Minecraft Dungeons II launches into one seamless world

Minecraft Dungeons II launches today on Steam, Xbox Series X|S, PlayStation 5, Nintendo Switch and Nintendo Switch 2, turning the 2020 dungeon crawler into something closer to an open world. Mojang Studios has built it with Double Eleven, published it under Xbox Game Studios, and put it on Steam at £24.99, with a day-one arrival in Xbox Game Pass.

The headline change is what sits between the dungeons. The first game handed you a mission list; the sequel drops you into an Overworld of connected regions you walk across without a loading screen, from the forested Howling Woods down through the icy Frozen Highlands and into the muddy Rainy Plains. Side quests, rifts and boss encounters are things you bump into on the way rather than pick from a menu.

What the sequel adds

Xbox Wire published a hands-on with the game a day before launch, and the list of additions is longer than a typical sequel's. It is built in Unreal Engine 5, which is doing a lot of work on the lighting in a series previously defined by flat, chunky blocks, and the heroes can jump, which sounds trivial until you remember the original could not. Enchantment Books fuse abilities onto gear, Echo Shards upgrade merchants, blacksmiths and equipment, and a Guidance Trail points towards your active quest when you click the left stick, a small mercy in a map the developers describe as huge.

There is also a new dimension, the Sift, reached through rifts and carrying its own pastel palette. Mojang has said the Sift will turn up in Minecraft Java and Bedrock Edition as well, which is a different move for a spin-off: rather than keeping the sequel's best idea behind a separate purchase, the main game gets it too.

The awkward part of the pitch

Launching an ARPG on five platforms on the same day is a genuinely hard thing to get right, and the Steam listing is a reminder that this is a sequel in a crowded year for them. The good news for anyone on the fence is that Game Pass makes the decision cheap if you already pay for Ultimate or Premium, and the game supports couch co-op, online co-op and cross-platform play, so the £24.99 is a shared cost rather than a solo one.

Our opinion

Removing the mission list is the sort of change that sounds like a downgrade on paper and usually turns out to be the opposite. The first Dungeons was paced like a board game: pick a tile, clear it, go home. Walking from one fight to the next, with the option to be distracted by something glowing in a corner, is a better fit for the way people actually play these games in co-op, and it gives the art team a reason to build places worth crossing. The risk is dilution. Spreading a 2020 game's tight loop across a continent-sized map can easily leave the loot treadmill feeling thin, and the honest test is whether the fourth hour still feels purposeful. Being on Game Pass on day one means most people can find out without paying separately, which is exactly the right way to launch a sequel that is asking players to unlearn the first one.