When comparing Hack 'n' Slash vs Minetest, the Slant community recommends Minetest for most people. In the question“What are the best educational games on PC?” Minetest is ranked 8th while Hack 'n' Slash is ranked 15th. The most important reason people chose Minetest is:
An easy to use lua API, and a large variety of existing modifications and games that can be downloaded and installed easily.
Specs
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
Pro Intuitively uses coding as a main mechanic
Players can use their hacking abilities to subvert their enemies instead of just using a traditional weapon like a sword. For instance a user can plug into a rock in a level and reprogram the code of the rock to allow for it to be moved and how many spaces. It is an intuitive way to interact with objects and solve the puzzles in the game.
Pro Writing is clever and funny
Like the majority of Double Fine games, Hack 'n' Slash is very cleverly written with humor similar to the Adventure Time series and many jokes referencing the old Legend of Zelda cartoon. This is definitely something for those that get the references of its origins.
Pro Allows you to break the game
The game does not restrict or prevent the player from experimenting, and breaking the game (crashing it) is a common result. It's simple to load back to a previous point in the game and try again with a different strategy.
Pro Easily customization through LUA mods
An easy to use lua API, and a large variety of existing modifications and games that can be downloaded and installed easily.
Pro Open Source
Pro Runs fast and clean
Runs on Low-End Hardware, runs Fast, Spartan on Memory.
Pro Cross platform
Can be played on Android, Linux, Windows, and macOS.
Pro Fewer griefers than Minecraft
The smaller community means fewer players, and that mean fewer griefers than on Minecraft.
Pro Built for plugins from the beginning
Pro It's Free
Pro Fun and thorough tutorial
There is a tutorial game that you can download that teaches you how to play Minetest in a fun and intuitive way. There are even collectable gems you can try to find in the tutorial.
Cons
Con Design seems lazy at times
Things like a poorly designed map or often not knowing where to go which leads to back tracking that may not even help makes for frustrating play. Really it comes off as lazy more than a design decision.
Con Lack of mobs
Yet mobs can be installed through mods or subgames. However, if the server is not optimized, these can make the game run slower.
Con Not much to do even with mods
All I do in the game is dig underground and mine the ore within the caves. There are no monsters to fight, dungeons to explore, or any leveling systems/progression mechanics to keep me playing.
Con No weather
There's no built-in weather. However, there are mods which add this feature and extend it far beyond what you might expect from basic weather.
Con Rips off Minecraft
And not very well either.
Con Certain graphics are really bad
Parts of the games's graphics and functionality are really bad. Mob mods or default mobs look like a 4 year old drew them. However, the devs seem to be slowly sweeping through these issues. Come back soon if you don't like what you see yet.
Con Server lags
Almost everything is done server side, so the game can feel very janky on some servers.
Con Minecraft mod ecosystem separate from Minetest
Minetest is obviously an opensource implementation of Minecraft but the only problem is all the mods made for Minecraft do not work in Minetest. They could have designed their clone in such a way say fix it at 1.7.10 forge so that you could load up forge mods straight up and have them work somewhat. There's so much great content for Minecraft that is completely lost and unusable in Minetest, however at this pace of developement, maybe that will change in the future.