So, this is one of those modern games.
Upon looking at Terraria I thought I was in for this kind of entertainment, a more casual Super Meat Boy if you will, the visuals looked sharp for an old school game and it seemed well-regarded within the community. So I thought "why not?" When I finally got my hands around it I was sad to see it was a monotonous modern game, with bulky controls and wave after wave of the same boring enemies jumping around with nothing else to do except bore you out of your mind. Add to it that the terrain was seemingly infinite with mountains of blocks that basically seemed to have no end whatsoever.
I frankly thought it sucked, I thought it sucked bad. It emerged and my one purchase off Steam that if I could, I'd get refunded, give me back 10 cents if you must, but deny me of having this bomb on my list of games, deny me the burden of having to look at its name, its icon, which so much sorrow had enveloped my hearth with. I was sure I would never play that monstrosity ever again.
In the meantime I discovered what Terraria really was, and discovered it wasn't for me at all. I don't hate modern gaming, I simply dislike some of its most abundant trends. I'm not exactly fond of shooters, but Crysis caught my attention from day 1, Team Fortress 2 is one of the games I've played the most in my life, and Counter-Strike's hardcoreness has provided great entertainment recently. I certainly dislike the Wii, music games and, to go with it all, Minecraft. I don't care about building stuff with blocks, I ignore games that fail to provide either competition or an actual sense of accomplishment.
Terraria was regarded as Minecraft in 2 dimensions. Hell, I'd hate to have Minecraft with its 3D, why would I stick with a game that's decreased of one full dimension from a game I'm already not the least interested for. It seemed a lost cause, it seemed like there was no fix for this problematic situation, but then a light at the end of the tunnel was seen, and embraced.
I guess I can deal with the fact that this game is not a platformer in the more traditional sense, but I can't deal with the fact that the game overwhelms you the first time you try it out. I watched someone play it on YouTube and realized you had to meet certain requirements before start venturing forth building tunnels and scything plants, like building a house for yourself and any "guests" you might evoke on how well you're doing and so on.
The game basically throws you in there with a guide that shouldn't even be called a guide who gives some obscure tips that won't do much good when you absolutely lost. You create your character, check. You decide upon the difficulty, check. You choose how big the world will be, check. Now it's all on you. This kind of anarchy can be alluring to some degree, but might easily scare someone who's not persistent enough.
The game itself takes the shape of the moment, and these moments will highly depend. During your first steps in the world of Terraria you're most likely to spend your time gathering basic resources like cutting down trees, mining simple ores and dirt to build yourself the most basic equipment and of course, build a home sweet home, a place you'll feel secure and warm.
Feeling secure and warm during the first few hours in Terraria is quite a treat, with limited health points, swords that can barely cut butter and no miscs at all to help you out, a simple bat will look like a chimera ready to tear you apart. They might if you're clumsy enough. Building stuff like a table and a chair will make your home feel cozy, while creating an anvil, a worktable and a forge will make your home feel useful. You'll probably prefer the latter at that moment.
With the stations ready to use it's time to gather all sorts of resources you're able to. The player can now feel the immensity and freedom Terraria provides as a whole, and it's no small portion it must be said, but to fully enjoy it the player must meet certain requirements. It's highly likely that the created character at that point is yet far too fragile to walk around unnoticed and unharmed, to build better equipments and weaponry one needs mineral resources, so it's time to dig.
Digging is really what Terraria is all about, digging is not fast paced and even though the world might be enormous, backtracking through the same caverns and paths is required. Some might find themselves going back and forth trying to avoid death and unloading what they've found during the excavations. That's not an exciting task, but it's a thorough task that will keep the player engaged. The sense of improvement is quite apparent.
If you have lots of copper you can create armor made of copper, not the best kind it's true, but something is better than nothing, after a while you'll have gone deep enough to find large reserves of iron, and an iron breast plate will be just around the corner. If you're lucky enough to find heaps of silver, silver armor and weaponry will come in handy for the deeper threats that surely await. Eventually, when enough gold is gathered, joy will positively fill your eyes when you see your character wearing that shiny golden armor.
