Minecraft is the ultimate playground. It’s a place where kids can go anywhere, do anything, and completely control the narrative.
Gamers of all ages have been enjoying it for over 15 years now, and my kids are among them. So when they heard about the Minecraft Experience London they were bugging me to go.
We were in London for a long weekend just after it opened, so I decided to surprise them with tickets.
In hindsight, the fact that the experience opened at the exact same time the Minecraft movie came out should have warned me. This is nothing but a cash grab, riding the wave of popularity without putting all that much effort into the experience itself.
It’s not dreadful, but it certainly didn’t warrant a £100 spend plus more in the gift shop.
Review of The Experience
Before going in you are given an square orb. I know an orb is technically round but this is Minecraft so it’s a square.
This orb is how you interact with the experience. You spend the whole time either putting it on surfaces or waving it at walls. If you ever used a Nintendo Wii it’s basically the same as a Wii remote.
Next you watch an introductory video that explains how everything will work.
You go through the experience as part of a larger group, so there is always someone ahead of you, and you can’t start (or move on to the next room) until the previous group have left. Each group gets a green t-shirt wearing guide, but they don’t really add to the immersion, they just make sure you all move on to the next room once its time.
The story, such as it is, puts you and your team in the role of heroes trying to save villagers from a zombie attack. You have to gather resources, craft items, and complete challenges to help you do that.
There are 7 rooms to go through as part of the story, and multiple Minecraft biomes to see. Once the first room is free, your ‘adventure’ begins.
Lots of Empty Rooms
The first room is a forest room which is kind of neat, but most of the rooms are basically empty apart from the odd block or Minecraft model. One room had touch screen terminals, too, where you play a basic game tapping to collect resources for the village. It was like a £1.99 game your toddler would play on the iPad.
Instead of a set, the Minecraft world is created using projections on the walls and ceilings. I suppose in this way you are immersed because it is all around you, but you can’t touch or actually engage with anything. It’s all visual. You stamp on the floor or wave your orb.
Shaking the orb in front of a tree will cut it down for wood. Putting your orb on a ‘well’ will load it with water which you then take to some lava, place the orb on there, and the two combine to create obsidian. That sort of thing.
And that’s it. You are either gathering resources, transferring resources, or crafting. Move to the next mostly empty room, and repeat.
The last bit involves throwing snowballs at a cloth screen to defeat zombies, and playing floor is lava to escape, but if that’s your idea of a show stopping big finish then you must be very easily impressed. It was fun, but I have literally played interactive floor is lava at a posh soft play centre in Cheshire. It cost £8 to get in and was just one part of the soft play structure. So as fun as it may have been, it’s hardly a unique immersive experience just because the graphics were Minecraft themed.
At the end they dump you in the gift shop.
What Did I Think?
You can probably tell already.
I found it all rather uninspiring to be honest. We had fun, but even the kids thought it was just “alright”.
It didn’t offer anything new, there were no ‘wow’ moments. I felt a bit of a wally shaking that sodding orb about, to be honest.
Minecraft is a huge open world game you can play for hours with complete freedom, then come back to the next day and pick up where you left off. A live immersive ‘experience’, by its very nature, can’t be much longer than an hour or two and what you do is pre-planned, so the fundamental essence of what Minecraft is has been lost.
What we have instead is a series of rooms with Minecraft projected on the walls and floors, and a threadbare storyline to knit them all together into some sort of rounded experience with a beginning and end.
It feels a bit like an interactive Minecraft gallery rather than an immersive experience. I never had the feeling I was inside the game.
I’ve played Minecraft quite a lot (don’t judge me), and honestly, playing the game on the Xbox was more fun than this was. I didn’t hate it, I just thought it was underwhelming.
Sadly, the concept doesn’t really work in the first place and it has been executed badly.
Ticket Prices and Value for Money
It’s not cheap, but it’s not the most expensive experience I’ve ever been to, either.
Tickets cost:
- Standard Adult: £27.00
- Standard Child (Under 16): £22.00
- Family Ticket: £92.00
- Group Bundle (7+): £21.50 per person
- Obsidian Package: £56 per person
We got a family ticket for the 4 of us, two adults and two kids. That works out as £23 per person.
The Obsidian Package is just an entry ticket plus a goody bag of tat: a pen, a lanyard, a pin badge, and a photo… whoop di doo…
It wouldn’t be too bad in terms of value, but the whole thing only lasts around 45 minutes, so it won’t fill a whole morning or afternoon. Plus, that includes the intro video at the start, so your actual game time is even less.
Then the cheek to expect you to pay over the odds of Minecraft merchandise at the end just made me angry.
I really wanted this to be amazing and worth every penny, but it’s absolutely not.
