The original Minecraft Dungeons was an isometric action RPG dungeon crawler. It had a main village hub, and then several levels that you played through to get better loot drops, improve your character, and after you completed all the levels, the idea was to go back and play the levels again at increasing levels of difficulty, and get even better loot drops. It was very Diablo-esque in its nature.
Now to give context, I only played a few hours of the original Minecraft Dungeons with my kids, although I have seen a lot of the game being played as it’s easily my son’s favorite and most played game of all time. Also, while I have played Diablo 1, 2 & 3 in the past– its been over a decade since I’ve played any significant amount of a Diablo game.
Minecraft Dungeons II doesn’t stray too far from the original formula. The game is now set in a large interconnected map, with hub villages scattered throughout the world where you can buy & upgrade your weapons and meet Quest givers. Due to this new structure, you don’t select difficulty anymore. Instead, as you progress through the game, the game auto levels enemies & loot drops when you reach specific milestones in your playthrough. The one issue some experienced players may have is the game may feel too easy early on until the difficulty ramps up as you progress.
They’ve added jump attacks, which makes the combat a little more lively than the first game. I did encounter some movement glitches when using Keyboard + Mouse controls where your character would get oddly stuck on a ledge producing a constantly falling animation– hopefully those are pre-release kinks that will get worked out. One change from the first game I wasn’t too thrilled about was that arrow ammo is now on a cooldown. To me, this gets frustrating when you are trying to manage your ammo and have to have significant pauses between arrow shots because you are constantly waiting for the cooldown to end to get your next arrow. I much preferred in the first game picking up a bundle of arrows and being able to use them all at once.
Since the game is set in a large interconnected map, there is a system to find the path to your next objective by clicking in the LS button. It will draw a line for the ideal path to your objective, and then still keep a faint sparkle for a while leading to your next objective. It works well enough most of the time, however, I did encounter a few times where it was either pathing me to my death, or through a wall I couldn’t pass.
The game’s loot is more in-depth than its predecessor. Now instead of just one armor piece, you have a Helmet, Chest Plate, Leggings and Boots. And you can equip up to 3 talismans, each of which can give you a unique passive ability.
One of the issues that existed in the original game that my kids encountered was that you could not both play co-op with multiple players on one system & other players online. It was one or the other. This ended up in a ridiculous setup where one of my kids would play in one room, the other would play in another room, and they would connect to their cousin, who himself could not play with his brother due to this limitation of not being able to mix couch co-op and online co-op. This is now addressed in Minecraft Dungeons II, and you can mix couch co-op and online co-op.
