About Miner’s Haven:
Edit: As of March 28th, the game will no longer be supported. The dev took all the money gained from nostalgic players from the Xbox 360 days and ran, doing minimal updates and now entirely dropping support. A year has now passed since the last update, both stable and beta. The single developer has yet to update us on progress other than him “needing to take a break” in October. Seemingly this game has been entirely abandoned for the foreseeable future, and as such I cannot recommend the game until it is at least comparable to the now unavailable Xbox 360 version. Edit: I’m leaving the original review under this. However, I’m changing my positive review to a negative one. The fact the Early Access Panel says this game will be in Early Access for under a year, but it has been over a year since “The Devs Are Back” and no updates have come out, at least they’re not listed, and the game is still in Early Access leads me to believe this game has been left in the dust. If you want to play the game, I’d suggest buying with caution, however if you really are considering, pros and cons of the gameplay are below. ————————————————— Apparently the Dev is back, so why not cop this for 3 dollars? Game is suppose to be a creative type of thing, cause you can build roughly 5x higher in this game compared to minecraft. But I don’t play that way so I’ll list the pros and cons of the game mode Dig Deep, the real fun of this game. Pros Dig Deep has a shop feature where you can sell/buy blocks/items for gold to buy useful things (e.g. selling Sandstone for Gold to get an Iron Pickaxe). The map is really deep (1k blocks) so actually getting to hell is an exercise, making for a greater challenge in completing Dig Deep. Blueprints spice up the game by making you find recipes to buy/craft the items. Enemy textures are really cool, a good chunk of block textures look cool too given the correct texture pack. Game comes with a bunch of texture packs and character skins. Block dispersion is really cool, especially when mining so it isn’t Stone 5 blocks under dirt and 5 blocks above the last block (Minecraft). There is sandstone, limestone, basalt, etc. Items don’t despawn, I think. If you die your items will still be there. 2 Hands! You can use a torch and a pickaxe/sword at the same time. Torches are lit when you hold them and to balance they don’t provide as much light when they’re held compared to when they’re placed. Cons The combat system is downright terrible, enemies can sometimes be outran, but not often like Minecraft. Enemies are too unbalanced when compared to one another (Small skeleton warrior doing 2dmg vs Troll doing 33dmg and both of them being in the same cave. And there is no knockback function on enemies so fighting and actually outplaying the monsters is really hard to do (Fight someone with Anti-Knockback on Minecraft, it’s ridiculous). Mining is strenuous if you want to reach hell as in my experience most caves stop roughly 300 blocks above hell. The settings feel terrible to navigate. They move with your mouse which is really disorienting. Some blocks are horrendous, Opal and Carbon mainly, but other blocks that I would consider eye sores are uh Flint, Salt, the one thing before Tin Ingots. You can’t drop items from inventory, trust me when your inventory is filled with Gold Pieces blueprints you’re going to hate that this isn’t in the game. Instead you have to drop using 1 and 2, which is what’s in your left and right hand. Blueprints “sell for -1 Gold Pieces”, so you can’t actually sell them. Not even with a deduction, the game won’t let you sell them at all. This means you’ll either have chests full of Gold Pieces blueprints, or you’ll have a map full of gold pieces blueprints, pick your poison. Items don’t despawn. Seeing blueprints everywhere is really annoying. Blueprint system is really unbalanced, items that need to be on the surface for Blueprints, are Beds, Doors, and Chests. The rest of the surface blueprints do not matter in what they contain. Duplicate blueprints automatically change to Gold Pieces, or there are just a ton of Gold Pieces blueprints that “sell for -1 Gold Pieces.” Maps are small if you don’t account for 1k depth, probably about 200 blocks wide and long. Maybe add a mode where the map is 800 blocks wide and long giving us a lot of terrain to cover? Summary: For 3 dollars, this game is okay. I’d suggest getting in touch with the dev(s), talk to them about features you want to see come into the game or change. Assuming they’d take the criticism. I bought this game a few days before the development resumes announcement came out, and it’s like the Xbox version, but not as fun as I remember. Would be more than willing for the Devs to reach out to me. But all-in-all, give it a shot, you might have hours of fun with it which is more than some games offer. Edit: rewording for specificity. Adding some mechanics I neglected.
