I can understand some people being put off by the relatively sedentary pace or the lack of a clear goal. Not so for me. Let me walk you through it.

The demo puts you in a ready-built area, complete with a pond, a ruined hut, a small town and a castle. I went through the tutorial bits easily enough, fixed up the hut as instructed, then went to explore. After wandering around the castle for a while, night fell. I trotted into the town and holed up in one of the houses. Curious about the monsters that I knew would come out now it was dark, I stood at the window and watched. What I saw was a brief glimmer of green, then BANG! One wall of the house caved in as one of those exploding creatures decided it was in a bad mood. Zombies and spiders piled in, and my flimsy sword could only do so much. Without room to get out of the house, they finished me off pretty quickly.

I respawned without any of my weapons or tools, all the way back at the pond in the tutorial area. I could hear enemies nearby, so rather than trying to get to town, I ran to the hut I’d fixed up earlier. A few seconds later, BANG! Half the building dissolved. Unarmed and trapped again, I didn’t have a chance.

I respawned. This time I had no choice but to make a break for it, but I had to pass the hut which was still crawling with enemies. I sprinted to the tunnel towards town, but they chased me down and tore me apart.

I respawned. Same problem but this time the monster clump had been thinned out by the previous chase. I ran to the tunnel, got through it and almost made it to town, but a spider blindsided me and ate my head.

I respawned. Got through the tunnel, decided to avoid getting trapped in a building again and headed over a ridge to the left in the hope that I’d get away from this main mass of monsters and be able to dig a hole to hide myself in. I managed that, but then found myself just sitting and staring at a dirt wall, waiting for the night to pass. Not my idea of fun. I dug my way out and tried to head back to town, but BANG! A chunk of the hill vanished. While trying to find a new route, spiders caught me and skewered my face.

I respawned back at the pond again. Made a dash for town, got through the tunnel, got to a building. I slammed the door behind me and breathed a sigh of relief. Then CLICK. A zombie let itself in like a rude neighbour. I hadn’t even tried to mine for materials in the dangerous darkness, so I was unarmed. I might have been able to take out the zombie with my bare hands, but I never got chance to find out. BANG! The room was decorated in shades of miner innards.

I respawned. Not knowing what else to do, I ran to the town. The monsters saw me from the ruins of my previous hiding place but I managed to dart into a house across the street. This time I dived straight into bed in the hope that unconsciousness might save me. And it did. I awoke to bright sunshine, wandered to the window and saw a smirking green face looking right back at me. That hissssss of burning fuse began, and I ran to the back of the house to try and hack my way free. BANG! The front wall gave way, and a couple of spiders pranced in. As they chewed me to pieces yet again, I hit what can only be described as The Wall. The “Fuck. This. Shit.” wall of quitting Minecraft, deleting the piece of crap and pretending I’d never seen it.

I died eight times in the first night in the demo. What’s the point of shelter if it provides no protection at all? What’s the point of a day/night cycle that doesn’t allow you to live to see the dawn? What’s the point of a demo that makes willing purchasers run away screaming from your badly designed travesty of a game? I don’t know whether Minecraft has always been like this, whether it’s just the Xbox version or even just the demo. I don’t know and I don’t really care. It’s horrible and I want no part of it.

That is why I didn’t buy Minecraft. Did you?

Typically a MOBA sees two teams of player-controlled characters, backed up by weaker AI-controlled characters, attacking each other across a map that is split into several paths, each defended by several auto-firing towers. It’s kind of like being on the attacking side in a tower defence game, but with both teams trying to simultaneously attack and defend.

Consoles have remained almost entirely MOBA-free. Part of this might be a control matter; like MMORPGs and RTS games, MOBAs demand precision of control and rapid navigation of menus, tasks which have never sat comfortably with the Xbox 360’s ‘side of beef’ controller or the PS3’s ‘TV remote control’ pad. The only MOBA-like game that springs to mind is Masters of Belial on Xbox Live Indie Games – incorporating all the finest (if slightly simplified) elements of a MOBA…except for the multiplayer and online portions. Oops.

It’s a power. There’s a power happening.

Well, times change. Roaring into view with MC Hammer references and hammy French accents comes new 2D MOBA-wannabe Awesomenauts. Gloating PC purists gleefully point out at every opportunity that console versions of PC games tend to be diluted and simplified. If you can get past their hyena cackles and bourgeois sneers they have a point, and Awesomenauts demonstrates it once again. Rather than the half-RTS, half-action-RPG epics of Dota, console owners get Super Smash Bros with upgrades and defensive towers.

That’s not really meant as a criticism. Awesomenauts certainly lacks the depth of the big name MOBAs but it delivers on most of the important points, and its simplified nature makes it a good starting point for those who’d like to try Dota but can’t get a beta key and/or don’t want to cry themselves to sleep for the 700 consecutive days of continuous play necessary to fully understand the game. You can learn Awesomenauts in ten minutes, and feel tolerably competent within an hour. Opting for side-scrolling 2D rather than top-down pseudo-3D hugely simplifies the arenas and the routes available for attack. The upgrade system ditches confusing crafting system and complex builds in favour of simple skill trees – two unique active powers per character, and a handful of passive health/stat upgrades available to all.

Red attacking the blue tower. Trust me, that’s what’s happening here.

The aim is to assist waves of AI droids in attacking the enemy team’s heavily armed towers. With each tower you manage to eliminate, you can advance one step closer towards the final objective – a drilling mechanism that has to be destroyed in order to take the victory. Assaulting towers isn’t a simple matter of charging at them, though. If you attack one alone, you will unceremoniously be killed in seconds. You need to at least have some droids on hand to act as cannon fodder, and preferably some fellow players as well. Awesomenauts doesn’t let you off lightly for throwing your digital life away. Each death costs you in-game currency, which inhibits your ability to buy upgrades and thereby keeps you as weak and vulnerable as a sleeping kitten. Of course, while all this is going on you also have to prevent the other team destroying your own towers.

Split-screen Awesomenautery is a thing, apparently.

All in all, it plays very well with a controller and it’s easy enough to learn that it shouldn’t put off casually curious players. The feel of combat is definitely more Smash Bros than Warcraft but that’s the choice Awesomenauts makes, and it’s a valid one.

It’s not without its deficiencies though. The game’s cartoony sense of humour, while generally pleasant enough, can grate after a while. Similarly, the arenas don’t vary enough to prevent repetitiveness setting in after three or four matches in a row. Perhaps the biggest flaw with the game, though, isn’t really anything in the game itself. The problem is console owners. There are legions of high quality, innovative, original, involving multiplayer games on Xbox and PS3, but most have little to no community because the console community is simply far more prone to sticking to familiar ground than the PC community is. On PC, MOBAs and other non-mainstream genres maintain a healthy following; on console, anything outside half a dozen major franchises is lucky to make a dent for more than a few weeks. I’m not sure why that is, but it does make me pessimistic about Awesomenauts’ longevity. How long will the game’s community last once people start losing the battle to resist the crack junkie siren call of Halo and Call of Duty? Only time will tell.

Some Awesomenauts. ‘Astro’ just isn’t enough for these Nauts.

Awesomenauts is easy to recommend simply because it’s so different from other experiences available on consoles. It brings in the competitive edge that makes online FPS games so popular but does something wholly different with it. If those of us who enjoy Awesomenauts don’t just wander off and leave it to die, this could be a lasting multiplayer action gem. It doesn’t come close to being a real console Dota but it does at least make the attempt, and produces something worthwhile of its own in the process.