You stand, aimless, as the world appears around you. Vast oceans, gigantic deserts, and majestic mountain ranges await your exploration. So what do you do?

You punch trees.

Anyone who sees Minecraft for the first time thinks the exact same thing: “Wait..are those huge pixels?” Yes, they are. But ask anyone who has played Minecraft more than once, and they’ll tell you it couldn’t have been done better.

The brainchild of Markus “Notch” Persson, the first jumble of code that would be Minecraft was released on May 17, 2009. Fast forward a year or so, and Minecraft Alpha is officially released.

It took the world by storm.
Minecraft is a very simple game, with only one objective: survive. Admittedly, when you first boot up Minecraft, you stand there marveling at the randomly generated landscape, and then it hits you: What am I supposed to do? Well, like I said, you punch trees. I won’t go into the intricacies, but I’ll tell you the first day is always the vital one. You need to find enough material with which to build a house, and then you need to find a source of light - before night falls.

It’s not that you have a terminal fear of darkness, it’s just that during the day, cows, chickens and sheep frolic the hills and grasslands. Come the time when the sun sets and the moon begins its reign, the monsters come out. Skeletons, zombies, spiders. Giant spiders. Not to mention exploding green, malevolent entities called Creepers. All these combined present a very good reason as to why you would want to be inside during the night.

But survival is only one aspect of the game. The true premise to Minecraft is its complete freedom of creation. Who said houses have to be square? Mine is built into an overhang!
No, that sheep is not standing on water.

Minecraft is like a throwback to the days of Lego. It brings out that child inside of us that just wants to build something cool. Like a secret base, or a treehouse, or a flaming tower of doom. Best of all, you can do it with friends, and it’s heaps more fun.

Minecraft is one of those games that refuses to conform to a genre. It’s first-person, but it’s not a shooter (you do have bows, though). It is not a survival horror game and it is definitely not an RPG. It contains all of those elements, and hardly on purpose. Minecraft is a package full of fun, and part of the reason as to why it’s so viral is due to its players. They can’t resist talking about the lava moat they built last night, or the wheat plantation they spent an hour making. It’s the friends-who-tell-their-friends publicity. Minecraft is just so fun, and I said that twice because it is.
Notch regularly updates Minecraft with new features, and he takes pains to ensure the community gets what it wants. If something is fun, it goes in. Boom, new feature. And he plans to keep up this schedule all the way until Minecraft is played and replayed, over and over again until it runs out of steam. Which won’t be for a long while.

Every review ever made on Minecraft struggles to describe it, because it is literally, too fantastic for words. It’s just one of those games you have to play.

And it’s still in Beta.

Rating: 9.5/10