By Duncan Geere, Wired UK

This took longer than we expected. A chap called Ben Aksoy is the first person to take low-res indie megahit Minecraft and add guns, creating a game called Ace of Spades.

OK, perhaps that’s a little unfair. There’s more to Ace of Spades than just guns. There are grenades, too — and a few other differences between it and Mojang’s blocky caving sim. You play on a team with other people, on a map filled with mountains and canyons. Your aim is to capture a briefcase full of intelligence documents and take it back to your base.

That’s where the fun starts. As the terrain is entirely destructible (and constructable), you can create bunkers, Viet Cong-style tunnels and clear out moats and killing fields in front of your fortifications. Of course, using those aforementioned grenades, your enemies can easily blow holes in your fortifications, too. The challenge is to balance the creation of fortifications and assaulting the enemy base.

Teams of up to 16 players are supported, and server software is freely available if you want to give hosting a server a go yourself. It’s pretty buggy, as it’s still in beta, and almost every player is called “Deuce” because you have to edit a config file to be called anything else.

But despite that, there’s plenty of fun to be had. For the time being, it’s Windows-only, but there are instructions available for running it on WINE.

Right now, the game’s website is in a very bare-bones state due to the traffic it’s getting, but someone’s put together a rather nifty guide-image that explains how it all works. There’s also a useful fan wiki already set up.

If you’ve given Ace of Spades a go, let us know what you think in the comments.