Review: Terraria

Terraria, a Minecraft-a-like that's not much like Minecraft. Confused? Because I am.

Terraria is a strange phenomenon to me. No matter how much I tell myself I dislike it, I keep playing it. Terraria is a game in which you have a small pixellated character who starts of simply with a pick axe and an axe. You start mining, you start cutting down trees, you make yourself a house, NPCs start moving in, you go exploring.

That's the gist of the entire game, wondering about mining, finding things, building houses and killing things that give you stuff. It's so simple it just works. The game doesn't have an ending, it has very little point. It's slightly more engaging than Minecraft but doesn't have the same epic feeling of architecture that the 3D brings.

I call it a Minecraft-a-like because you mine and it's an open world, it's also got a crafting system, but that's actually better than Minecraft's. The entire play style is very different. It's a 2D side-scrolling game, which is an interesting new way of playing a RPG/Exploring game, something that hasn't been done in my memory at least. This is a pretty good idea to some degree as it's very difficult to get lost, there's nothing more depressing in Minecraft than making yourself an epic settlement/bastion/citadel/farm then going off for a while and getting lost and losing your home forever (or at least until you stumble upon it again in a Planet of the Apes style). In Terraria you can go left, and you can go right, it's hard not to find your way home unless you occasionally turn your monitor upside down and are easily confused. It also makes it harder for enemies to sneak up on you.

The first night I played it after I quit I thought "Well it's all right I guess, I've not really been sucked in", it was at this point I realised that I had been playing for 8 hours straight. The next day I promised myself I wouldn't play it any more, then a friend of mine started playing and we played together, adding a whole new layer of fun. I've recently started playing with another friend who is... let's say chaotic, which has added even more fun, as I feel I have to goad around this wound of ball of crazy and try and prevent him from dying. (More on that later!). I keep thinking I'm going to get bored of the game but for some reason I don't. I don't feel elated whilst playing it, but it passes the time and if you've got some mates to play with it can be huge amounts of fun.

I realise this has been something of a short review, but it's a short game (in a pathetically crude metaphor kind-of-way!), there's stuff to do, but not much depth, it's fun, but not hugely. This also means I can talk about some other news!

I know a few days ago I posted that a friend of mine and I would be putting together a little video play through of Final Fantasy 14, with various HILARIOUS (debatable) banter. Well that's still going to happen, it's just my friend is in the West Country and their internet is atrocious so it's taken him 2 days of downloading just to patch the thing, so that's in the works. In the mean time we've been playing Terraria and had a little recording session of us just mucking about. I've got about an hours worth of recorded material that needs to be edited down to about 15 minutes of anything usable, so that's happening as we speak. I thought that I would put up a little teaser so you can see what we're like.

For those of you who have never met me, quiet shout out to my 5 American fans (five!), I'm the one with the excellent enunciation and Oxford accent, he's (Colrum/Joe) the one who sounds like a farmer.