Don't get me wrong, Minecraft is a great game. It's a utterly unique game in that, it has plenty to do, but nothing to do. There is no end, no ultimate goal, and because of this, you never really feel like the game is over. Admittedly, vanilla Minecraft will eventually get boring for most players. Once you build a super-awesome house/pimp cave, have a full suit of the strongest Armor, can beat the strongest mobs, and explore everything there is to explore, there's not much else to do. And that brings me to my biggest gripe with Minecraft, there is not much to show for your effort. The achievement system is kind of pointless, there aren't really any epic drops, no trophies, and there isn't really a boss either (well there is, but it's not really worth beating). Ultimately, in the end you'll end up just starting a new world, and repeating the entire process, perhaps making a more interesting home.
All is not lost though, thanks to the fact that Minecraft has an absolutely huge modding community, and you can extend the life of your purchase for months with mods, and years with custom maps. And if you can imagine it, odds are someone has, or will, eventually do it. It's also nice because, no matter what flaws you find in the game, someone else probably has thought the same, and has done something to fix it. In my case, I thought combat was bland and the weaponry was so limited I found myself bored of fighting monsters within a week of playing. I was not alone, and a quick search of the minecraft mod forum revealed a handful of weapon mods adding entirely new dynamics to battle, and many many more mods that just added a huge arsenal of weapons to the game, ranging from better swords, to WWII era firearms.
Knowing all this, I can't honestly call Minecraft a bad purchase. It's huge, and even though I don't play it much anymore, I can say that I've gotten my money's worth and then some.
No, what makes this hard to recommend is the price. It's about $27 at the moment, and while that's not a terrible price for the content by any stretch of the imagination, it does bother me that the price has risen so much. Having picked up the game in beta, It was $15, and to be honest, the improvements from beta to full game, aren't all that impressive, and certainly not enough to justify almost doubling in price. Not to mention, though I'm about to, that we were kind of promised more. There were talks of an adventure mode, giving the game more of a... game feel. Complete with NPCs and adventures, as the name would suggest. What we have at the moment, are silent NPCs that you can't interact with, and seem to wander around randomly generated, vastly underpopulated, towns that all look the same. What bothers me most about this though, is that there are free mods that make the game itself look bad. There's a mod called Millénaire that not only has talking NPCs, but also have varied societies that will expand depending on how you interact with them. Does this make Minecraft any worse? No, of course not. If anything, these mods make the purchase even better, it's more just a matter of principle. It's kind of disappointing that something I got for under $20 is now almost $30, and in all honesty, it's hard to recommend something that's price has jumped when the purpose of this blog is to save you money while satisfying your gaming needs.
Ultimately, I have to recommend Minecraft. It would be wrong not to, because you really wont find a game with a more to do, or a better modding community, out there for this price. And if it were $27 when I got it, I probably wouldn't have cared as much about the price.
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