Developer: Re-Logic
Publishers: Re-Logic, 505 Games, Spike Chunsoft (Japan)
Platform: Windows, PlayStation, Xbox, iOS, Android, PlayStation Vita (coming soon!), Windows Phone (TBA)
Terraria – Review
Do you like to play open world sandbox games like Minecraft but are you missing some action? Then Terraria is the perfect game for you. It has a superb mixture of open world gameplay and lots of action!
Story
As this is a sandbox style of game, there isn’t really much story involved. When you first create a new character and start playing, you are dropped into the world of Terraria together with your guide. You can talk to your guide to get some tips if you don’t know where to go or you can just roam around and explore the numerous randomly generated dungeons!
If you like peace and quiet in a game, then you can just build a huge house out of any material you can find and have a peaceful life. If you like action though, you can battle bosses, scavenge loot and explore the underworld!
Graphics
As you can expect from a Minecraft style game, the graphics aren’t great. It’s very pixelated, but that doesn’t make the game less fun. With each “biome” comes a different set of graphics, new colors and a new animated background.
Further into the game, you will find out that there is a lot of repetition in the design of the monsters, some just have another color and are a bit stronger than their normal version. Same goes for the bosses, some of them are very similar to each other.
There isn’t much customizing to the game’s graphic settings, you can swap from windowed mode to full screen mode, change the resolution and set the graphics low to high, no fancy anti-aliasing involved.
Sound
With each biome or boss fight comes a new soundtrack. If you play for a while you will start noticing that the music is very catchy, but oh so repetitive. If it’s daytime and you are in your house, there is a very peaceful soundtrack, but if it becomes night, the track becomes dark and mysterious, as if monsters were to come and get you, and they will!
The sound isn’t finished without sound effects! As with the music, these are much alike, every gun makes the same sound, a lot of magic weapons make the same sound, on-hit sounds are very much alike. Again, very repetitive!
Gameplay
Of course the most important aspect of a game is its gameplay, and Terraria has lots of it! The game starts out peaceful but can soon turn out to be very difficult once a goblin army comes to attack your house and the inhabitants when you least expect it.
When you create your character, there are three different difficulties to choose from, there is softcore, mediumcore and hardcore.
When you die on softcore, you drop an amount of your money, which can be recollected when you run to your tombstone. If you die on mediumcore, you drop everything in your inventory; again this can be recollected if you run to the place where you died. At last we have hardcore, when you die on a hardcore character, your character will be lost forever; any items you placed in chests will be saved, only your character and its inventory are deleted. But even though you have to be very careful in hardcore, there are a lot of items for hardcore players only!
The game has 8 different bosses, the PC version has an added 4 exclusive bosses and the console has 1 extra boss. Each boss has its own unique abilities, attacks and difficulty, so practice makes perfect! Attacking a boss without knowing how strong he is or what type of attack he does is bound to be a failure.
The purpose of the game is to start out as a weak character and become the strongest warrior, ranger or caster ever! Together with your unique weapon and armor arsenal for each role, you can enchant your weapons and get accessories to become an outstanding killing machine, a very hard to kill tank or a fast utility character. Of course you can combine everything and play a hybrid role, using melee or ranged attacks when best suited.
The controls are very basic and adjustable; you have the directional keys and a jump key. For the more advanced players there is a quick slot key, heal key, grapple key etc.
For people who like to play in a group, there is always the easy to set up multiplayer server, if your ports are correctly configured that is!
Conclusion
Terraria is a very fun, addictive and fast-paced game, at least if you make it through the boring first couple of hours. There is little to none storyline involved, as expected from a sandbox game. The graphics aren’t great and the sound can be repetitive and boring. Although this might sound bad, the gameplay makes up for a lot of its flaws. If you are a fan of 2D, action-adventure, open world and sandbox games this is definitely a must have for you!
Terraria - Review,
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