The current version of Voxelands has pretty nice gameplay to offer. It has come a long way after all these years. You should definitely give it a try or a re-try. :-)
Here are some screenshots as a teaser:
http://forum.voxelands.com/viewtopic.php?pid=2846#p2846:-)
In terms of gameplay, it is MILES ahead of Minetest Game.
(I also want to stress here: Minetest Game is NOT Minetest! There are many subgames FOR Minetest, created by the community. So if you're disappointed with Minetest Game (rightfully so!), give other subgames a chance.)
The downside of Voxelands is that also has many of the old bugs from old Minetest versions, and it is also obviously behind in engine features.
It's a pity that development on Voxelands seems almost dead right now, and I really hope someone will pick up this project again. But it's still in a good and playable state, although I think it still needs lots of bugfixing and polish.
I have to disagree that Voxelands is always faster than Minetest.
In terms of CPU usage, yeah, I think Voxelands is a winner here. :-)
HOWEVER:
First, it still uses the extremely terrible Minetest-c55 0.3 inventory and crafting management, it needs way too many clicks and it is REALLY painful to craft large amounts.
Formspecs are also much slower than in Minetest. The crafting guide, for instance, often needs SECONDS to flip a single freaking page. In singleplayer! This is very painful. In contrast, the days of laggy formspecs are basically over in Minetest.
All mithril mechanisms are pretty laggy in my opinion, which makes it not fun or even impossible to build really fun and complex machines.