Terraria Review

Terraria, a game that, from what we can gather, had basically no advertising other than a tweet from Notch: Creator of Minecraft and one of the current Lords of the Internet. And so it is I bring you a review of this little gem (I mean little literally, it's less than 10mb to download).

The most obvious analogy to sum it up is, it's a 2D Minecraft, where you start as an effectively naked character, owning only a pickaxe, an axe and the clothes on your back. You aren't told what to do, you aren't told why you're there. You just are, get use to it. While there is a 'guide' present, he's more of a hindrance, offering such pearls of wisdom as 'build a shelter to survive the night' but giving no clues on how one might construct such a shelter. With that, you're on your way.

Once you have the materials, you can build more houses and buildings, and unlike Minecraft, they serve a purpose, other than decoration. If you fulfil a certain criteria, NPC's will move into one of your houses, for example if all players have a combined total of over 50 silver, a merchant will move in, this can turn your little bunch of houses into a living village which is far better than the somewhat lonely looking cities I've seen build in Minecraft. Among others, you can get the afore-mentioned merchant, a nurse, a Dryad who sells special items, and a gun-smith. All require special tasks to be completed before they'll appear, and they can die too, so you'll want to try and protect your new charges.

2D Minecraft, while being the easiest comparison to draw, also isn't strictly true. Yes, you will spend your first in-game day gathering materials to build a house/shelter, and yes you will spend a lot of time gathering resources from mines – both natural and man-made – to construct better equipment. This, however, is where all similarities end. The focus here isn't on building, you can do nothing but build if you like, the the game is in its element as a dungeon crawler from the 16-32 bit generations.

Your character is a sprite reminiscent of Final Fantasy in the early days, and with lucky discoveries of ore and material, you can build armour to turn yourself into something of a mix between Mega Man and a Power Ranger. It's this mad, nonsensical upgrading that makes it so much more fun than Minecraft. You make your shelter, you start to dig, you'll come across something so powerful it can kill you in one hit. This just makes you determined to find better materials to create better weapons and armour so you get that warm-inside victory feeling when you defeat it.

As you descend further and further underground you'll happen across different biomes, such as the underworld, where you'll come across powerful skeletons, jellies (the games most common enemies who come in different colours indicating difficulty) and demonic floating eyeballs. Descend further still and you will come to what can only be described as Hell. Even more powerful skeletons await you, as well as fire-breathing imps who will destroy you and make you wish you hadn't ventured this far down. If you manage to beat Hell however, you can come across an underground forest where some very rare equipment is found, making the journey somewhat worth it. Note however, you will not be able to descent too far until you have got some basic armour at the very least, and some good weaponry.

Progressing and getting better resources can lead to fantastic things, like a hook-shot to help you reach great heights, or survive long falls, a lightsaber.. sorry, a phase-blade, and laser guns, and I've a feeling I haven't even scratched the surface, yet.

You can currently play with up to five other friends online, but the plan is for the game to eventually support 'as many characters as your server can handle', which after encountering a boss by mistake, I can safely say will be necessary.

There are a whole host of pieces of brilliance in this game, from three hidden boss monsters, to randomly generated islands in the sky, to a pre-generated dungeon on the far end of the map, which lies past the Corruption, another type of land you will have to get through). This is all in the initial build and plans are currently to keep adding in the same way Minecraft does, with incremental updates, adding more and more each time, hopefully adding more resources, as well as expanding the use of currently useless ones.

To give you an idea on how time can fly with this, I installed the game at roughly 11.30pm, and I didn't stop playing until 11am the following morning. Now that's either a sad indictment of a GameOn reviewers life, or testament to how addictive the game itself is. Or perhaps a bit of both.

For the £5.99 it's currently selling for on Steam, it's a crime to miss out on this. Fantastic fun with friends, great exploring on your own and discovering what the game has to offer. I fully recommend this to anyone who has time on there hands, or a lax boss at work who doesn't mind you coming in to work knackered, or late.