While digging your first cave you'll have quite a view of what expects deeper and deeper. Along with the logistics of how the cavern should be handled. The player can carry limited amounts of ores, wood or anything you might encounter, so your house will most likely become a warehouse to store your stuff. Your tunnel needs light as well, nothing worse than being underground with unlimited enemies roaming around aiming to tear you apart and not able to see a thing.
Whatever goes down, needs to come up. A clumsy-dug tunnel might offer difficulties for when the player needs to go back. If it is too steep a lot of work will be required to make it traversable. It's certainly easy to go digging and let gravity do its job, but when things get ugly you need a quick escape plan, with a quick escape route.
When you're digging you'll come across several layers of dirt, each present different sorts of enemies with increasing difficulty. It's safe to say that Terraria needs to be taken slowly, this is not a fast paced game in any way you look at it and whoever plays it will soon find out. If you dig deep enough you'll eventually reach hell, the increasing number of lava pools will give you a hint and then bang, there you are, in the center of the Terraria world; fire, demons, danger every where you look at.
Depending on what you choose at the very beginning you'll have different experiences. The world itself is randomly generated so it's safe to say that no one has similar worlds to play in. Though that's true some elements are always present, like a dungeon that is randomly generated as well, but will always take place somewhere. Underground forests and other biomes are placed in different spots, but are sure to be found somewhere.
The number if biomes and the intrinsic differences between them are clear after a quick trip through the newly created environment. Forest can be found, ice landscapes the enable the player to go ahead and gather ice blocks, seas or lakes, depending on how you look at it, deserts, etc. The two biomes that have a different approach and, had it a story to tell, would certainly wield the most effect in it are the corrupted and the purified biomes.
Called simply Corruption and Hallow these opposite biomes are not exactly important until you reach a very late period of gameplay but have serious consequences on your world as the Corruption will spread and eventually take over while the Hallow is the anti-corruption biome, we could call it the sanctified version. As I've no background story is offered on how and why this happens and the closest thing that could be called an objective in this game is defeating bosses.
Before mentioning anything about the bosses one should know that the difficulties in which you choose at the beginning functions as a death penalty more than anything else, the rest is basically the same. If you play on softcore you lose half the coins in your inventory and return to spawn, possibly your home; you still have the possibility to go back where you died to retrieve the lost money. On mediumcore you not only lose every coin you might have store but also your whole inventory at that point. Death becomes something to be scared of, really.
It's on the hardest difficulty setting that the prospect gets grim, when you lose on hardcore your very existence simply gets banned from the world of Terraria. Upon death everything you had is dropped and your character gets deleted back to its roots as you had just created it. Harsh.
Completely unrelated to these difficulty settings there's the hard mode. The hard mode is a point mid-game when your defeat certain boss and everything in Terraria gets considerably harder, harder bosses are presented, newer, tougher enemies might attack. Those two opposing biomes mentioned earlier start to get more and more important; the Hallow is created, the Corruption gets a boost spreading twice as fast and much more easily through different, harder blocks.
There are bosses which can be fought only after hard mode is turned on, while others are pre-hard mode. Crafting better items is crucial for surviving, though, as much as it might happen when you first start the game, crafting it far too complicated to rely only on in-game mechanics. Be it finding the required ingredient or knowing what can be created with it can be frustrating since you must have the ingredient to be notified. Simply aiming for a better weapon and not having anything related to it won't do.
The graphics are simply yet effective, absolutely no improvement is needed to make the game work the way it should and quite frankly it's far too stylish for an indie game and an art style that should be a lesson for other platformers. The sound is not bad, but nothing amazing either, eventually it's hard not to grow tired of that catchy yet repetitive song.
I think Terraria is a great welcome party for anyone wanting to venture on these modernized games of the likes of Minecraft and certainly others to come. Sometimes you feel lost since there's not an actual goal to accomplish like saving the princess or saving the world. The message sent is pretty much this one: "play it because it's fun, build because it's fun, fight stronger monsters because it's fun". If you somehow find any fun in any of that you're sure to sink dozens of hours in it.
It's also very true that sometimes you'll simply feel absorbed in all that crafting and resource gathering, sometimes you won't even care about anything related to monsters, bosses or corruption, you just want to make your house bigger, craft that bed you wanted so much, make it look more and more like a home, and provide the best place for merchant NPCs to stick around. After all, you're the host.