After eight long years in development, Hytale finally reached its early access in January. Developed by Hypixel Studios, recognized as the creators of the popular Minecraft server Hypixel. Hytale, first announced eight years ago, was meant to be Minecraft’s direct competitor, promising a similar experience while still bringing fresh ideas and concepts to the sandbox genre. Now, post-release and five updates later, the game fails to live up to the hype fans created. Hytale is described as an open-world survival crafting game that borrows many mechanics from its predecessor, Minecraft. The game has the player gather resources and craft tools to explore a procedurally generated block world, with the added experience of new biomes, dungeons and bosses to conquer.
When first loading into the game, the player is dropped into a procedurally-generated world surrounded by trees and structures to explore. The game encourages them to explore and craft a new set of tools from a tree they punch down. The early game is very similar to Minecraft’s.
This gameplay loop has often been imitated since Minecraft popularized it so many years ago. This seems to be a recurring pattern in the game often when there are no new original ideas to be added. The game also doesn’t hesitate to throw in a mechanic or feature directly taken from Minecraft. Although this isn’t always a problem, often bringing a nice change of pace to the new flood of content, it can make the game feel uninspired at times.
The gameplay follows the foundation set by the survival genre, having the player upgrade their tools with every new ore or enemy found. This can make the gameplay pretty tedious, often having to search for hours just for one material. This also leads to Hytale’s biggest problem: the gameplay loop. Hytale adds nothing new of interest when it comes to the repeating gameplay, requiring the player to get more resources to make more tools to defeat difficult enemies, repeating until theybeat the final boss. Hytale doesn’t strive to make this interesting outside of the content itself, and we can see this same exact loop with most other survival games, the difference being that these newer games aim to mix up this foundation, creating more interesting gameplay. This doesn’t mean the new content presented is stale.
The content Hytale does provide is a huge breath of fresh air, one highlight being the movement. The game allows players to sprint and vault over blocks, only needing players to reach the top layer of a block before gaining access to them. This change hints at a massive improvement for exploration. With bosses and enemies comes fighting mechanics. Being one of the more exciting parts of Hytale, and a portion that most other survival games seem to get wrong, the combat of the game is very flexible and inviting, giving the player a whole arsenal of fantasy-themed weapons to discover or craft.
Hytale is far from a perfect game. Although Hypixel Studios is moving toward a full release even after eight years of development, the gameplay requires major improvements. The uninspired progression and mechanics of the game can at times be tiresome, but it’s worth it for the exploration and content alone. Overall, its development has a long way to go, but once Hypixel Studios finds its own unique perspective on the survival genre through future updates, Hytale could see the success this team has worked so long for.
