Held off making a review until they fixed the matchmaking with friends issue, which they did! In this review I will be going over a certain few aspects of Minecraft Legends and my own opinions. For clarity, I bought the deluxe edition of the game at full price as a pre-order.

Graphics & Ambience
Graphics are honestly gorgeous throughout the entire day/night cycle and in every biome. The art team honestly nailed everything from the lighting to the stylised textures and 3D models. The framerate is perfect too and im sure this can run more than well on lower end machines. (more about this later)

And the music. OH MY GOD THE MUSIC. It captures the tone of the game perfectly and is tense at the right moments and completely goes with everything happening in-game. It changes depending on what you are doing and the sound design team did an INCREDIBLE job! I sometimes put the ost on in the background while doing work that's how good it is. I would end my review right here and now but I have lots more to talk about.

Gameplay
Relaxing at the right moments, tense in the other moments. If your team is coordinating well, this game is an honest blast. My only problem with PvP at the moment is the ability to not talk to your teammates at all, I'm hoping they add a form of text chat or something because the pinging system isn't enough to give direct orders to specific people yet honestly.

The army aspect of the game is satisfying and the gameplay loop is nothing short of addicting in my experience. Genuinely a fun time. One memory I had was 1v1'ing a friend, sneaking up to their base and sending a whole swarm of creepers up to it to blow the wall, then sending another army of creepers to completely obliterate their tower. It genuinely was so hilarious and I did not expect my plan to work that well.

Campaign
I haven't completed the campaign yet as most of my hours are sank into the PvP mode, however I truly admire how gorgeous and full-of-life the cutscenes are in the story mode. After every main objective, and trust me there are lots. The game will play an adorable story focused cutscene that adds so much personality and life into the world you are playing. For that, this game sits very close to my heart, as I can tell blackbird interactive really cared about what they were making and knew it was special.

I cannot say anything on the gameplay side of the campaign just yet but from the looks of things on Mythic (the game's hard mode) difficulty, fights are intense and the campaign really keeps you on alert most of the time. My only concern is how many piglins are on screen at one time as i'm not too sure if that will affect lower end devices and such.

Content/Replay Value
This section is probably the game's strongest and weakest parts.

PvP gives the game essentially an infinite replay value with its procedrally generated world like the orignal minecraft, and millions of different scenarios you can find yourself in. Redstone launcher set up by your base? Call back your friends and find a way to shoo the enemy away. Trying to sneak behind your enemy's base? Get a distraction going!! It's all strategy which I adore and the game rewards clever plays instead of mindlessly spamming armies.

In terms of content. If you are someone who does not enjoy PvP whatsoever and just cares about singleplayer experiences or co-op, this game is still fantastic. However you will find a lot less to do than someone tackling the world of MCL PvP. Just keep that in mind. However this can change as this game has the minecraft marketplace, It's a little barren at the moment but it seems it might contain more singleplayer/co-op missions in the future, one is free on there at the moment but I assume some will be paid DLC, which obviously depends on the contents. And yes, minecoins from the bedrock edition of minecraft DO carry over to minecraft legends if you're on the same xbox account, which is honestly kinda neat.

I am unsure if players will be able to create content on this marketplace though, but that is in the future and I will update the review if this changes.

Conclusion
Overall, give this game a chance if you love minecraft and strategy games in general. This one is certainly unique and I haven't really played anything like it which makes it pretty fresh in it's own way with how I chose to play.