Review: Minecraft: Story Mode - Episode 2: Assembly Required

And understanding what initially draws a person into video games is all the more difficult today. With three major consoles on the market and an avalanche of games to play, newcomers to the gaming world have ample opportunity and choice to select from. Fans of sports games are able to experience the fun of managing their favorite player rosters with Madden . Fans of Dungeon and Dragons or other tabletop games are able to get a faster-paced and more cinematic version of role-playing with The Elder Scrolls . Alternatively designed games like Minecraft , Journey and The Stanley Parable are becoming interesting to scholars who find fascination in experiencing a story from an unorthodox viewpoint. There are so many different styles and genres to choose from that, now more than ever, finding out why anyone gets into games is a question with too many answers to list.

Minecraft: Story Mode - Episode 2: Assembly Required doesn't meet the bar that the previous episode set, but that doesn't rule it out as awful. The fact that it relies on environments to cover the fact that there's really nothing to do/talk about gives reason as to why forked paths are rarely done in games. There are no new innovations and because of that, the story should be a little stronger, but instead stumbles. Hopefully, with the potential that the series holds, the following episode will focus more on Jessie and give players a much wider variety of things to do, decide and explore.

A lot of us remember our very first video game rather fondly. While I’m not going to explain my own life story, I will say that I was first hooked on video games through my older cousins’ Sega Genesis systems, specifically the Sonic the Hedgehog series. Much of my interest in gaming as a whole came from the Yuji Naka-created mascot. It wasn’t the only set of games on the Genesis available to me at the time, but it was without question the series that hooked me. It began my own journey humbly, but in retrospect, it’s actually quite difficult to articulate why it was so interesting to me. This is a situation that many of us recall, but rarely ever examine deeply. Think about your first video game, the one that convinced you to pick up a controller and keep playing till the end credits, the one that convinced you to try another game afterward. What exactly was it about that first game that hooked you and urged you to keep playing from then till today? In essence, what appealed to you about that game that made you "a gamer"?

The episode doesn't stop there, because once you've returned from either of those two paths, you head off as a group with whichever other character you picked up in the first episode (Lukas for me) to find the last member of the Order of the Stone, Soren the Architect. This path also follows a relatively fast-paced action sequence, but falls a little short with its sub-par cliffhanger. It's only episode two, but the weird events surrounding the Order of the Stone and exactly what they're going to do to stop this crazy Wither Storm seems as though it will never be resolved.

The pace of the game is dictated entirely by how the player wants to approach the game. If someone only cares about completing the main story, it is possible to rush through the game and complete it in approximately ten hours, but because of the volume of optional quests and activities it can extend well beyond one hundred hours. It is possible to build anywhere in Enter The Gungeon Roguelike world, the player is not restricted to only having construction done in the base camp area. This will not effect the camp growth or progress the story but should the player desire it is possible to cover every square inch of land with construction. The scope of world is huge, and exploring to the end of it will give the player more things to build with nearly limitless potential. There are four different stages, all are unique from each other with different challenges and unique things to do.
Each path differs in gameplay as Magnus’s path is a lot more action-oriented with the introduction of Boom Town and 'griefers.' Of course, we all know 'griefers' from the original game as annoying players who would blow stuff up. Because of this, QTEs (Quick Time Events) are utilized that were so popular in the previous episode to dodge TNT. Ellegaard’s path isn’t as action oriented and focuses more on puzzles and the character focus from the very first episode. There is a lot more dialogue in this path and a lot of it makes up the funnier aspects of this episode. This episode capitalizes on the voice actors that Telltale has gotten together like Corey Feldman (Magnus), who played Mouth in The Goonies, and Grey Griffin (Ellegaard), famous for playing Daphne Blake in the Scooby-Doo cartoon movies that bring the characters to life.

The episode in itself offers a lot of promise for the rest of the announced episode, but it also cuts them short. The next slew of episodes will be adding new story arcs to the new Order of the Stone as they go on new adventures to build up their legacy. That being said, in the two hours it took to finish the episode to its completion, it made the entire premise feel very unimportant. So much had happened and so much story and character development was involved that Telltale could have made the entire plot itself into a single season if they wanted to. Some characters could have definitely used some development to give the story a little more depth and the entirety of Sky City itself has so much more that could have been explored. It's a little bit of a shame that what could have become a great season based on the new Order of the Stone's adventures was downgraded into a single episode that takes place over the course of about two days.