Rogue_Agent

Reviewed: 03/05/19

A very mixed and disappointing experience.

At one point, Minecraft was a ginormous sensation in the gaming world, having become the one of the biggest names in indie gaming, taking over YouTube in its heyday and selling over 100 million copies in the process. It was only inevitable that the game would see ports to the console / handheld markets, and eventually it saw ten ports outside of the computer realm. Two of those ports would be the Minecraft: Pocket Edition (PE) titles on Android and iOS.

I bought the game a while back hoping for a decent Minecraft experience on the go, however I ran into some issues during gameplay such as severe frame rate drops as well as problems regarding the touch screen controls. As a note, I'm using a near brand-new Android 7.1.1 "Nougat" tablet to play the game on; the current operating system for Android is 9.0 "Pie". I had considered the possibility that my tablet might just be too old or something, but the listing for the game said (as pictured below), "This app is compatible with all of your devices." That leads me to believe that the app has problems and not my device. This review will not focus much on Minecraft as a whole, but on the quality on the port as well as my experience with it.

The Gameplay / Controls / Difficulty

Minecraft is both a simple game as well as a game with a ton of complex features. You start out in a world that is randomly generated for a completely new experience every time (or one can just type a code into the Seed Generator for a desired world), with each world either being "Classic" or "Infinite" sized. While there is an endgame involving heading heading to "The End" to kill the "Enderdragon," you are not told to do this; rather, you can live your virtual life freely, from building sky fortresses to hoarding valuable materials.

There is so much to discover in every world seed in Minecraft, some of which include meeting and / or fighting polar bears, or exploring randomly generated structures like abandoned mineshafts and woodland mansions. Almost everywhere there is peril and danger (as long as you're not on Peaceful difficulty in Survival mode), as well as enough loot to make the risks worth it. There's a level of depth to the game that I have never seen before in a video game before, and it all comes from a game that seems so simplistic in presentation and nature. There are easily distinguishable enemy mobs (despite some using the same designs as each other) which all have a reason for you to go after them, passive mobs you can kill for food, food that can poison you, and much more.

As someone whose first and only experience with Minecraft prior to PE was the PlayStation 3 Edition, I adored the features that weren't present in that release and started falling back into my addiction to the game. But, the honeymoon phase ended once I noticed the game had no music, and then I noticed more cracks in the surface. My main issue lies in the technical issues the game has, as well as the problems I found with the touch controls.

To mine something, you have to hold your thumb on the tablet screen; a "mining circle" will appear above the block you're mining, which will slowly fill up to show how long is left before the block you're mining will drop. To look around, you swipe around, you swipe your thumb on an empty part of the screen in whatever direction to look around. Overall, I'd say the basic controls feel tight and responsive (the camera sensitivity is way too high on default however).

To attack, you simply get close to whatever you're trying to harm and tap it (so for example, one needs to tap on a skeleton when close to one); a strange thing omitted from other releases is that you can't seeing anything in the air (like a weapon), which I would imagine would make returning a Ghast's attack in "The Nether" rather difficult). Another odd change, you have to hold your thumb down to throw an egg, and after a second you finally throw it (your target will have most likely moved in that time); I'm going to assume other items that could be thrown have this change.

One last thing before I get into the more problematic things, trying to kill something underwater is impossible. If you go underwater and swim forward, you automatically start floating to the surface; to stay underwater and moving around, you have to keep your left thumb on the D-pad and your right thumb on the arrow that lets you swim downward. This means you have no free thumbs to attack with (and using your index fingers won't work either).

A somewhat big issue, there is no button to change the camera perspective during gameplay. Instead, the player has to go into the video settings to change it. Because it's in real time (even if the player isn't connected to Wi-Fi or playing with other players), you're going to be left open to enemy attacks when changing camera perspectives.

An problem that I most certainly find issue with is the enemies. No change appears to be made to the amounts of damage dealt by enemy mobs to accommodate for the touch screen controls. While this is workable in the regular world, things are absolutely horrible in The Nether. The Nether is where I had decided that Peaceful difficulty was the only way to play the game, because it's just a gigantic difficulty spike; why that is is because three to four enemies at a time can gang up on the player and one can do very little about either fighting back or running away due to the limited controls.

