Terraria

This game is an indie game developed by a small amount of people in the XNA Game Studio (provided by Microsoft) in the powerful language of C#. While it’s only been recently made buyable to the world, it has already reached sales of over 50,000 on its first day.

I bought this product on release day and while starting the game you are completely clueless as to what you’re supposed to do (reminiscent of minecraft...) and slowly but surely have been getting more and more into this lovely little sandbox game. To be honest, I had heard this randomly by browsing the internet looking for games to play and eventually, review. Then when I came across this little gem I thought... Hmm... Old-style final fantasy graphics, Minecraft aspects, RPG elements, Bosses, lots of monsters... Seems like my kind of game.

GRAPHICS

Here is a very subjective aspect of any game... I personally love the old-school 8-bit style graphics of this game and it sort of brings me back to playing Final Fantasy VI and Golden Axe... However it’s not to everyone’s tastes. Unfortunately most modern games rely on the graphics to get people to buy it, like Crysis or Battlefield (not that I’m saying they are bad games... I love them both – but the superb graphics are one of the main selling points.) But despite this I think that the old-school graphics are just part of this games charm. It’s cute yet when you see something like the Eye of Cthulu (a mini-boss that can be summoned or appear at random) it can scare the hell out of you – even though it doesn’t need a £5000 gaming rig your parents bought for you to play.

SOUND

The sound in this game is what you would expect from an indie game that looks like a old-school game. They aren’t exactly amazing but they do reflect the nature of the game through the sound. The music itself during the daytime (when the monsters are merely slimes on the surface) is bouncy and happy, while the music at night (when zombies, demon eyes and bosses can spawn) is slightly darker and reflects the dangerous atmosphere the night can bring – as when its night time you can hardly see anything coming unless you put some sort of light source outside on your path. The noises of monsters are what you would expect, for skeletons it’s a sound of bones rattling and for slimes it’s a slapping sound as they bounce about. Overall the sound for this game is just what you would expect for it.

GAMEPLAY

The gameplay starts off relatively simple... You build a house around your spawn point, then you go around gathering materials to further enhance your house and surroundings, while also burrowing underground to gather ores for different things such as weapons, pickaxes and armour. However, as you delve deeper into the world of Terraria, lots of things become open to you, such as the Underground Jungle. As the name states – it is a large lush jungle located beneath the ground a few thousand feet. Also if you create more houses and rooms on the surface you attract NPC (non-playable characters) to your ‘village’ such as the Merchant, Nurse and Demolitionist. These all provide different things to you and for the later NPC’s you have to have obtained certain items or defeat certain foes before they appear in your village. Then after (or before) this you can go online onto a hosted server and help out other Terraria owners or build a village with them or go excavating or explore the Dungeon.

However among all this there is one small downside that seems to affect quite a few of the Terraria Population. This is the potential of skipping half the game – which unfortunately I did without realising it. Basically when you reach Gold armour you have just enough defence to venture down to the lowest level of the underworld – hell. Here you can mine a very special ore called Hellstone, and this is used to create one of the best armours in the game. I did this without realising that there is maybe 3 or 4 other armour sets you can get in between gold and Hellstone, and talking to a lot of people on servers, they had as well. Since this game has literally just been released and the owners are still updating this a few times a week I can see them putting in some sort of limitation that will hinder a person’s ability to skip half a game. In light of all this I can still say that... this is such a fun game. There is so much to do, even once you have the end-game armour and weapons you can still find things to do, such as finding floating islands or delving into the chasms in the ‘corruption’ which is essentially where the land has become corrupted and weird monsters spawn there. Also ‘spheres of corruption’ reside there and if you break them open lots of goodies are inside... however, break too many and you will anger something...

STORYLINE

As this is a sandbox game, I can’t really comment on the storyline as well... there isn’t any. Don’t let this sway your decision to buy it though... it still is loads of fun!

LASTING APPEAL

While I have now reached the end-game armour and I am in the process of collection all of the weapons and other armours, I can still see this game lasting for a long, long time. The developers are constantly updating the game and the community is a friendly one, such as within a day or two of owning the game I have become friends with a server owner and I am now a regular on there. Also I am hoping the developers will be creating more biomes (essentially patches of land, i.e. deserts, forests) and weapons for me to find and collect! I can see myself coming back to this game again and again.

TOTAL SCORE

89 out of 100

As a fan of old-school games and graphics this game instantly grabbed me with its look. It is essentially just a game you can go to when there is nothing else to do, but also a game that can hook you for hours on end while you go excavating with friends or by yourself. This seems to be just the break I needed from all the COD-like games that are being shipped out by the dozen right now.

NEXT TIME: WHO KNOWS?!