One of the most bizarre things about Minecraft spin-off Minecraft Dungeons is just how little it has to do with the game it’s spun off from. An isometric action-RPG that doesn’t even involve mining or crafting—Minecraft’s defining features!—the only overlap is in the blocky art-style and mobs. And yet, somehow, it still feels so intrinsically Minecraft-y. The sequel, released September 29, doesn’t take any steps to draw the two games closer together, but instead improves on the ARPG formula of the original in a way that makes it feel fresh and interesting all over again.
To get something crucially important out of the way, Dungeons II is much better played in co-op, ideally with an adult and child together. This is not a game that is going to reward an ARPG aficionado looking to fill in the gaps between Diablo updates, nor is it trying to be. Much like the original, this game feels designed for kid-friendly co-op from the ground up, with its super-simple interface, its lack of needlessly complex systems, and the way it keeps making sure you know where to head next and how to have fun doing it, while still offering a challenge. (Difficulty settings allow you to ramp the obnoxiousness of the million mobs up or down, letting you create a simple breeze for a young kid who just wants to trample everything, or to provide some properly stiff competition for those wanting to focus on teamwork.) All the time I’ve spent playing Dungeons II so far has been alongside my almost-12-year-old.
Dungeons II picks up after the ending of the original, but not in a way that is meaningful to a first-time player. It simply says, “After the last game’s baddie was stopped, there was a minute of peace, but now something else is kicking off,” before establishing its tale about soul corruption spreading across the Overworld. The evil Illager High Council has figured out how to open portals and is unleashing attacks all across the Squid Coast, forcing you and your chums to flee and create a new homeland, Brave Haven. But even this isn’t safe thanks to the High Council, as they release familiar enemies (zombies, skeletons, slimes, Endermen, etc.) to harass the peaceful folks and upend their simple lives. They’ve also discovered a way to reach a whole new dimension, The Sift, and you and any available chums need to fight back and close down all the rifts to this strange realm. So no, it’s not a sophisticated plot, but it does the job.
What’s important to note about Brave Haven is that it isn’t the same as the first game’s tiny hub area from which you portal to missions, but rather a sprawling map which you explore to find new quests, side-quests, and mission areas, as well as poking about to find secrets, loot-filled chests, and NPCs to chat with in the many little villages. It’s also from here that you enter the game’s lengthy dungeons, whether for plot purposes or just because you fancy it. And most interestingly of all, it’s where you’ll discover the rifts that gain access to The Sift.
The Sift is due to be added to Minecraft at some point in 2027, making its inclusion in Minecraft Dungeons II surprising (and perhaps indicative of something going awry behind the scenes?), but also a real pleasure. This blue-pink world is bizarre and unlike either of two other dimensions added in 2010 and 2011 (The Nether and The End) which are both grimdark and gloomy zones. The Sift is filled with both friendly and aggressive creatures that look like blocky fairy-tale animals, lolloping beasts, or furry frog-likes, with some that look peculiarly close to Pokémon. It’s a peculiar fantasy world, super-pretty and always weird, with rainbow-colored streams and blue-ish grass, and each brief visit feels like a little bonus treat, even when you’re facing a threat like the new Eldritch being, the Harmonizer. Oh, and the blue bunnies! They are adorable, and I’m delighted to report they like to jump on top of one another to form teetering towers that occasionally topple over.
These visits are brief, however. You enter a rift, run through a short section of Sift and battle what’s there, and then exit the other side to close the rift. Clearly the true intricacies of what the place has to offer are being saved for next year, and that makes sense given just how much this isn’t a game that plays like Minecraft. Still, they have been a highlight of our time playing.
This open-ish world changes a lot about how the game feels to play, letting you find the people who need your help and speak to them to receive quests, like you would in a more traditional ARPG. It makes completing these tasks more meaningful, whether it’s because you’ve rescued their best friend or helped their bees have a better place to build their hives. There’s now an extremely generous transit system that lets you tram your way around the map to get closer to quest markers, or you can just run there and battle everything you encounter along the way. The latter is ideal for loot, of course, and that’s the game’s next change.
Armor in the original Dungeons was a single item, contrary to Minecraft proper. Now it’s broken into the correct four parts: helmet, chest, leggings, and boots, each dropping separately and offering an enormous range of specialties, abilities, and advantages. As you progress, the levels of items leap up satisfyingly, causing shouts of delight from the boy as he discovers a level 23 pair of boots to replace the old level 14s. As you progress through the plot you rescue merchants from the Illagers, meaning you can then buy items from upgradeable stores, or get them enchanted based on the spellbooks you’ve discovered in your adventures. And of course there’s eventually the blacksmith so you can upgrade favorites, rather than ditch them for the next higher number.
Alongside these you have up to three slots of special skills (throwing out bees to help attack, dropping AoE buffs, striking the ground with lightning bolts, changing your arrows to special types, and so on), and now three slots for Talismans that buff you in tailored ways. These two groups are the best way to define your character’s archetype, and the boy and I would commit to specific tools that best aided one another in the increasingly tricky battles.
Dungeons II certainly lacks depth, and I’m surprised there hasn’t been some sort of effort to at least add a notional version of either mining or crafting to the game. It seems like including rocks you could whack to get ores that could be used with the blacksmith or Enchantsmith would have been fairly straightforward, or letting players craft different armor types from loot drops. It was odd not to do it in the first game, and its absence here is downright conspicuous.
This sequel is also, at least in the pre-release Xbox build I spent my time with, more buggy than I ever remember the original being. Frequently my son and I would find that an inventory slot would suddenly become impossible to select, meaning we’d become stuck with one particular item or talisman until we quit the game and reloaded. Unfortunately, restarting the game also occasionally introduced its own new weirdness, where moving around one player’s inventory would cause the other player’s controller to frantically buzz, which was rather irritating.
The other real peculiarity is how the game handles playing on or offline. We started playing online, but after realizing that this meant we’d get logged out if we left it idle too long, decided to play offline. That resulted in both our characters disappearing, and a horrible moment when we thought we’d lost all progress. And ludicrously, the game only sometimes offers you the option to pick which mode you want. Even hard-resetting the Xbox wouldn’t bring up the screen to let us choose to go back online, and we eventually discovered that the only way to do this was to go into our list of characters and select one that’d been played online, which mysteriously switched the game back to that mode. Thankfully our progress remained.
Playing games with your kids is a special treat, but it’s all too infrequently as fun as it should be. Duos in Fortnite can be splendid, and obviously Traveler’s Tales’ Lego games are the gold standard, but put Minecraft Dungeons II up there with them. What it lacks in depth and granular min-maxxing for the ARPG nerds, it makes up for in just allowing a good time spread across a large age gap. I mean, I should probably note that my co-op partner revives me far more often than the other way around. Much as with the first game, we are both pathologically incapable of remembering which character we’re playing, and laugh often as we realize why we feel like we’re suddenly stuck or can’t understand why the other isn’t being helpful. We feel that sense of achievement on a quest well completed, and we cheer or boo at each other as the drops are divvied between us. “Why do YOU keep getting such good boots?!” “But YOU got that incredible crossbow!” It’s bonding and balanced and fair and fun. And that’s what it’s for.
