Gamespot Score: 8.0 (Great)
My Score: 8.5
(+) Pros: - Massive world filled with strange atrocities and exciting loot, - Tons of content to keep you playing for a long time, - Great value, - Co-op with friends is extremely fun, - Tons of fun bosses.
(-) Cons: - Tutorial sucks hard, - No built in multi-player modes.
Gameplay time: Stupid (87 hours for me)
"Terraria" is a really stupid ass game. There's really nothing more I can say about it. Its so f**king stupid, that you'll get hooked on to it as you laugh about it. You'll say this and that, then before you know it, you've already dumped 10 hours into the game. Yes, its that engrossing. Its one of those games that'll probably destroy you for the first few hours, then after you've got the hang of it, you'll start to lose yourself. "Terraria" gets extremely addicting, extremely fast, and its damn hard to pull yourself away...even harder when you're playing with friends. You'll never want to stop playing, you won't want to stop digging, building your house, chopping for wood, anything. There's just SO MUCH TO DO, and you'll likely want to do EVERYTHING before stopping. Unfortunately for you, "Everything" in "Terraria" is going to take you a long, LONG time.
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| Yeah, you can really go crazy in building your ideal home. |
There's no story in "Terraria", so I'll jump straight into the game. "Terraria" is an open world, sandbox experience. There is no immediate goal in the game, except for one thing: survive. Right off the bat you're thrown into a world with nothing but a very unclear NPC that does a bad job at explaining what the game is about, with slimes and wild rabbits jumping all around trying to kick your sorry ass. Of course, starting off the game as a noob with nothing on you, you soon come to discover that even killing your everyday garden variety slime is tough. Then when zombies start appearing at night, you know you're f**ked.
Depending on your player experience, "Terraria" can be different kinds of games overall. For your standard casual player, having to die only means losing some money. Anything above that immediately turns the game into a terrifying, survival experience, as dying makes you lose ALL your items or deleting your character permanently. Ouch, that f**king hurts. That only further pushes the fact that you should try NOT to die, and the game becomes a lot more intense....and also a lot more rewarding as you farm for loot.
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| Whoever thought that going to hell was a good idea, is a f**king dumbass. |
And speaking of loot...oh damn. That's basically the heart and soul of "Terraria", that's all the game is about. Throughout the entire game, you'll be building a house out of wood. How do you get wood? Chop trees. You use blocks to build tiles. How do you get blocks? Mine the ground. Everything is based of collecting, and this includes equipment that you either craft from hard earned ore, monster bones, or from a sweet ass chest that you found while exploring some deep, underground ice cave. "Terraria"'s world is massive and filled to the brim with nonsense. Move horizontally and you'll find yourself in jungles, deserts, corrupted wastelands, and if you go far east or west, you'll see the ocean, where sharks and flying fish demon reside. Try digging downwards and you'll find caves, underground tunnels, frozen cravens, forest shrines, lava, and the lowest layer, hell itself, where demons and bullshit lie EVERYWHERE. You want to go upwards towards the sky then? Okay, you can find yourself some floating fortresses, where harpies and dragons will try to devour you whole, or perhaps reach into space, where falling from that height will explode you into a thousand bits.
Needless to say, this game is EXPLODING with different kinds of environments, and each one has its own unique monsters, materials to harvest from the environment and badass loot. It takes a lot to explore in this game, and you'll spend a lot of time getting proper armor to advance into further areas, not to mention gathering resources to sustain/upgrade your home so that NPCs can visit more often. From copper to iron to silver to gold, upgrading your stuff counts, and from regular walking, you'll soon start triple jumping or even flying as you find better materials to craft new shit. Between exploring, killing monsters, looking for items or just trying to run for your life, you'll be spending LOTS of times traversing through different environments.
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| Dragons, son. |
Co-op is a blast, and I spent my whole time in this game on co-op (not ashamed to admit it). You can send multiple people exploring/hunting for loot, others stay behind to cultivate materials, and have a couple of people watch the house. There are plenty of ways to have fun together, and one of those ways...is the boss fights. There are plenty of bosses in "Terraria", and while the battle is fairly simple and straightforward, its always a blast to fight bosses. They are huge, they hit hard, and they have varying designs. Its too bad though that most of these are just a matter of trading hits. If you have sucky armor/equipment, you are bound to die. Either that or you are under-manned.
Other than that, the game has a horrible way of teaching you how to play. There is no effective tutorial other than the guide at the start (which does a HORRIBLE job), and that there's no effective multiplayer mode in the game. To start a match together, you have to either do some port forwarding, or download a third party program like Hamachi. While this doesn't directly hurt the game, it definitely sucks to not be able to play with one another with just a few button clicks in game.
"Terraria" doesn't have a lot of depth in its game play, but it definitely makes up for it with its massive amount of INTERESTING/WELL MADE content that can keep you glued to the screen for hours on end. For a game with such a low price tag (I got it for $1 during a steam sale, one, f**king dollar, and I spent 87 hours on it), you must be high if you think that its not a worthwhile purchase. I gotta say, this was the best dollar I've spent in my life.
Happy gaming!
