Minecraft Dungeons II: a loot game that is frightened of its own numbers

Let me tell you the exact moment this game lost me.

I picked up a sword. It showed a percentage bonus. A percentage of what? My current damage? The weapon's base damage? The weapon in my other hand?

The game does not say. It displays no raw values at all. In a game whose entire loop is comparing two items, somebody decided you would not be able to compare two items.

Start with what works, because there is plenty

The first Dungeons was a string of separate levels picked from a map. Dungeons II dropped that for a connected world, and it is the best decision in the game.

You cross the Overworld, then step through a rift into the Sift, a dimension new to the Minecraft universe. The enemies there are genuinely different, the colour palette changes completely, and for forty minutes I felt like I was exploring something rather than clearing a level.

And you can jump. I know. Put like that it is nothing. But when your previous game nailed the hero to the floor in a universe built on verticality, adding a jump button is not a detail, it is a repair.

The rest of the additions are solid: more weapons, armour and artifacts, a new item type in the talismans, disenchanting so you recover value from what you discard, and a blacksmith who no longer wants three levels to upgrade a piece. Combat itself is smoother than before, and stacking enchantments that answer each other produces real power spikes.

Co-op for four, on the same couch, online, or both mixed, with matchmaking. On paper, everything we asked for.

Now the problem, and it is structural

Dungeons II stacks a series of decisions which, taken separately, are arguable, and which end to end strip the game of the one thing an action RPG has to guarantee: the feeling of getting stronger.

Stats are percentages with no absolute values. You do not know what you are comparing. It is the number one complaint from players past the six-hour mark, and it is justified.

One enchantment per item. The first game allowed several. The promise of a loot game is combination, and the combination has just been divided.

Emeralds and echo shards are capped. So you can play, earn currency, and do nothing with it because your purse is full. A currency cap in a farming game is a contradiction in terms.

The first game's artifacts have been heavily nerfed. Anyone arriving with Dungeons one reflexes will spend several hours wondering why their favourite combination does nothing any more.

And there is no transmog. You will finish the game dressed like a Christmas tree because the best armour is also the ugliest. In a universe built on how blocks look, that absence shows.

The endgame, or rather its absence

This is the most repeated complaint, and it is the one that weighs on the score.

You finish the campaign. And then, nothing. There are side quests left to clean up, bosses to refight, and Soulstorms that appear every thirty to forty-five minutes, get cleared in a minute, and leave you two pieces of gear hoping one is unique.

An action RPG is a genre whose campaign is the introduction. Here, the campaign is the game, and what follows is an airlock.

The specialist press points at the same thing: traversal is described as dull, a run of nine hubs linked by biome corridors, where going off the path almost never pays. And the Sift, whose idea is excellent, ends up forgettable because you only pass through it.

The technical problems

I separate these, because they can be fixed and the rest cannot.

Softlocks that force a reload. Cutscenes running visibly below the rest of the game. Ghosting on screen, the sign of an upscaling solution nobody expected on a title meant to run anywhere. And Linux players flatly advising against the purchase.

The most serious concerns multiplayer: several groups describe enemy scaling that cancels progression. You level up, you find better enchantments, and the game answers by adding dozens of extra enemies with absurd health pools. You do not get stronger, you run alongside your own progression.

The question of the mouse

Last point, and it comes up in positive and negative reviews alike: there is no keyboard movement. Everything is pointer-driven, or on a controller.

In 2026, in an action RPG on PC, the absence of a WASD option is a choice that calls for an explanation, and it does not get one. Several players describe the game as near unplayable without a pad, and these are not people who turned up to complain, they are people recommending the game otherwise.

So where does it land.

Nearly five thousand reviews, a little under six in ten positive, and thirteen thousand people online at once as I write. Both numbers say the same thing: the game interests a great many people and disappoints almost one player in two.

There is in Dungeons II a structure markedly better than the first game's, a world you travel through instead of selecting from, and combat that has gained in suppleness. And there is on top of it a layer of design decisions that make loot illegible, cap the farm and empty out the post-campaign.

Mojang built a much better house and bricked up the windows. At thirty euros, wait for the patches, because half of these problems are fixable with numbers and an update.

Made it as far as the Sift? Come and say whether the effect holds up, we are discussing it on the InsertCoins Discord.