Minecraft Story Mode Episode 2 Review

Minecraft Story Mod: Assembly Required
Telltale Games 
Available On PlayStation 4, PlayStation 3, Xbox One, Xbox 360, PC

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The Minecraft adventure featuring Jesse and friends continues in Minecraft Story Mode Episode 2: Assembly Required. The game starts right away with Jesse in search for the remaining members of The Order of the Stone. He seeks to gain assistance in stopping the Wither Storm unleashed in the first episode. Depending on what you chose to do at the end of the first episode, you spend roughly half of the episode either looking for Ellegaard the Redstone Engineer or Magnus the Rouge. They are in the places that were mapped out to you with the Amulet that Gabriel gave you in Episode 1. You only get to see one town per playthrough so if you want to experience both sides of the story, then you’ll have to play through the game twice, or take advantage of the save file system and reload another file from just before the end of Episode 1.

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In terms of gameplay, it all changes depending on what you do. If you choose to go after Elligaarde, you go to Redstonia, where the only puzzle in this whole episode is at: getting enough materials to craft a repeater. But you can just skip that whole process if you decide to just steal it from someone else. Choosing to recruit Magnus first takes you to Boomtown, a town filled with griefers who run amok in the town either stealing from each other or blowing each other up with blocks of TNT. A good amount of this portion of the game is filled with quick time events as you try to avoid having your stuff stolen while searching simultaneously looking for Magnus.

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Other than that it’s still really great that this episode released just two weeks after Episode 1 was launched. Still it doesn’t quite feel like there was as much content in this episode as there was in the first one.  It  does feel bigger if you go back and go with the choices that you didn’t make at the end of the previous episode to see the the alternative outcomes. It might become an arduous process if you are playing on any of the last gen consoles due to load times but it’s not all bad if you play on a decent enough PC.

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In the end, I think it’s still pretty cool that the game gives the player more incentive to go back and replay the episode in order to see what was missed after making your choices, but if that’s not something you’re going to be interested in, then the game is going to feel much shorter than the previous episode did. However it just might be okay it if the episodes continue to be released every two weeks. Waiting that long in between episodes would be much more bearable for the length of time it takes to complete. Especially compared to waiting the typical six to eight weeks like Game of Thrones or Tales from Borderlands. Before I waited over a year before even giving Telltale’s The Walking Dead a second playthrough because many of the choices had minor differences from one another except for a few choice story moments in game. At least here in Minecraft: Story Mode, I’m fine with running two back to back, but different, playthroughs. We’ll see if this trend will continue in the future episodes.Â