The Blockheads Is The Minecraft-Style iOS Game You’ve Always Wanted

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You may lose days of productivity. Sorry.
You may lose days of productivity. Sorry.

Move over, Mojang! The Blockheads, inspired by such open-world exploration games as Mojang’s certified hit, Minecraft, is the best implementation of the genre yet, out Minecrafting even the official Minecraft game released for iOS some time ago.

You start the game as either a single or 2 player experience. The two player game promises online multiplayer with voice chat via Game Center, while the single player is what I’ve spent my afternoon messing with on both my iPhone and iPad mini. It’s seriously sticky, with all the kinds of things that made me sink hundreds of hours into the Mac version of Minecraft a couple of years ago. There’s crafting and mining, day and night cycles, sleep, a huge open world to explore, and more.

The world is randomly generated at the start of your game, placing mountains, oceans, forests, deserts and huge underground caves. The ground itself is over 500 blocks deep, and there are 15,000 blocks to travel left to right on before you circle back on your starting place. While the game is 2D with a bit of a faux 3D perspective, the feel is the same as that of playing Minecraft with chickens, sheep, boats, trees, etc. You can make a boat to travel the ocean, craft up some fur clothing to stand the harsh North Pole climate, paint walls, plant an orchard, or even ride a donkey.

The controls are super easy to use, after a bit of a learning curve: tap items in your inventory to use them, then tap on the type of block you want to mine or gather. Tap on a tree to gather wood, tap on a block full of flint to mine that mineral. Build one of several kinds of workbenches to make ever more complicated items. You’ll need to keep your avatar–which can be male or female, a great move in this day and age–fed and happy, making sure he or she gets enough sleep and food to maintain a solid pace of mining and resource gathering.

If you dig the open-world sandbox style of Terraria or Minecraft, you’ll love The Blockheads, available now from the App Store for the grand price of free. There are purchasable gems that can speed up tasks, and you can also drop $2.99 as an in-game purchase to speed up the typical mining and gathering tasks, but it’s completely playable and fun without these extras.

Give it a shot and let us know what you think in the comments below.

Source: iTunes App Store

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