Microsoft purchasing Mojang diminished hopes of playing Minecraft on the Wii U; whilst other consoles are still supported, there’s no intention from Microsoft to still expand their platforms for the game, especially if it supports rival consoles.
‘UCraft’ is being developed my Nexis games, hoping to bring Minecraft style gameplay to the Wii U, which is expected to head to the e-shop during ‘Holidays 2014’. This isn’t the first we’ve heard of the game, however it is the first extensive trailer (no matter how unbearably cheesy it is) which reveals gameplay from the game.
UCraft isn’t just a standard free-play sandbox game, but rather has quests integrated in the game too, providing more of a purpose in creating and roaming the virtual world. There features such as local-multiplayer, 16 players online (with voice chat), and even modding (to an extent), all which provide a replication of the original Minecraft game. The genuinely more interesting feature is the modding, where apparently there will be an integrated SDK paint tool for users to provide custom textures and importing them into the game, allowing more customisability, and the ability to ‘mod’ which console versions did not officially support.
Admittedly, the trailer pathetically states “this is not a clone”, however I cannot think of anything other than it being a clone, which overall looks quite unimpressive so far. I appreciate the notion of making a Minecraft-like experience on the Wii U, yet I’m not particularly excited to play the game as of yet, perhaps because it doesn’t seem to provide much which I can’t just experience on practically any other accessible platform. There may be a wide group of people who’d want to play Minecraft on their Wii U, but it’s safe to assume that anyone who owns a Wii U could also own perhaps a PC, a Smartphone or a Xbox 360/Xbox One/PS3/PS4/PS Vita – therefore making it quite simple to find another device to play on.
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