"Video Game Review: Minecraft Xbox 360 Edition review"

Minecraft Xbox 360 Edition is available to download now. 

PC phenomenon Minecraft makes its way to Xbox 360 with considerable success.

Formats: Xbox 360
Developer: Mojang/4J
Publisher: Microsoft
Released: Out now

It's not the same game it is on PC today, but it's certainly very close to being the Beta 1.6.6 version it was many moons ago and it is still a great, looming, colossal time sink.

For the very few who don't already know, Minecraft is an open-world survival adventure game with a simple selling point: you build your safe-havens, your experimental oddities and monster monuments from raw materials you find yourself - by mining anything and everything, from stone and wood to gold and obsidian.

Just as with the PC version, you can choose to play on a selection of difficulties, the governing force over the ferocity and prevalence of zombies, spiders, skeletons and the Creepers. These beasts come out to terrorise in the night and will be your only true source of fret and peril, other than mining yourself into a pit of the aforementioned lava, getting lost, or falling from the top of one of your grand structures. Secure your safe place with torches by crafting together wooden sticks and coal, though, and these creatures can be kept at bay. Mostly. Mine down into the deep, subterranean caverns, however, and you're in their domain, where they co-exist with the very best resources.

There's also the Peaceful setting for those wanting to spend more time building huge feats of architectural genius and less time cowering in a 4x4 wooden shack. There's no Creative Mode as there is on PC, however. The Peaceful mode does nothing to alter the day and night rotation, doesn't give you a flying camera perspective or allow you spawn whatever resources you need as you need them. It's nothing more than the difficulty setting that disallows enemies, who can sometimes be a little frustrating, but are what essentially makes Minecraft feel like a survival adventure rather than a simple crafting sim.

4J, the company who ported Mojang's Minecraft, have done a brilliant job of bringing the game to console and adapting its interface to suit the controller. While the crafting and inventory interfaces aren't perfect – the crafting being simplified immensely and the inventory navigation using analogue sticks occasionally allowing for confusion, dropping blocks where they're not wanted and so forth – it's hard to see how anyone could have done it better. In the past, players on PC have had to look up every crafting combination on the Minecraft wiki and memorise them for quick usage, while Xbox gamers have the privilege of being able to see all the formulas of creation as they navigate through attainable items. As much as this could be considered a form of “dumbing down”, who really wants to have to get up off the sofa every two minutes and Google how to make a jukebox?

The main draw of the Xbox 360 Minecraft is probably its multiplayer component and how its easy-access, drop-in, drop-out fare is so inviting. Minecraft has always been more fun in multiplayer, but finding a suitable server for your play style and friend group on PC can sometimes be awkward. Game worlds on Xbox are hosted by their creator, however, through the Xbox LIVE system and so long as the “Online” check box is checked when the world is opened, players can have their mates come and go as they please with only minor connection issues for the most part. And there's really nothing like watching that blonde bombshell in full tennis attire set fire to their house – creatively structured to closely resemble a tribal infant's head – from up high in your Cloud Tree. The only drawback of the set up is that, unlike on PC with user-controlled servers, the game ends and all players are booted when the world's creator signs offline to attend to their real-world needs.

Though Minecraft is renowned for being an extensive world in its own right, 64,000 kilometres, in fact, it's reduced significantly here. Xbox players are likely to find the 'end of the world' much sooner than they'd like, too, with the port's maps being a tiny 1024x1024 blocks. However, as 4J and Mojang promise to keep patching the console version, it's hopeful that both map size and version will update and grow. There'll always be limitations on console, and it's highly unlikely the game will ever compare to it's PC counterpart, but this is an impressive port and a brilliant game regardless. It's made even more of an ominous time-glutton by having you sprawled out on the sofa, pad in hand, mind, so be careful.