Terraria is a game I put quite a lot of hours to back when I was a teenager. It's a game that's been around for forever, and has at least once been claimed by its developers to be at an end state and won't see anymore updates, but it seems a new huge content patch is always on the horizon whether the game is in "active development" or not, and it's changed a LOT since I last played it XD. I played it a bunch over the course of a few days with my significant other, and we got to the end credits (which I was quite surprised to see, honestly) after about 21 or so hours of play together.
Terraria doesn't really have a story. It got a lot of comparisons to Minecraft back when it came out over a decade ago, and not totally unreasonably so. It's a game about spawning in a world of wilderness whose primary component is made up of blocks you can manipulate to build new structures. There are NPCs to find and interact with, and they have a cute sense of humor, but it really isn't the main reason you're here, and virtually all of their dialogue is very easily ignored if you wanted to. Though there are named enemies and themes among them and such, there isn't really anything that could be called a narrative, but that's just fine. The primary thing that sets Terraria apart from Minecraft isn't just that the former is 2D while the latter is 3D, but Terraria also has a design centered much more around loot and combat rather than building pretty structures. Most of the gameplay loop of Terraria revolves around exploring to get materials (usually mining, but sometimes dungeon delving) to then gear up and/or find the materials necessary to fight the next boss in the game's progression. These bosses generally have some key material they drop or change the world in some way upon their death that will allow you to embark upon the next tier of gear hunting and dungeon delving to fight the NEXT boss, and so on and so forth. The game takes place on a 2D plane, and you have all sorts of weapons you can fight them with. You can tech towards a melee (either swinging or stabbing or even yo-yos or maces if you want to) or ranged (whether it be bows or guns) character, or you can go for magic (and there are oodles of spells to find). Since I had last stopped playing, they've even put in items and sets around summoning familiars to fight for you as well, which is a playstyle I had a lot of fun using as a supplementary part of my other builds. Though it is only 2D, you get more and more ability to gain more mobility and terrain manipulation as you go through the game. At first you're either just fighting the bosses on their own terms or buildling little arenas of floating platforms to better fight them in, but eventually you can get wings to fly, pegasus boots, anti-gravity potions, and much much more, and that's not counting the bosses that have special arenas you need to fight them in on their own terms. The game can be pretty damn difficult, but the bosses are really tightly designed and you need a lot of strategy to take them down alone. Honestly, my main complaint with the game (aside from that some difficulty spikes are a bit too steep) is that it's mostly designed around a single-player experience in most respects, as just having one other person between the two of us made many bosses MUCH easier as they had to split their attention between two targets instead of one. The presentation of Terraria is quite simple in most respects, but it's also very charming. You can build pretty buildings full of furniture if you want (and you'll have to at least build simple houses for all the NPC merchants you'll want in your town), and you can also not just wear cool armor, but even dress yourself up in all sorts of silly vanity costumes if you like (ranging from a simple wizard costume to a downright copyright infringing Toad from Super Mario costume you can find XD). The music is often quite understated, but it does its job well, especially for the boss fights. Verdict: Highly Recommended. Terraria hasn't stuck around for only a decade on pure luck alone. It's a really solidly designed game with a very satisfying gameplay loop that's tons of fun whether you're alone or with friends. It's a very easy pick-up to recommend if you're looking for a fun time on either a PC or a console, and it's very likely that even the current version I've played won't be the actually full experience if I revisit it again in another few years x3
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
Categories
All
AuthorI'm an avid gamer who likes to detail their thoughts about what they play in the hopes it might aid someone else's search for a game to play. Archives
April 2024
|