Minecraft Legends is an interesting prospect. Like Minecraft Dungeons, it takes the familiar iconography and building blocks of one of gaming's most familiar and beloved worlds, and employs everything in a new way. For Dungeons, this meant transforming the game into a hack-and-slash action RPG. For Legends, it means something the developer's calling "action strategy", but might otherwise be called real-time strategy.
Ian and I had a chance to play the game in London a few weeks ago, dropping into the start of the single-player campaign and then trying a 3vs3 multiplayer match. (The final game will support 4vs4 and 2vs2 as well, I gather.) With the game out on the 18th, it's not too long before you'll get to see all this yourself, but here, at least, are the very basics.
I was surprised by what a traditional RTS Legends actually feels like, albeit one that's been smartly stripped back for an audience that is coming to this genre perhaps for the first time. Story-wise, Piglins are invading the worlds of Minecraft, and these funny, grotty, ravenous little horrors might be my favourite element of the entire game, spreading a charmingly silly kind of anarchy wherever they go. As a hero character you can attack them with your sword as you move around the procedurally created maps on your horse, but since this is a strategy game, the real key to success comes from harvesting resources and then building stuff with it.