{"id":14377,"date":"2015-12-28T00:01:07","date_gmt":"2015-12-28T00:01:07","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.gamerdad.com\/blog\/?p=14377"},"modified":"2015-12-03T00:40:22","modified_gmt":"2015-12-03T00:40:22","slug":"minecraft-story-mode-episode-2-assembly-required-ps3-ps4-360-xbox-one-pc-ios-android","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.gamerdad.com\/blog\/2015\/12\/28\/minecraft-story-mode-episode-2-assembly-required-ps3-ps4-360-xbox-one-pc-ios-android\/","title":{"rendered":"Minecraft Story Mode: Episode 2: Assembly Required (PS3, PS4, 360, Xbox One, PC, iOS, Android)"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"MINECRAFT_BOX\"<\/a>Minecraft is an incredibly popular open-world building adventure game with stylishly blocky graphics.\u00a0 It\u2019s become a bit of a phenomenon since its release a few years back, especially with kids.\u00a0 And now, point and click experts TellTale Games has crafted an adventure based on the Minecraft universe called Minecraft: Story Mode.\u00a0 It is split up into five episodes, like most other TellTale titles, and this is a review of the second episode.\u00a0 It\u2019s available for nearly all current home consoles, PCs, and tablets, but reviewed on PS3 here.<\/p>\n

Continuing where the last episode left off, you and a group of builder friends are searching for members of The Order of the Stone so they can figure out a way to defeat a giant monster called the Witherstorm that has been unleased into the world.\u00a0 But will they be able to find all of the members of the group?\u00a0 And will they all get along together and find a way to stop the monster and save the day?\u00a0 That\u2019s what you\u2019ll be trying to find out in Episode 2.<\/p>\n

Like most TellTale games, Minecraft Story Mode is told in episodes, each one releasing a month or two after the last.\u00a0 You can download them separately, or buy a season pass so you can have them when they are ready.\u00a0 You can also buy a disc that acts like a season pass, too.\u00a0 However, the game plays more like a kid-friendly Walking Dead title (another popular TellTale entry) rather than a true point and click adventure.\u00a0 Most of what you do is listen to people talk to each other, and every once in a while you can choose what you want to say.\u00a0 But be quick because you are timed, otherwise you\u2019ll just go with the \u2018silent\u2019 option.\u00a0 Choose your words wisely, though, because people will remember how you react to them later on.\u00a0 This encourages a little bit of replayability as you can try different dialog options in another playthrough.<\/p>\n

Every so often, you\u2019ll get a chance to move around on your own.\u00a0 You\u2019ll control main character Jesse directly with the left pad, and can move around a cursor with the right stick.\u00a0 You can highlight items to look at, pick up, or talk to certain people.\u00a0 These parts of the game are most like a point and click adventure, too bad they don\u2019t last very long.\u00a0 Finally, sometimes you\u2019ll have to do quick time events, where you must press buttons prompted on screen quickly to dodge obstacles in action sequences.<\/p>\n

The second episode feels a little shorter than the last, and I think that\u2019s because you had a choice in the first episode as to which member of the Order of the Stone to go after first, and the one you didn\u2019t go after counts as a chapter that you don\u2019t get to see.\u00a0 Other problems with the game include that it\u2019s just leading you around by the nose, and there is hardly any actual gameplay involved.\u00a0 I know that the Walking Dead style of games proved popular for TellTale, and that\u2019s why they probably went that route with this one.\u00a0 But I miss the \u2018old\u2019 TellTale games like Sam & Max, Wallace & Gromit\u2019s Grand Adventures, and Tales of Monkey Island, which all felt more like \u2018true\u2019 point and click adventures.<\/p>\n

But TellTale does have a tendency to improve a season as the episodes progress, and this is only the second episode.\u00a0 If anyone can improve it, I believe TellTale can.\u00a0 At the end of each episode, you can see how many other people who played it made the same choices you did, which is kind of neat.\u00a0 The voice acting and storytelling are certainly top-notch, and while the game has blocky graphics, they are still charming and expressive.\u00a0 Another good thing is that you don\u2019t have to play Minecraft to enjoy this game, but I think fans of Minecraft will get the most fun out of it.<\/p>\n

\"MINECRAFT2_SCREEN\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Kid Factor:<\/strong><\/p>\n

Minecraft: Story Mode is rated E-10 with ESRB descriptors of Fantasy Violence and Mild Language.\u00a0 You can attack monsters with swords and other weapons, but they just disappear when defeated.\u00a0 There are times when you can die, but the screen just fades out and you can start back over shortly before you made your mistake.\u00a0 Plus the blocky visual keep the violence from looking too graphic anyway.\u00a0 In the second episode, I didn\u2019t hear any bad language at all, but there is a powerful super TNT the characters talk about called the Formida-bomb, and they shorten it to \u201cF-bomb\u201d for a few gags.\u00a0 I think young Minecraft fans will still enjoy this one, especially since it is so simple.\u00a0 After titles like The Walking Dead and Game of Thrones, it\u2019s nice to see TellTale working with a family-friendly license again.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Minecraft is an incredibly popular open-world building adventure game with stylishly blocky graphics.\u00a0 It\u2019s become a bit of a phenomenon since its release a few years back, especially with kids.\u00a0 And now, point and click experts TellTale Games has crafted an adventure based on the Minecraft universe called Minecraft: Story Mode.\u00a0 It is split up […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":14375,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-14377","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-game-reviews"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.gamerdad.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14377","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.gamerdad.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.gamerdad.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.gamerdad.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.gamerdad.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=14377"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/www.gamerdad.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14377\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":14379,"href":"http:\/\/www.gamerdad.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14377\/revisions\/14379"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.gamerdad.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/14375"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.gamerdad.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14377"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.gamerdad.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14377"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.gamerdad.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14377"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}