I suspect Minecraft Dungeons 2 was not made for a 35-year-old man who has already spent an unhealthy number of hours watching numbers go up in other action RPGs. It was probably made for someone considerably smaller, fuelled by Capri-Suns, who thinks a Creeper is one of the greatest fictional characters ever devised. That creates something of a problem when it comes to reviewing it. And yet here I am.

For this review, I did get sent something a little bit special: the Deluxe physical edition of Minecraft Dungeons 2, which felt like the perfect choice given PlayStation’s decision to stop producing physical discs in 2028. Aside from the fact that it’s a pretty box I can put on my shelf and stare at, the Deluxe Edition comes packing a Soul Cape, four hero skins, a Blub pet and access to the first two DLC packs whenever they are made available.

Minecraft Dungeons 2 is not a sequel that overhauls everything, meaning you’re still playing Diablo-lite with a Minecraft skin. Despite the source material, there’s absolutely no building, only seemingly endless hordes of mobs willing to be decimated via simplistic combat and a thirst for loot.

The linear dungeons of the first game have been replaced with a new semi-open-world structure. It’s not quite seamless, as there are a few different areas to explore. Usually, there’s a main quest line and a couple of side quests to complete, which you’ll probably do in about seven hours if you mainline the whole thing, and maybe 10 hours if you do the majority of the side quests. This isn’t a particularly beefy game, especially since it is lacking the more developed late-game content of the original Minecraft Dungeons.

The new world is… fine. The main issue is that it exists as space with nothing much between missions. There are heaps of enemies toddling around and chests to find, but there’s little in the way of cool stuff to discover when you venture off the beaten path. No awesome vistas, no hidden content of note, no quests that aren’t clearly shown on the map – nothing, really.

Combat boils down to hitting the ranged button to dish some damage out from afar before wading into the fight with your melee weapon swinging. You hammer away at that single button (or just hold it down) and spam your three artefacts as their cooldowns reset. There’s a roll button, but it’s on a fairly lengthy cooldown as well unless you specifically build towards using it more. Since that’s your main way of mitigating damage outside of armour and other build-specific effects, combat often boils down to a damage race between you and the mobs.

And the game is surprisingly tough even on the default setting. Foes can soak up punishment, doubly so for the bosses, and there’s very little feedback when you take damage, making it very easy to die suddenly if you don’t glance down at the health gauge for a second. I actually ended up having more fun on the easy setting, where ploughing into big groups of enemies is far more enjoyable.

Minecraft Dungeons 2 hands you loot at an impressive speed, throwing it at your face as quest rewards, from chests and as random drops from mobs. There are two weapon slots, four armour slots, three artefact slots and three talisman slots that you pop all this gear into, so there’s quite a bit of room for combining the various pieces and perks into a fun build. Maybe you’ll base the whole thing around boosting artefacts, or dishing out elemental damage like you’ve been binge-watching Avatar. The good one, not the blue one.

Which is why I find it so frustrating that the stats are completely hidden. Does a level 90 common sword do more damage than a level 75 Unique sword? What about when you add enchantments? With weapons, there is at least the option of hitting a dummy to see the damage, but with armour there’s no way of knowing how much it’s helping; likewise with artefacts. It’s annoying in a game that makes loot such a big part of the core loop.

My guess is that Mojang wanted to avoid players, especially casual Minecraft players, feeling overwhelmed by the stats. But instead, we have a weird system that drops loot on your head like a tonne of bricks and wants you to use it to build something awesome, then doesn’t give you the information you need to properly judge it.

You can also add enchantments to your gear for extra power and upgrade it at a blacksmith. Unfortunately, this also means a lot of loot quickly starts to become useless. Commons can be ignored within the first hour or two, for example. Uncommons and rares go the same way. And Unique items aren’t as… well, unique as I’d like. Basically, I wound up finding a few weapon types I liked and then sticking with them.

All of this is wrapped up in a thin narrative shell about some nasty Illagers gaining access to a dimension called The Sift, where they gain some superpowers and then try to invade your nameless hero’s home. And… that’s pretty much it. The bad guys are bad guys because that’s what they do, and you’re going to stop them because that’s what you do, and that will be achieved by killing an annoyingly small variety of boss monsters that get recycled and by going on a series of extremely generic quests. Go over there, says someone, so that you can kill some stuff or grab something in order to go over there and repeat it. Sometimes a quest is quite literally to speak to someone, just for them to tell you to meet them somewhere else.

I played through most of the game in single-player mode, which bafflingly does not contain a way to actually pause the game, making me question the term “single-player”. Anyway, the point is there’s also a co-op mode that lets you and up to three other players team up either online or locally, or by mixing the two together. As with most things, having some pals tag along does make the action more fun and chaotic, and there’s a decent selection of gear that emphasises buffing your friends in case you want to play support.

The online play is cross-platform, too. Oh, and they added proper matchmaking, so now you can team up with random people from across the globe. Nice. All around, then, this multiplayer setup is a decent upgrade over the first game.

Well, almost. There is one massive caveat: you cannot take your offline character online, and vice versa. After spending half a dozen hours playing through the campaign, I was bamboozled to find I couldn’t take my hero online. Weirdly, this was not an issue in the original.

Everything I’ve said here comes with one fairly major caveat: I’m really not this game’s target audience. To me, this is another forgettable ARPG in a sea of other forgettable ARPGs, but for a parent and their Minecraft-obsessed kid, this might just be the perfect my-first-ARPG that they can experience together, sitting on the couch and munching snacks.

Unfortunately, I can’t go find a woman and have a kid and come back in five or six years to review this game again, so for now all I can do is try to put myself in that position. I have a 9-year-old nephew who adores Minecraft, and Dungeons 2 feels like an excellent lens for him to learn about what games can be outside of Minecraft.

But for me, all I have is a strong urge to go and play Diablo or something.