Welcome To The World Of "Terraria"
Wow, it seems like I almost always find a reason to hold off my reviews of good games. I also have taken way too much time off from doing a review that I feel guilty now. Just a quick explanation is I am looking at getting a house and possibly doing video reviews of games as typing takes some effort for me to do. So why not start off with a good review of a game I have been waiting to do for a while (and possibly a future "Let’s Play" series if everything comes together).
As from my previous Minecraft review you will notice my obsession to dig and build items. I also love the idea of randomly generated content. So as a for note the following game has some inspiration from Minecraft, but is in no way a rip off so do not dare to say it. If you follow the Steam community then you will know that I am talking about Terraria. This is a game about digging, getting items, exploring, and game progression. Do you like Minecraft but want more content progression, like Castlevania-styled games, and only want to spend $10 on a game that will probably hold twenty hours of your time if you rush through the game? (I have about 200 hours already!) The only downside that I hear people say is they do not want to play 2D games anymore, but really if you take the time to get into the game you will be an addict.
So what do you do in this game really? You start off on the surface of a world in the normal way trying to build a house before the nightfall comes. What comes at night you ask (if you are not a gamer)? Well zombies and demon floating eyeballs like most other games. The next step follows in the Minecraft tradition to look for caves that hold valuable ores for armor. Here is where this game starts to deferrer from Minecraft, as there are also secret rooms and chests in the caves that will upgrade your health, give you magical and special items like double jump and a grappling hook. In fact exploration is often rewarded with gear and nifty items that make progression a main part with building secondary unlike Minecraft. You can use ore to craft your armor at a bench, or make your house into a doom castle equipped with traps, NPC vendors, and throne rooms. It does not stop there, after you get gear from mining you fight in corrupt areas of the map, summon bosses for special armor, fight in underground jungles and dungeons filled with traps and loot, and eventually transform the world to do it all over again.
This game sounds cool to play, but the best part is that there is a fully integrated multiplayer so you can do all this with a group of friends (8 open slots default on a server). If you want more of a challenge, you can change the game modes so that death leaves more of a penalty. There are three settings that are softcore, normalcore, and hardcore. From easiest to hardest as follows: drop gold on death, drop gear on death, and your character is deleted with all gear and items on death. Hardcore is especially horrible as the introduction of traps and the new hard mode world make avoiding death at some point seem impossible.
Well there have to be some downsides to Terraria, it cannot be that amazing. I really wish that I could say I have finally found the perfect game for me to play. Sadly that is not the case here, but this game is amazingly close to perfect. My first and biggest would be the multiplayer aspects difficulty, sadly the developers have not put a scale on the monsters. This means that the more people you have, the easier the game will be. I would love to see the bosses hit harder or have more health with every person you add.
The second would be lack of true end game content. When you get all the gear you are left with building and whatever else you can find to amuse yourself. This is not an easy thing for most developers to figure out, but I hear that competitive modes are on the way so I guess we will be forced to organize and setup special maps to extend the fighting in this game. This is really just me pushing for a feature earlier rather than later on the list, as once it is implemented all content patches after will only require developer tweaking to update death matches. Finally would be Steam integration, the current system does not save characters or your game to the Steam cloud. This also means that to set up a game you will need to pass you game host’s IP address to connect.
What else could I say here but a personal thank you to Re-Logic for making an amazing game that has sucked up many hours that I would have spent doing nothing or being “social,” and who wants that. They are an inspiration for what game companies should be, adding content well past the game's official release and promising more content to come for free. (If Redigit sees this review, the one thing I would tell him is the community has his back for an amazing game like this, if he wants to charge for the next content patch or at least put up a donation page for continued development I will gladly give.) There are few companies out there that I have found their games for as cheap and given so much. If you have not played or watched this game then do so, until I get a video review setup I will recommend Totalbiscuit and Jesse Cox Play Terraria. It is hours of hilarity and it will show you what this game is about.
PS: Yes, in the below pic I am killing a unicorn. He shoots fire out of his mouth!
Until next time: Shut up and dig, Gaiden!