Then there's the technical I've experienced that strongly hinders any ideas of playing the game on any difficulty higher than Peaceful. I've experienced on numerous occasions both frame rate and slow down issues so bad that the game would quickly become unplayable, mainly because there will either be a 4-5 second long delay for any input or it won't recognize any at all in this state (or, it will get stuck on an input such as moving forward). It has gotten so bad that, on at least four occasions, PE had completely frozen my tablet. It's completely random when the game will have issues, as some days the game will play swimmingly, while others I will have to close the app every fifteen minutes due to problems.

When the game isn't having the issues I described, I think it can be a somewhat fair experience. Most things cannot be blamed on the game or it's shortcomings, and there's nothing really negative to say about the difficulty curve it has going. I do think that some enemy mobs are not fair to go up against on a tablet; Drowned and Phantoms seem to come out of nowhere (the Drowned appear to attack at day, which is slightly annoying), Endermen teleport too quickly for one to swipe their thumb on the screen to keep track of it; and all of the Nether enemy mobs but the Magma Cubes are unnecessarily difficult to fight. I never got to the end, but I would imagine the Enderdragon would be just as difficult as its computer and console counterparts.

I'm not at all saying that Minecraft can't be a frustrating experience. Learning the ropes isn't the easiest thing in the gaming world, and dying in lava while carrying various materials and tools consisting of diamonds will make a good deal of people a little annoyed at best. But the issues in the above two paragraphs are describing frustration due to things you cannot control, and deaths that you cannot prevent. These issues completely break the solid difficulty curve that Minecraft has going for it, thus breaking the game.

One last thing is that it is near impossible to find anyone to play with within the game itself. The "Find Worlds" feature on the PlayStation 3 Edition is not present, so if one did not have any friends on XBOX Live going in (XBOX Live is required to make to play PE online), you're not going to be playing with other players anytime soon unless you find someone on a message board or something similar. It's a shame, because the chat window from the computer ports is present, and communication would be very easy due to tablet keyboards.

The Graphics

It's arguable that Minecraft has a style that is entirely its own. The graphics are most certainly memorable, and I daresay iconic. Everything is made up of pixels and / or cubes, from Dirt Blocks to the not-so-sharp Diamond Sword. For characters and mobs, all body parts are entirely straight (such as arms, legs, and heads). Players are usually given Steve or Alex as defaults, but they can go to the Minecraft shop to purchase some skins that all look quite great, or they can upload a picture for a custom avatar. Everything in the game is nice to look at and is pleasing to the eye, from the sky when the sun is going down to going underwater to watch all the ocean-life thrive.

The graphics do an exceptional job at immersing you into this virtual world for days, months, for some even, years. You really get to know the world because of distinct locations (although some locations look the same) and you often time forget that you are not your avatar. The presentation and atmosphere of the game has a relaxing, calming vibe to it, allowing you to get lost in your world for hours to come.

The Sound

As mentioned before, the game lacks any of the game's amazing soundtrack (despite a volume bar in settings -- I couldn't figure out how to get it to work for the life of me), so all I had was the sound effects. I think all of the sounds are pretty good, and they fit where they're supposed to be. No sound effect sounds off (nothing like breaking a tree wood block makes a noise that sounds like glass breaking), although some sound effects can be annoying after extended use (Tree Leaves and Dirt Blocks). The game with just sound effects alone can get boring, but that can be fixed by opening Spotify the same tablet (it won't close Spotify when opening Minecraft), or open YouTube on one's phone.

Overall

With all that being said, I don't actually hate the port, I'm really just disappointed. This may come as a shocker, but I genuinely recommend the game. The listing on Google Play did say that it's compatible on all devices, so I believe the game not working on mine may just be due to bad app optimization for certain devices or something similar. I'll say this, the app isn't completely unplayable, it can be very fun at times. This is a mansion I've been working on over the course of most of my ownership of PE, which shows that the app is most certainly useable.

With all that out of the way, I give Minecraft: Pocket Edition on Android a score of 3.0 out of 5.

Rating:   3.0 - Fair

Product Release: Minecraft: Pocket Edition (US, 08/16/11)