Total Miner: Forge - the Next Minecraft

A few days ago I logged onto Xbox LIVE and saw a few of my friends playing an Indie game. My first thought was ok, there's no coincidence they're playing the same game. I joined their party only to hear them talking about a game that sounded very, very similar to Minecraft. Yesterday, I went over to one of those friends house along with a few other people, and I think we played a good 6 hours straight of that game. The name of this game you ask? Total Miner: Forge, an Indie game for the Xbox. The best way to describe it is a much more in depth version of Minecraft for Xbox. The graphics are almost completely identical, the object is exactly the same, and like minecraft, it is extremely addicting. I have no idea how six hours flew by that quick, we were all pretty much glued to the TV all four of us were playing on.  

I watched in fascination as soon as the world was generated at how the game was exactly like Minecraft. The player is tossed into an empty paradise set out on one journey...surviving. As the other three of us joined in on my friends game we all just kind of jumped in on the experience. We created a community, built our houses, and built a storage building and a shop. Yes, I said it, shop. One of the biggest differences in Total Miner is the fact there are shops in the game. There are two different shops: A block store and a tool store. At the start of the game the character is givin about 1000 gold (Which is a decent starting amount), a wooden pickaxe, and one obsidian piece. Now, I said 1,000 gold, and it probably sounds like a lot, where as it really isn't even enough to buy an iron pickaxe. An iron pickaxe costs about 1,200 gold. Gold is just gold, an alternative to crafting all of your items. As a player the option of crafting all of the items exists, yet I think it's just simpler to buy items. But enough about the currency...I haven't even hit the best part. In Minecraft you're limited to a few hundred blocks of depth, maybe more. In Total Miner: Forge it goes down for a little over 2,000 blocks. All the while you hit a vast array of different items. It's not eh average steel, gold, silver, diamond. Total Miner: Forge goes much more in depth on it's items. At 250 blocks down I hit Limestone (I was the explorer of our group of four) and thought "Oh my...there's more than steel?" and the limestone just kept on going and going. All the mean while I would hit areas of Carbon, Gold, Opal, Dacite, Andesite, etc. I swear to you It would take like an entire year to completely excavate the entire map.

It got interesting when my friends came down my little hole (No sexual joke intended) and started digging off in their own tunnels. Eventually we all met up in a cavern about 600 blocks down. We thought, ok, it can't be that bad. Well, our luck changed as soon as we hear this extremelly loud yelling. The room went dead silent when we saw three pairs of red eyes staring at us from the other end of the cavern. We just looked at each other thinking, we just got into something we didn't want to. Our inventories were loaded with wooden pickaxes and a few silver pickaxes. We had no defense or effense at all against this gigantic spiders that where constantly sending wave after wave of onslaughting spiders. I must say, I have never yelled that much in my life. The entire room bust out hysterically. We were all scrambling to high tail it out of this cavern we wish we had not found. One person stayed to fight, one ran, one died, and I just built a wall of bricks around myself. We were all freaking out saying, "What do we do?". Obviously none of us were equipped to fight, and the main objective was to save me because I had almost all of our supply of ladders, gold, and precious rare materials that would be a pain to get again. We started to dig down again after we all got out of the cave, because that was our only option. And as our luck would have it, another 20 blocks or so down there is a massive cave. It was as big as thee I could see. In the middle was a gigantic lava pit, and on the outer rim of this pit were a good 50 spiders all spawning from these eggs. But, I will spoil no more of this game. 

All I can say is this a top notch indie game that I would recommend to any fan of Minecraft that owns an Xbox. Though, the game does have its downsides. A while into the massive cave I was talking about, our game crashed with a long error about too many spiders or something, so we had to set the game to peaceful to prevent the crashing, which took a lot out of our experience. Also, the online multiplayer isn't really multiplayer, mainly because it's really confusing to set up to play with friends that aren't on splitscreen. The crash is what made all of us stop playing just because it was extremelly annoying. 

Total score over the game: 9.0/10

I give this game a 9.0 because it reigns supreme to all other ports and accomplishes the feeling of playing minecraft and then some. But it wasn't a perfect score because, sadly, it has a few minor problems and bugs that need to be worked out, yet I'm sure will be worked out sooner rather than later. BUY THIS GAME! You will enjoy it so much! Even though there is the random crash (Which probably was something that only happened to us for a specific reason) and the multiplayer issue this game is among one of my favorte indie games of all time. If you have a couple hundred microsoft points on your account, go buy it with those points. You won't get nearly as much enjoyment out of anything else in the marketplace.