Minecraft: Story Mode - Episode 5: Order Up! shapes up to be an incredible introduction to the Order of the Stone's newest adventures, but still manages to fall a little short. Telltale introduces new concepts, characters and worlds, but their biggest mistake was shoving it all into a single episode. Had they created a separate season talking about the events of Sky City and expanding a little bit more on the environments and characters, this episode would have been much more successful. That being said, however, this episode does deviate from previous installments as being much more adult and changes the characters as once being small time builders to being full-fledged heroes risking their lives to save common folk. Hopefully Telltale will continue to capitalize on that aspect of the characters and convey it in the following episodes.
Editor’s Note: Before reading this review, we highly recommend checking out our review for Episode One: The Order of the Stone , Episode 2: Assembly Required , Episode 3: The Last Place You Look and Episode 4: A Block and a Hard Place as there are spoilers ahead.
The story also deserves notice. Minecraft itself might not have as intense of a story, but Telltale was able to grab some of the more important factors of Minecraft and create a lore to follow and better understand what the characters with. Previously, your goal was to mine for enough materials and minerals to make a portal to the End to slay the Ender Dragon. Now, that story doesn't necessarily apply to everyone, because the ones who slayed the Ender Dragon were the members of the Order of the Stone. The members are essentially the people that you would have normally gone to the End with to help you fight the dragon, so it almost makes it seem like you were some kind of legendary hero for being able to do that if you were able to do so in the past. Everyone else in the episode doesn't have that same goal and, funny enough, don't look at all like the villagers that you sometimes wander upon in the original game. The storytelling and characters leave you with enough of an impression that leaves you waiting in anticipation for the next episode. You begin to make connections with your friends and build a relationship with them in the span of one single episode so it leaves you wanting to know what will come next for this party of builders.
The episode also alludes to death; a lot. Considering the fact that both Olivia and Axel are completely omitted from the episode save for the prologue, there is basically no comic relief. Not that you should play a game simply for its humor, Minecraft: Story Mode has a reputation for having humor and making friendship stand above all else. While this episode does focus on friendship and how your decisions can shape the future, death always seems to be around the corner and everyone you come in contact with seems to want you to die, or at last Aiden openly expresses it. It also doesn't help that Aiden and the Blaze Rods were basically considered obsolete until now, so it's difficult to really believe that he would want to do this to the citizens of Sky City just because he's jealous. Had this episode focused on why they are being brought back rather than throwing them into a whole new story, the episode would have made a little more sense.
Cocoa Beans are a useful material in Minecraft . They can be used to create cookies, but are also used as a brown dye . They can be farmed easily, and grown on jungle wood, but it may become tedious to constantly Fantasy Farm Animals the beans manua
Daggers, for instance, are fast but weak, while a halberd is noticeably slower but better for slicing enemies at range. The Spelunker armor comes with a pet bat that flies out to attack enemies for you, but the hunter's armor gets a bonus ten arrows per pickup. Equipment also comes with a number of abilities, further complicating the selection. Abilities such as weaken enemies or lightning strike are only rarely pre-equipped, but rather must be chosen. A sickle might have two ability slots with three options each, but once you've chosen one the other two go away. There's a hard choice to be made between "move faster for five seconds after dodge roll" and "heal allies in small radius" and it can take a surprising amount of thought to pull the trigger. Each ability also can be upgraded twice and this is where character leveling comes in.
While you don’t get to explore the world, you are given the chance to look around in order to find clues that lead to the next event. The episode doesn’t stray at all from the original and even gives you the opportunity to fight zombies and craft items to make you feel more at home, feeling a little bit like a tribute. As stated before, you don’t have to have prior knowledge of the game in order to enjoy this but some you should have some prior knowledge to understand the terminology and some of the jokes. 'Ender Dragon' and 'Wither' are not really words that everyone has in their everyday vocabulary but knowing about them will give you better understanding of why they’re bad and why the situation that Jesse and his friends are in is bad.
