LET’S PLAY: ENDER STORM

The adventure starts with you in a building  that’s shaking and crumbling all around you. Uh oh. Text along the top of the screen informs you that your first objective is to ‘CHECK WHAT’S GOING ON OUTSIDE’. Er, how about we COWER AND HIDE AND MAKE UNDIGNIFIED WHIMPERING NOISES instead? No? …Fine.

Outside we meet a Mysterious Villager who immediately starts chewing our ear off (not literally, it’s not THAT ominous):

According to our new best friend, creatures from The End have started breaking into this dimension, which admittedly sounds slightly more urgent than our problem (we forgot to wash our favorite tea towel). The Villager informs us that we need to find a legendary weapon. They also tell us that we’re their only hope. Yeah, we use that line to get people to do stuff all the time too.

We head on into the next area merrily whistling and checking our fingernails. Come on now, we’ve all played games before, we know how this works. There’ll be a nice little tutorial, then a few simple challenges a sleeping baby could succeed at, and then over time the difficulty will slowly ramp uOH ARGGHH WAIT WHATTT?!?!?!

Yes, unfortunately, Ender Storm has no interest in easing you in. It prefers a more direct approach of handing you a sword and then immediately spawning several horrible new End-themed enemies to attack you. Those horrid jerks you can see in the screenshot above are fast. Too fast. Killed-us-several-times-just-to-get-that-screenshot fast!

Luckily, we’re pretty fast too. At eating cakes. Unfortunately, we’re not very fast at any skills that actually matter in a direct combat situation. Cue lots of desperate flailing of our sword (which, thankfully, does have Sharpness III). Shockingly, we manage to take down all five invaders, thanks to the fact the game keeps respawning us in the same room when we mess up. Woo!

We limp into the next room, ready for more pain and… ooooh! What is that?

The Mysterious Villager, who sure provides a hefty portion of helpful exposition for a guy who claims to be ‘mysterious’, informs us that this is the Enchanted Void Blade. When we’ve finished pretending to listen to them talk about it, we jump up on that podium and snatch it for ourselves. 

Success! Except for the fact that picking up the blade immediately spawns a fresh wave of hostile mobs. Oh, crumbs.

Soon we’re fighting our way through a village full of hostile horrors. Wait, a village? Score! Naturally, we do the most heroic thing we could ever do here, a skill we’ve mastered through countless pillager raids - we find the nearest bed and take a nap. Night!

It’s important to get your beauty sleep, especially when fighting enemies this ugly. Seriously, have you seen their Endy take on the Ghast? It looks like a demon drank too much grape juice at a rave. It also seems very very very very unhappy to see us walking about, well rested and alive.

OK, so eventually we remember why a bow and arrow is better for fighting flying mobs than a sword, and take on this Ender Ghast (Eghast? Hmm… let’s work on that one later). 

Now, we love our fancy new void sword. It’s great at defeating mobs, you do lots of flashy arm movements when you use it (we’re always a sucker for showboating) and have we mentioned how shiny it is? But after we met the game’s next weapon, we tossed that stupid sword away in disgust. It’s dead to us now - seriously, never contact us again, void sword, it’s not us it’s you - because now we’ve met The Gavel of Ender.

Usually, we hate gavels. Often, we only encounter them when we’re in courtrooms and angry judges are bashing their gavels at us and accusing us of being guilty of handing in our Minecraft.net let’s play late yet again. But now we love gavels more than our own children. Sorry kids, but the Gavel of Ender basically turns you into Thor, God of Thunder - how could you possibly compete? How could anyone?