After its reveal at the Xbox Games Showcase 2026, Minecraft Dungeons II sparked excitement from fans of the first game looking for a new entry. Following the show, we spent 30 minutes hands-on with the game, guided by Mans Olson (Creative Director) and Laura De Llorens (Design Director), which turned out to be a fun and chaotic time with other members of the press.

Minecraft Dungeons II Hands-on Preview

Our time with the game may have been brief, but it was enough to give a taste of what the game offers. The demo took us deep into a sprawling cave system, spiraling downward as we encountered many enemies, including skeletons and illagers, along the way.

It’s a dungeon crawler that’s mostly straightforward. Players are equipped with the basic attack and skill buttons, but the addition of a jump button makes traversal and even encounters even more exciting. Enemies came at a steady pace, and there’s just enough time in between encounters to give the game some good pacing.

The big system underpinning Minecraft Dungeons II is its expansive gear system, allowing players to express themselves in even more ways than before. While our time was not long enough to really dig into the system, it was evident that each player had multiple gear and weapon slots (four armor slots and three talisman slots, among others), with each piece of equipment having different perks and abilities, the higher the rarity tier. Since the game rewards players with generous amounts of loot while exploring, players can eventually min-max their loadout depending on their playstyle.

My character was equipped with double daggers and a bow that could seemingly inflict poison damage due to its green attacks, while the others had swords and bigger weapons that cleared mobs with sweeping attacks.

Our short run culminated in a boss fight against the Twisted Warden, which had the ability to continuously summon mobs while moving around and launching wide attacks. We didn’t manage to defeat the boss, but it was clear that while challenging, teams need to communicate well to manage the tougher battles. In this case, some members of the team should have concentrated on killing the mobs while others took aggro from the boss.

Another feature of Minecraft Dungeons II that the developers highlighted was its overworld structure, where maps are connected and can be traversed end to end. Dungeons are littered throughout the overworld, awaiting players and rewarding them for their curiosity.

Minecraft Dungeons II is built for co-op, whether local or online, but with our full 4-player team, it was quite difficult to follow the action when the screen became too busy with particle effects, so much so that I fell to my death a couple of times because I had a hard time finding my character amidst all the chaos. The developers mentioned that the game scales with the number of players on the team, and the ideal group size is closer to two.

Minecraft Dungeons II launches on September 29 for PS5, Xbox Series, Switch, Switch 2, and PC.