The 360 version lacks the free-form Creative Mode of the PC, but its Survival Mode is much more user-friendly. On top of a substantial tutorial level, which covers all the basics of Minecraft and then even lets you just keep playing in that world, tooltips regularly pop up. These work great as a primer for new players, giving them the gist of each material’s use. At any time you can also open up your inventory and see a basic description of each item, ensuring you never have to open a wiki to enjoy Minecraft.
Alongside these great tips and tutorials, the team behind Minecraft on Xbox has smartly recreated the crafting system. The materials you need for each recipe are faithful to the PC version, and building them is accomplished with a few button presses. The crafting menu separates everything you can make into various categories, allowing you to rapidly tab between them, select the item you wish to make and then do it in a snap. If you don’t have the necessary materials, it clearly shows you, which again makes it so you never have to leave the game to hunt down additional information. And before you say it, no, tracking down information is something longtime fans have grown accustomed to doing, but it isn’t a good feature. The point of Minecraft is to create and have adventures, not to open up web browsers and read forums.
Just because the 360 version explains gameplay features, doesn’t mean that you don’t earn everything in Minecraft. Every block of your house, every window you fashion and every door you put up comes from raw materials that you harvest. Finishing a powered rail system or laying the final block of a 12-story tower instills a sense of accomplishment few games can match. Hours spent trudging through caves and battling monsters all seem worth it for the moment you break through a block, place a hand-crafted torch and see the bright colored stones that indicate there are diamonds to mine. You get the thrill of finding treasure, the suspense of venturing into the unknown and the reward of seeing your dreams come to life.
The thing some longtime fans might complain about (and rightfully so) is the features the 360 Minecraft is missing. Great tutorials and a streamlined crafting system make it much more user-friendly, but, since this version of the game is adapted from an early PC beta version, many recipes and seemingly minor gameplay mechanics are missing. For instance you can’t sprint and you can’t stack food items. There are no jungle biomes, either, and mods are pretty much never going to happen on the Xbox. The other features and additions don’t detract that much from the experience, but mods have been so great at extending the value and life of the PC version that they’re deeply missed on Xbox. In the end I don’t think most newcomers will care about any of these “missing” features, especially since the core mechanics and crafting recipes are present and more than enough to inspire countless hours of play.
The PC version of Minecraft never integrated multiplayer very well, and the barrier to entry was enough that many people probably didn’t bother. The Xbox version alleviates this with great integration of Xbox Live, letting you pop into your friends worlds from the main menu, as well as quickly invite them to yours. You can also play with up to four players in local split-screen co-op, jumping into another player’s game or simply running around as team within your own. It’s a lot of fun creating vast castles, taming the wilds and exploring caves full of monsters, but it’s even better when you can share those times with your friends. Minecraft on Xbox just makes that a lot easier.
