Reviewing it for what it actually is, minecraft is one of the most dull games I’ve ever played. It fails both as an open world and as a survival game, because the game just isn’t very fun to play. Exploration is dull because you’ll walk stretches of nothing with nothing to do, no real goal to any of it. They fixed it in updates but back when I played it crafting stuff was also a question of having a wiki open at all times. The blocky aesthetic is timeless but in my opinion, ugly. As a creative tool to build complex structures, it’s great at what it does and has many uses. Mods have given the game essentially infinite possibilities. For example, custom maps with quests and actual stuff to find, that sounds right up my alley. Recreations of real-life places are possible and that’s just baffling.

But those are all things that were built around the original. They are, to me, not part of what minecraft is at its core. So because I’m not reviewing the excellent mods nor does the creative mode have much appeal for me, it’s pretty much a failure as a game, even if it’s a grand success as a creative tool.