Minecraft, developed by a team of talented programmers at Mojang AB, is a creative sandbox game dreamed up and created by one man: Markus Persson, or as he’s better known in the Minecraft community, “Notch.”

Minecraft’s development began around May of 2009, and throughout it’s development the desktop versions have been open as a “paid alpha” (later a paid beta), with the game finally reaching it’s official 1.0 release on November 18th, 2011. Pocket Edition is a spin-off of the main game, designed and developed for mobile devices running Google’s Android and Apple’s iOS. Initially released for Android devices, the iOS version of “Pocket Edition” became available on November 17th, just one day before the full desktop game was released.

Minecraft: Pocket Edition is a very simple and “watered-down” version of the full Minecraft experience. Rather than being a port of the full game, Pocket Edition does away with many of the superfluous aspects of Minecraft (such as enemies, items, and health), and instead focuses 100% on the creative and building aspects of the game that really make up the roots of Minecraft.

Upon creating a new world in the game, players are given a relatively small area of randomly-generated terrain on which to build. Unlike the full game, this world’s size is fixed – no more new land will generate when you reach the border of the world.

The reduced size of the world, along with the lack of monsters, large cave systems, and tools, really shows what kind of focus Mojang had for their mobile editions. Pocket Edition doesn’t serve the same purpose as the full game – players aren’t expected to explore the land and collect tons of resources. Instead, Pocket Edition lends itself to creating interesting structures and buildings, which turns out to be perfect for a game that is more likely to be played in 10-15 minutes stretches rather than several hours on end.

Given that Minecraft: Pocket Edition seems to be focused on building rather than exploring, I found it puzzling that the game only allows access to a small fraction of the types or blocks available in the full game. Only 29 different types of blocks are available to build with, along with 7 assorted items that can be used for decorative purposes. This is one area of the game that actually disappoints and detracts from Pocket Edition’s overall purpose, as limiting the number of blocks limits the player’s creativity, and Pocket Edition is entirely about building.

The controls for the game are simple. On the lower left side of the screen, the game gives you a virtual 4-way D-Pad, with a center “jump” button. Moving your view around is accomplished by dragging your finger around on the screen. Both of these controls work well, although dragging the view around felt cramped on the iPhone’s screen. The main part of Minecraft – breaking and placing blocks – is controlled through direct touches on the blocks. One tap on a square in the world will place your selected block. Touch-and-hold on a block for a moment, and you will break a block. The touch controls for both actions feel very natural, and actually gave a more direct sense of interaction.

Overall, I like Minecraft: Pocket Edition. It’s great for when you’re out on the move and a great idea strikes you for something you want to build later in your main world. However, if you where hoping for a full port of Minecraft will all the features and perks of the PC and Mac version, I would hold off for now. Minecraft: Pocket Edition is in it’s infancy right now, but like the main game, I fully expect this version of Minecraft to evolve and grow into a full-fledged game just like the PC/Mac version did.

Minecraft: Pocket Edition is available on the App Store for $6.99 here.