First review: Terraria!

Released by indie game developer Re-Logic, Terraria as a game took a lot of inspiration from Minecraft, which in turn took its inspiration from Infiniminer. However, it is arguably deeper than Minecraft. Giving you goals to reach beyond simply just throwing you in a sandbox and saying "Build to your heart's content." I will admit, when I first was given it by a friend of mine (Thank you Chocolate Donuts), I expected it to be just that. A Minecraft ripoff in 2D. I was very very wrong.

It has a rather novel way of allowing you to visit other worlds. Each character is its own save, and you are able to enter any world you like with said character. This means you could bring your brand new created character into the world of someone who has been playing a long time. Or you can bring your older character with all his overpowered goodies to your friend's world to give him a helping hand.

After choosing the appearance and color of your hair, shirt, and pants. You are dropped into a randomly generated world of varying size. You can choose small, medium, and large. The smallest worlds are very compact, and while you can grow in strength quickly, you're also forced to confront more enemies and monsters in a shorter amount of time. You also pick your difficulty. Softcore, where you drop half of the money you're carrying at the time. Mediumcore, you drop everything you are carrying at the time. As well as Hardcore, if you die once, you are dead forever. The character is deleted, and s/he drops everything s/he had.

I will do my best to outline generally what you can expect from the game without spoiling anything. If I don't speak on something, assume I'm trying not to spoil.

Your character begins with two tools, a pickax and an ax. As well as one weapon, a short sword. These are more useful than you would imagine. The first few upgrades do little more than increase the speed at which the tool works, and how much damage the weapon does.

There is also an element of chance, as the majority of your crafted equipment will have a title assigned to it. This can run from very bad to very good. The worst being to my knowledge 'broken' and the best being 'legendary' or 'godlike'.

Even though the game is 2D, against Minecraft's 3D approach, the game itself offers a lot more crafting options. Unlike Minecraft however, you are given a guide who helps you learn how to survive, and how to build what you need. By speaking to him and placing ingredients into his hands, he'll tell you what can be made from it, and what else you require in the recipe.

                                 (The guide showing us what we can build with lumber)


Yes, there are other people in this world, and they offer varying skills, including a merchant, nurse, demolitions expert, and more. Attracting them requires two things. First, certain pre-requisites must be met. The merchant for instance requires you to have saved up at least fifty silver coins. After all if you don't have the money to spend, why should he come to you? They also require their own living space. Living spaces comprise of a building with walls, ceiling, and a floor. As well as furniture to liven the place up. You need a chair, table, light source, and door for it to be considered a proper residence. There are some items that do double duty as a table and as chairs, but they are harder to make, due to having rarer ingredients. If you want NPCs early, you're going to have to settle for sticking to generic wooden chairs and tables. At first, at least.

The NPC's have their own personalities which color their occupations. Many of them offer items for sale, and all will buy items from you, at a discount of course. Even if you are the only thing standing between them and a horrific demise, you get No Hero Discount. Oh yes, you have to buy, sell, and hunt down enemies. Fortunately the majority of them have the old RPG staple of somehow carrying money in their stomachs.

The monsters are much more varied than Minecraft. The starting enemies will be the slimes, a valuable source of flammable ooze to make torches, and make several normal objects into sticky variants. Such as sticky bombs and sticky glowsticks to make impromptu lights while deep underground. As night falls, zombies will rise from their graves with a hunger for the living. Floating eyeballs, optic nerves and blood vessels trailing behind them, swarm through the air. What a horrible night to have a curse. There are even boss creatures, that upon their death, drop rare items and ores all over the place. Be cautious however as these creatures are more dangerous than they usually appear.

Multiplayer is just marvelous, better built than Minecraft's. It functions on IPs, and doesn't have a server browser, but considering you generally are only going to play with 2-4 people on one server, this can be excused. There is very little lag, which makes this a wonderful game to play with friends.

For this review, I am going to rate the game based on the price point it is currently retailing at of this writing. The prices are in US($) Dollars.

As of this writing, the game can be purchased and downloaded in roughly 5-10 minutes off of steam, for $9.99. This includes all future patches, as there are no plans to my knowledge of any DLC with a price tag.

Honestly, for what you get, this price is a bit low. Knowing about it, and knowing how much fun I've had with it, I'd gladly pay up to fifteen dollars for this enjoyment. Twenty would be stretching it, but depending on how much you like playing with your friends, it'd easily be worth it.

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E-Tank