Minecraft Dungeons II review: Looks lovely, feels lacklustre

After playing Minecraft Dungeons II this week, a dungeon crawler and the follow-up to the original Minecraft Dungeons, I’m unconvinced we needed a sequel at all.

Minecraft Dungeons originally came out in May 2020, intended as a fun spin-off to Mojang’s biggest IP, Minecraft. And despite criticisms on its lack of depth and story, the game sold millions of copies across all platforms. The pessimist in me wants to say this might’ve been because of the pandemic, as seen with other games like Animal Crossing: New Horizons also benefiting from lockdown – but for now, I’ll keep my suspicions at bay.

The game has a simple enough concept, Castle Crashers-like in its hack and slash mechanic, but Minecraft Dungeons II doesn’t quite deliver the same charm. Castle Crashers works because of its creativity within its simplicity, continuing to push the boundaries of something uncomplicated.

A 2D side scroller, Castle Crasher adapts to its limitations, forcing the player to jump and move in certain ways to defeat bosses. Coupled with interesting animations and a vibrant cast of characters with unique abilities, it is a hack and slash that serves its purpose very well.

Minecraft Dungeons II, however, seems to be style over substance. First of all, the game looks gorgeous, and I think they’ve done a really amazing job at combining the look of Minecraft with the aesthetics of a dungeon crawler. They’ve also introduced a new dimension called The Sift, a pastel world full of poisonous waters and cute, but sometimes deadly, mobs.

The Sift is also coming to vanilla Minecraft, an exciting addition that not only is the first new dimension to Minecraft in over 14 years, but neatly ties these spin-off titles with the main game.

But, despite its beauty, where this game mostly let me down is in its combat. I played on PC and the controls and combat were at its best uninteresting and at its worse annoying to use.

Trained religiously by Minecraft, I have to admit I kept pressing E to open my inventory instead of I, but beyond that, the click to walk mechanic was annoying, and I found myself wishing it was keyboard controls like OG Minecraft instead. If you find yourself struggling, then I would highly recommend switching to a controller.

But besides my minor grudges against control mapping, the actual combat itself was a bit boring. In chests across the world you find different abilities, weapons and items to help you in battle, but nothing is more effective than spamming left click with your mouse. With the abilities, I wanted something to unlock or something to work towards, but instead everything just felt randomised.

Every battle, whether that’s facing off against illager grunts or defeating dungeon bosses, felt very repetitive, and while the scenery was different and beautiful, it felt slightly hollow. You do level up in this game, with opportunities to enchant your gear, but this wasn’t nearly incentivising enough.

The repetitive nature of the battles doesn’t mean that they’re easy – often, I was backed into a corner and completely swarmed by mobs. It was here that I found my only line of defence was running around and letting the mobs chase after me in an angry hoard until my potion recharged and I could heal myself. This made me realise how much this game could benefit from a shield mechanic, as not only would this make the fights more dynamic it would also be a more efficient tool.

When I finally arrived to square off against the Twisted Warden boss, it was during this fight that I realised how flawed the combat was. First of all, the Warden’s attacks knock you back – which is completely fine if I was thrown up against a wall.

But instead, I was thrown repeatedly off the arena where I was supposed to fight the Warden, causing me to respawn directly in the Warden’s path and, at times, immediately die. Not one part of this was enjoyable, and it ended up being a challenge that I just wanted to get over with. Fed up, I ended up cheesing the battle by running up a staircase at the back before the Warden spawned in and hitting him from above.

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Now, if you like games with yellow paint telling you where to go, Minecraft Dungeons II is definitely for you. Unironically, this is a somewhat solid introduction for younger players to get into gaming, as it’s hard to go wrong – not only do villagers tell you where to go, but there is a golden icon on the map as well as a golden line of light telling you where you need to be at the easy click of a button.

However, this also makes the game mind-boggling easy, as you don’t even have to take in any of the information the villagers tell you. There is no challenge or demand on the player to listen to the story whatsoever, and it eliminates all need for critical thinking.

This over-explaining in games, especially in games directed towards the younger generation, is becoming somewhat of an epidemic. And in a digital age where attention spans are getting shorter and shorter, giving players something to work out should be encouraged, not feared.

The story, much like the combat, is dull. You play as an extension of yourself, a hero, travelling through dimension rifts found across the overworld, completing dungeons and collecting gear to level yourself up.

The ultimate goal of the game is to take down the illager high council, a group of powerful foes wreaking havoc on villages. It’s a plot that does the job in theory, but in practice it’s very much a mindless go here, beat this, collect this, narrative.

I would’ve loved if these spin-offs could expand further on Minecraft lore to tie itself further into the main game beyond adding in The Sift dimension, as simply helping out villagers wasn’t enticing.

This game certainly will have a place for someone, and I think it will succeed in appealing to its fanbase, but I don’t think it’s for me. In a multiplayer setting this game does have the potential to thrive, as I can imagine it’s quite fun to battle alongside your friends, but as for solo play I’m still unconvinced.

Minecraft Dungeons II is out today (29 September) across Xbox Series X/S, PlayStation 5, Nintendo Switch, Nintendo Switch 2 and PC. We reviewed on PC.

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