From then on, it’s plain sailing to a base and some guns, which can be crafted stupidly easily.Įnemies will spawn in the night, but even then, they’re no threat, they’re just annoying. As self-explanatory as ‘Survival’ mode is, it has no real element of danger other than this sense of being trapped until you find some ore to mine. You have three main modes Survival, Creative and Endurance. While the lack of decent visual presentation gives it more churn than charm, it’s the actual gameplay that renders the entire experience as a torture to go through. To paraphrase Jim Sterling “The eye gets the first slice of the cake.” And though that is 100% of the main issue this game has, it’s certainly not its biggest downfalls. They can do better, they’re just too fucking lazy. They’ve made visual improvements since the days of XBLIG, they’ve improved the engine. As much as game engines have their limits, this is not the case with CastleMiner Z. Indie games can look astonishing, if using the correct form of art. Now, as much as I’m aware that the visuals of a game shouldn’t dictate the experience you have with it, I mean, it’s all about the gameplay right? But that’s an oversimplification and a horrendous attempt at justifying a games worst fault, after all, this is 2014. The aesthetics of CastleMiner Z are almost sickening, to think that this is a game being sold as an Indie port using the spiritual success that was almost immediately overridden by the PC Juggernaut that is Minecraft’s arrival to the Marketplace is beyond me. The animations for /all/ of the characters, mobs and actions are still disgusting, and the UI is deplorable. The engine is still the same piss poor Indie port, only with a slightly better draw distance.
The PC version manages to sort of fix the control problems, and I use the term ‘sort of’ loosely, as it really depends on your preference. Sounds cool in a sort of cliché way, right? No? Yeah, I didn’t think that either. Virtually the same game but with, in case you’re as dim as a smashed lightbulb, Zombies.
The disgusting draw distances and textures were clearly neglected by the designer, and even for an indie game, the presentation was poorly made.Some years later and we’re greeted with CastleMiner Z, a port of the original Xbox Indie sequel to CastleMiner. It managed to tide gamers such as myself over until the eventual release of the actual Minecraft game and me and all of my other gullible friends bought it and played it for a few hours at a time before eventually and inevitably getting bored out of our skulls and playing something half decent.Īs charming as the original Castle Miner was, it really didn’t help that it ran horribly and even with the Xbox’s intuitive control scheme, everything felt clunky to control and the game just felt really bad in general. It’s always funny to see games take bits from other games and mix them all together in what usually ends up to be quite a big mess, and I say funny in a metaphorical sense, but when you get games like CastleMiner Z, one of the (literally) hundred-something Minecraft voxel game clones, you really can’t help but laugh at how funny it actually is. Ironically enough, back before Minecraft was ever going to be introduced to consoles, CastleMiner and Total Miner and FortressCraft and the other list of abominations Minecraft managed to spawn (Though Total Miner still stands alone out of all of them as the best game, more to come on that.) had over a hundred thousand sales.
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