Review by Maloth Slagger

I woke up in a strange land I'd never seen before. The sun was just rising over the horizon. I was on a beach. Alone. Sea to the south and what looked like a forest to the north. I decided to approach the trees and found a duck and a pig resting in the shade. Interacting with the tree gave a surprising result...I could tear it apart into lumber with my bare hands. And then the lumber into sticks. And sticks into torches and shovels and mining picks and whatever I could think of.... As I was playing with wood (read nothing into this) I hadn't noticed the sun cross the sky and slip past view. It got dark. Fast. I was knocked from my crafts suddenly by a zombie. IT was a horrible blocky looking thing.

With my adrenaline pumping and pick axe in hand, I hit that zombie 4 times, but the sucker wouldn't die, so I ran away....into a volley of arrows let loose by an animated skeleton. Badly hurt, I ducked behind a tree I lost it deeper in the forest and then around a trunk came this funny little green guy. He was tall, textured like moss with black set eyes and had four stubby legs and no arms. He looked harmless. I got close and he started hissing. One second later I was dead; He exploded, destroying the trees around me and making a crater through the dirt and rock I was standing on.

That was my first experience in Minecraft. It's an amazing game with as low-end graphics as you can possibly get in a first-person perspective game. Ever seen angular water? No? well it's bad. First time I saw a cow I thought it was a leather chair or something.

What was my goal? There is no goal but to survive and let your imagination go wild building things. And BOY can you build. I've made a lighthouse cresting the clouds in the sky, moats of lava, underground forests, wheat grow houses, castles, mines, roller coasters, water powered elevators and electrically powered doors. I found a saddle I could mount and ride pigs with.

It's a game you can spend hours just exploring. You can collect milk from cows and go fishing. There are tundras, bogs, forests, deserts, rain-forests, lava-flows and you name it. You'll likely find something interesting to see and delve into every few minutes. Some caves are only deep enough to stand in. Others go on for days. It's even been said you can build portals that let you explore hell itself.

And the best part? it's multi-player! So you can share your creations with friends. There's no REAL competition right now, but once they add PvP, this game is going to kick some serious ass.

On the down side, everything is made out of blocks. The arrangement of blocks is beautiful...but blocks only go so far. Multiplayer is glitchy, you'll be mining and the hole you just made vanish. Or the water you spill from a bucket disappears. But aside from the glitches and bad graphics, it's major down fall, as I said before is having no clear goal. It's a pure sandbox game. I'd love to see some dragons or deep cave and sea dwelling monsters. Some kind of major bad guys or a princess to save would be nice. For now, you'll have to be content picking up stone, and placing it somewhere else you'd rather it be.

If you have 14 bucks, I'd say it's worth your money. You'll be able to express some creativity, satisfy any cravings you may have to explore strange new lands (it randomly creates terrain, so you can literally explore forever) and get more hours of entertainment out of it than the 3 movies the 14 bucks could offer.