Nobody believes me when I say that this game is not just Good For A Minecraft Spinoff but genuinely the best ARPG I've ever played. It's not complex like PoE but that game was too grim for me. And it's leagues better than Diablo 4. Lemme give you some reasons why this game kicks ass.
It's fast to get to the action
Minecraft Dungeons is level-based, meaning that there's no open world shit to trudge through, and there's only one "town." That means that you can get to the A part of the ARPG extremely quickly. Unlike certain games that rhyme with Miablo Bore.
Plus you have all your actions available to you from the start of the game: Melee attack, Bow attack, Roll, and special attacks based on your equipment. There's no leveling up to unlock the potential of your class. Speaking of:
There are no classes
In Minecraft Dungeons, leveling gives you extra HP, Attack, and Enchantment Points. You do not gain skills by leveling up, and there are no classes that determine what skills you get.
Instead, your equipment determines all of your skills. So you might have a bone that summons a dog, a book that steals souls so you can create explosions, and a feather that lets you jump/roll to stun enemies. Plus your sword might shoot big waves every 3 attacks, your bow steals life, and your armor spawns bees when you roll.
That's your class!! It's up to you to build a class from the wreckage of your enemies. And the fucking genius thing is that you get to pick what enchantments your equipment has. To a point.
In other words, when I picked up the armor, it had an option to spawn bees when I rolled, to deflect arrows, or to set people in a limited vicinity on fire. I used an enchantment point to pick the bee spawning, setting it for that armor.
Since the enchantments are randomized, it's kind of like random loot but with a choice and that is incredibly important. It lets you make builds from even weird bullshit that you find. And you can make really wild builds because...
The synergies are incredible
Each weapon and armor can have up to 3 enchantments, and there are tons of them. My favorite bow that I ever found had a default enchantment that caused it to shoot five fucking arrows for the cost of one every time. I then added a Ricochet enchantment, an Arrow-Splitting enchantment, and a Grow enchantment.
This meant that every arrow had a chance to split into 3 further arrows, each hit would ricochet to a new enemy 60% of the time (and they could ricochet even further), and the farther the arrow flew, the more powerful it got.
So please picture me hitting the trigger once and an entire crowd of enemies just immediately fucking dying from a hail of arrows. So. Good.
Of course, it was absolutely useless against bosses. Which is great!! My skills and weapons should be specialized.
And there are tons and tons of wildly overpowered and specialized combos like this.
You'll play as so many classes
The thing about that bow is that I didn't use it forever. Eventually, it just wasn't outputting enough damage. This is a very good thing, because it meant I had to find a new bow with a totally different set of enchantments, altering my play style completely.
And that to me is the crux of this game. You will constantly be swapping out equipment, and therefore changing your entire set of skills every few missions. This has the most variety of any ARPG I've ever, ever played. It's always a new friggin game!!
The equipment is meaningfully different
Picking between a wand and a staff in Diablo 4 is basically choosing whether or not you have a shield. In this game, playing with a polearm vs. a sword vs. claws is incredibly different, and determines how and when you tackle enemies.
And the armor also has huge differentiations. I'm currently wearing armor that reduces damage by 35% and reflects 30% of attacks. And that's before enchantments. My previous set increased my ranged damage by 30% and made quivers contain 1.5x as many arrows. That's just. So different.
The difficulty is incredibly granular
Since the game is level based, you have to pick your difficulty before every mission. There are seven levels of difficulty, and it will recommend one based on your current power level. Also, you have three difficulty...modes, I guess, which is kinda like Diablo's Normal, Hell, and Nightmare modes. I know Diablo 3 had something similar but the fact that you can choose this before every mission means I play with it a lot more.
AND it means that you can very easily play above your current level for higher challenge and better rewards. And believe me...
The game can get very hard
It's a very fast-paced game with very powerful enemies that can often take off half of your health in a second if you're not paying attention. And yes, creepers will fucking murder you.
This means you have to pay attention in a way that most ARPGs that I've played don't demand except for bosses. Targeting individual enemies, moving away from dangerous situations, tactically deploying your special skills; all of these are important to survive.
That said, you have three lives to spend before you get kicked out of a mission, so death isn't the end! It is, however, going to increase the tension quite a lot, because if you run out of lives, you have to start the whole level over. I love this kind of high tension gameplay, personally, as it forces me to play more or less cautiously depending on how many resources I have left. I often end levels with no lives simply because the bosses are so damn difficult, and I'm not playing at peak until everything's on the line.
But hey, if that's not your speed, bump the difficulty down!
It's actually good in single player
I haven't played a moment of this game in multiplayer (partially because nobody believes me about how good it is), but it's an excellent single player ARPG. Since you can choose your own class at any time, essentially, you can make builds that have crowd control, high damage single attacks, healing, summoning, and defensive skills all at once. Or you can try and specialize and just power your way through enemies. It's viable!!
No fucking microtransactions
Yes, this game has DLC and a few season pass things, but (1) it's not getting updates anymore (and they let you choose the season so you can work on whatever pass you want), and (2) there are no microtransactions for like, some fucked up armor or whatever. What you see is what you get. AND the game is actually quite different from when it came out, mostly for the Much Better. You're getting a complete game when you buy this.
Anyway that's my spiel. I love, love, love this game, and right now the ultimate edition is like, $25 bucks on Steam. If you like ARPGs at all, I encourage you to give it a shot.
god i didn't even touch on how the game lets you spend character levels and high level equipment on generating new levels that you can get better equipment from. or how there's only one currency and it's always valuable. or how it's easy to tell what levels will give you what equipment so when you are grinding it's very obvious where you wanna go. or how legendary items just have bonkers enchantments but are always thematically appropriate. or how the game is built from the ground up to work with controllers. or how it can run on a potato. or how it has cross-platform character saves.
it's just. so fucking good.
we played this a fair amount and had a LOT of fun; i even bought it on my switch to fuck around by myself
