Terraria is a sandbox action/building/survival game that was released back in 2011. It came out a few years after Minecraft premiered, and there’s a decent chance Minecraft was part of the inspiration, as it does share the general premise of surviving in a sandbox world where you can freely explore, dig, gather resources, fight monsters and build stuff. However, one big difference in the feel of Terraria (besides it being 2D rather than 3D) is that it is a very combat focused game.
Whereas Minecraft only has a couple of bosses and a handful of weapons, Terraria is bursting
with bosses, enemies, weapons and gear. A big part of the fun I’ve had
with the game has simply been going around collecting a huge arsenal of
weapons, accessories and armor sets. There’s a satisfying sense of
progression to the game where you must continuously hone your skills and
beef up your equipment to take on each boss in the game’s main
story-line. When you get far enough, the world changes into “hard mode”,
spawning a new biome along with *even more*new enemies and bosses to
duke it out with! Occasionally invasions will occur in your world where
a mob of baddies will descend upon you as well, and you are also able
to summon many invasions and bosses yourself for optional challenges. If
you play the game in Expert or Master Mode, the baddies all get a heck
of a lot tougher, but they also drop special items, so the game gives a
really nice incentive for practicing and getting skilled enough to try
out the harder difficulty world modes. I suppose if I have one criticism
of the games combat, it is that I do wish you could progress without
having to hurt any friendlies (I’ll be vague so as to not spoil but
you’ll eventually have the game itself tell you you’re a terrible person
if you want to play all the way to the final boss. ouch!)
In
addition to the challenging but fun combat, you can also do lots of
other things like building, well, pretty much whatever you want (I’ve
been making My Little Pony themed buildings myself). You can go fishing,
farm plants, and when you complete certain tasks NPCs can also show up
in your world. The NPCs are a lot of fun, I enjoy talking with them all
(even jerk ones like the angler because he’s still an amusing little
shit). There’s even one modeled after Pinkie Pie! There’s also an
adorable fox-monster lady, the Zoologist. and also….well, there’s many I
like, so I’ll go onto how they affect game-play. Many of the
characters have unique game-play functions attached to them beyond just
selling stuff. The angler can give you fishing quests to complete, the
goblin tinkerer can reforge your items to change their stat bonuses, the
sassy nurse can heal you while reminding you of the importance of
social distancing (good!), and the big burly Tavernkeep even lets you
set up a whole little tower-defense mini-game with its own currency and
loot rewards! Another feature this game has that you don’t really get in
Minecraft - you get to play dress-up! The game features tons of
cosmetic items that you can wear over your armor, ranging form silly to
cute to spooky and more!
The
game is wonderful audio-wise, largely in part due to its delightfully
charming soundtrack. When I first heard the music, it reminded me of the
feel of Adventure Time with it’s often playful feel.
Now, onto my criticisms - which are few, as there’s a good reason I’ve been playing this game for almost a year now, but I always wanna try to give constructive feedback, especially in a game that it still being updated such as this one. Watching my wife play this before it’s current “Journeys End” update, it used to be possible to have the game world pause when looking at the map, but this was taken away with the newest update and that was disappointing to her and I felt it unfair as well. Another issue is that NPCS have an AI issue where they will just walk into a pool of water and casually drown themself. A third issue is that sometimes if you have the game paused or the inventory open, and the controller disconnects, the game will unpause, putting you in danger of dying. Similarly, if the controller dies while you’re actively playing, it won’t pause the game, also potentially screwing the player over. I hope in the new “labor of love” update, these things will be fixed.
Lastly,
I do have a criticism about how updates are handled in modern day games
like this - When 1.4 was released, it caused corruption in my wife’s
previously made worlds, and she ended up having to make new ones. This
is why I feel that if a developer is going to keep changing a game after
its initial release, the older versions of it should be available to
the player as well. Minecraft Java Edition has shown a very good example
of this where you can create player profiles and tell the launcher
which version of Minecraft you want to play on. Some players may have
preferred the way Terraria was more in its early days, and these forced
updates erasing older versions of the game could potentially ruin a
customers favorite game and replace it with something they don’t enjoy
much anymore. I also miss the days when games were not released until
they were finished, and they were released on an un-changable physical
format.
All that said, I do greatly recommend the game if you enjoy Minecraft or love the idea of a big, colorful open world where you can spend months on end collecting cool items, building cute houses, and battling big tough monsters. I know of a couple decent options for getting a copy of the game: I went with playing on the Xbox One because my family already owns the game and had it installed. I know it is also available for PC DRM-free on good old games, (I don’t really like buying from them but sadly they seemed to be the only source of a DRM-free PC copy currently). I also own an older physical copy of the game for Xbox 360, and if you’re a big enough Terraria fan I may recommend picking that one up as well because it might be the only to get to experience an older version of the game if you didn’t snag one of the DRM-free copies early enough.
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