Now that Microsoft’s purchase of Mojang-the maker of Minecraft- is final, the dream of having Minecraft on the 3DS is likely over. However, eShop developers have taken up the flag of creating a game to satisfy Nintendo fans’ Minecraft itch while adding their own ideas to the formula.

Battleminer. Simply put, imitates Minecraft’s premise idea and adds in gunplay. Sadly Battleminer takes two game types with peanut butter and jelly-like blending potential and fails to deliver either type effectively.

The game is broken into two main modes, Survival and Creative. In the game’s Survival mode players will explore a large world made of blocks representing different materials such as dirt, wood, stone and diamond. After collecting a certain amount of specific materials, the player can craft tools.

Those who are familiar with Minecraft will quickly be disappointed with the variety of tools available to craft and the complete lack of any gadgets or home items available in Minecraft. Players can only create the tiers of pickaxes, which improve the speed of mining, a handful of guns as well as various armor and ammunition and grenades.

Throughout the map, players can rescue several Lego-esque characters who are surrounded by giant ants. Combat in this game boils down to fighting multiple ants, each with different attack styles and item drops, using guns or a pickaxe. Battleminer suffers from greatly from the single circle pad configuration of the 3DS hardware and it handles this obstacle worse than previous games which required similar control function such as Kid Icarus: Uprising.The circle pad controls the characters movement while the A B X and Y buttons control the camera and targeting reticule, and there are no options of changing this configuration to use the touchscreen or the Circle Pad Pro. Aiming with the A, B, X and Y button gets so frustrating that I usually counted on the pickaxe to fight off ants. Because of the issues with the controls, I found the gunplay to be really disappointing and without interesting gunplay, the Survival mode of Battleminer does not have anything significant to offer.

This mode is very shallow in content and the content that exists is extremely repetitive and uninspired. My time in Survival mode essentially consisted of walking around and shooting ants as I saw them, occasionally stopping to mine for materials to make more guns and ammo.

On the other hand, Battleminer has a competent Creative mode. Players can choose from a variety of block colors to create whatever their imagination can conceive. I was pleasantly surprised to also find a very active Miiverse community for this game filled with players showing off their block creations. Battleminer succeeds in providing players with a virtual canvas that many gamers will love to take advantage of.

Battleminer definitely falls short of a well-rounded game with some thin gameplay and trying controls dominating Survival mode. It definitely picks up the slack some in its other half, but your spare eShop credit might be better served to wait and see if a better 3DS Minecraft comes along.