Minecraft: Story Mode Episode 1 review - Has Telltale succeeded where others have failed?

HAS Telltale Games succeeded in making a story mode for Minecraft?

 

Minecraft Story boasts top voice acting and music

 

Minecraft: Story Mode is following the episodic format that Telltale games is best known for and episode one is now out for Playstation 4, Xbox One, PC and iOS.

Minecraft has never had a single player narratively driven campaign, Minecraft: Story Mode, is that game.

For complete transparency I have not played much Minecraft. Not because I dislike the gameplay but just that creating worlds is not for me. I prefer it when it has been done for me.

Since the dawn of Gaming, companies have tried to adapt film and TV shows and the majority of them have been terrible such as ET and Superman 64. 

There has been some good titles, like Spider-Man 2 on the Playstation 2,  but typically if you see a game based on an already established popular TV or film franchise it will typically shovelware.

 

Jesse has some work to do in Minecraft: Story Mode

 

However, Telltale games have broken this mould and produced many great games based on TV shows and films such as The Walking Dead and Back to the future. Furthermore, they have also had success in adapting existing game franchises to their adventure game framework with Tales from Borderlands.

Minecraft: Story Mode is an adequate experience but lacks any exceptional gameplay.

Story Mode has brief moments of gameplay elements that franchise is known for such as crafting, but overall building of things is done by repeatedly pushing one button. In this episode you are not allowed to build something unique.

The majority of the gameplay is the same as other Telltale games which is not a bad thing. Players collect items, solve puzzles, and talk to non-player characters through conversation trees to learn about the story and determine what to do next. Like other Telltale Games, decisions that the player makes will impact events in the current and later episodes.

 

In the game you play as Jesse, a newcomer to minecraft, who attends a convention with his friends, when a terrible evil is unleashed on the world and is up to you to track down the “Order of the Stone”, a fabled group of adventurers who could help.

I did find that the choices given to converse with other characters allowed the user to identify themselves with Jesse. You could have all of his conversations as arrogant, aggressive, optimistic or reserved.

The music for the game is great, and sets the tone of each part wonderfully. Voice acting is exceptionally done with Patton Oswalt, Catherine Taber, Ashley Johnson, Brian Posehn, Martha Plimpton and Scott Porter bringing life to the block characters.

The game is very funny and endearing to players of all ages. The developers were influenced by Indiana Jones, Ghostbusters and Goonies in making this and there are subtle references to the films throughout.

However, this chapter game is incredibly easy and I hope this is just a tutorial chapter and the existing games get better more complex because it is a very linear experience.

 

At times this feels like you are watching a machinima and not actually playing a game, the whole thing took about two hours to complete, but it didn’t feel as though I had achieved as much as I had done in other episode one games from Telltale.

At one point in the game I came across what I thought would be the first puzzle where you have to get passed a bouncer, a classic trope of Lucas Arts adventure games. Solving this did not require any thinking, however, as the options were straight in front of me and I just had to press a few buttons to continue the game.

The game feels more linear than previous Telltale games, I didn't have that feeling of choice being presented that my actions would result in completely different results.