Monster mash

Clones can be pretty darn shameless, but Dragon Quest Builders is not your ordinary rip-off – primarily because it actually looks better than Mojang's $2 billion mega brand, Minecraft. Of course, it's utterly bereft of originality – it's a copycat, after all – but what it lacks in innovation it more than makes up for in production values. Feast your eyes on it – doesn't it just look great?

IGN recorded 18 minutes of gameplay from TGS 2015, and while you'll be watching a novice get to grips with the systems here, the potential is already plain to see. Combat, for example, looks much more like the kind that you'd expect from an action RPG, while the whole building aspect – a key tenet here, naturally – seems fast and fluid. Without wanting to repeat ourselves, it just looks good.

And we're even more encouraged by the fact that there's a bit of structure to this title. Minecraft's freedom is undoubtedly one of its attractive qualities, but we always felt that the game lacked purpose. Here your objective is to rebuild the world that Dragon Quest I antagonist Dragonlord has ruined in an alternate ending – it even ties in to the property's darn fiction.

What a lovely surprise this could turn out to be, then. It's due out on 28th January in Japan across all three flagship PlayStation formats, with a Western release unconfirmed but inevitable.

[source youtube.com]