Minecraft

 Minecraft is dangerous. You can sit down to a new randomly generated world for a quick session only to snap out of the creative haze many hours later to realize you've forgotten to eat, sleep, and go to the bathroom. There's always just one more tunnel to carve, one more resource to harvest, one more tool to forge, or one more to-scale replica of the Star Trek Enterprise to re-create block by block. The ability to exercise limitless freedom and mold the game's retro fantasy world to your liking is powerfully addictive, and this indie-developed sandbox phenomenon holds a staggering level of depth. Some of the game's elements still feel rough and unfinished, but nevertheless, once Minecraft sinks its hooks into you, it won't let go.   Though it initially lacks any tangible plot or specific direction to follow, the real beauty of Minecraft lies in the fact that neither is needed. You get out of the game what you choose to put into it, which allows you to pursue the aspects that most appeal to you. Survival mode is where the experience comes closest to resembling a game in a traditional sense. Dropped into a lovely but primitive-looking 3D world, you're free to explore, build, and adventure as you see fit. Unique biomes like thick forests, swamps, mountain ranges, deserts, and icy tundras hold many resources to harvest, and the jagged landscape itself is your key to survival in these first tenuous steps of the adventure. You start out empty-handed and danger-prone, but carving out the land yields tons of resources needed to generate food, craft weapons and armor, and form crucial tools. Building a shelter with stone, wood, and other blocks is also important; nightfall ushers in the arrival of meandering killer creatures that range from the exploding creepers and mumbling zombies to the enigmatic endermen and arrow-flinging skeletons. There's a cool natural flow to the day/night cycle that encourages you to shift gears between fiddling around on the surface and hunkering down or heading below ground.



 The complex crafting system at the heart of Minecraft's open-ended gameplay is a huge part of what makes the game so enjoyable, and it adds to the thrill of exploration. Laying down raw materials and other resources you've collected in certain combinations along the crafting grid lets you produce everything from practical adventuring tools and structural building elements to clever decorations for your mega fortresses. Some basic items, like torches and pickaxes, are needed for navigating below ground and mining key resources. More elaborate items, like enchanting tables that let you imbue weapons with buffs and powered mine carts that can be used to ferry materials across great expanses of track, require rarer materials to craft. Scouring both the surface and subterranean realms for the elements needed to craft these "recipes" is hard work, but it's rewarding. Toiling away for hours to finally uncover that elusive component you've been searching for can unlock a whole new range of crafting possibilities, and there are more than 200 recipes to make. The big issue for newcomers is that figuring out recipes is a completely unintuitive process. There's nothing in the game in the way of tutorials or even a basic explanation of possible item combinations and what they do. Thankfully, Minecraft players have posted a tremendous amount of detailed information online to help the uninitiated learn the ropes, but it's a major shortcoming of the game that you have to venture outside of it to learn new crafting combinations. There's a hefty learning curve to get past when you start out, though it's not a total fun dampener. It's less of an inconvenience once you get a feel for it, and the sheer volume and variety in the things you can craft more than make up for it.

 Read: http://www.gamespot.com/reviews/minecraft-review/1900-6346734/

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