4.5/5 ★ – jared_c's review of Dragon Quest Builders.

I initially wrote this game off as my interest in Minecraft has long gone, and I had never played a Dragon Quest game in the past. Talk about a huge mistake. This game does take the blocky crafting and building of Minecraft but adds so much more to it. You have a town that acts as your base of operations and take on a large range of quests from. Sometimes these can be as simple as making your base look fancier, or a rescue mission where you have to go find one of your villager's friends and bring them back to your base. Gameplay is pretty evenly split between combat and crafting/light survival. I never fully got used to the distance required from enemies to hit them without running into them, as still by the end I was losing half my damage just due to running into enemies. The crafting is fun, but some minor changes could be added (not sure if they were added/changed into the second entry or not yet) such as an indicator for the area certain items will cover when placing down, or the inventory system and how to it's managed. Nothing is too frustrating though, and the charm of this game will help you easily see past any shortcomings. There are 4 chapters in the story mode, with each one I believe taking around 20-25 hours in my play through. As you finish these chapters then, you unlock a mode that's more of an open ended survival crafting mode. You unlock different items and others for this mode based on completing challenges in the story mode. Unfortunately though, you do not know what these challenges are when you are first playing through them. I did not really explore this mode so I can't speak to it. Dragon Quest Builders is a really charming game that has great humor and writing, light combat and survival mechanics with heavy emphasis on crafting/building. There is a demo available for it that I highly recommend checking out as it will definitely get you hooked!