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Terraria
PC (Steam)
Digging Your Own Grave.
3/5 stars
After making a splash in the world of Indie game development with the illegal-but-awesome “Super Mario Bros. X,” developer Re-Digit went legit and formed Re-Logic, an Indie game company that has, so far, only produced a single original game: “Terraria.” Based solely on my love of Re-Digit’s work on “Super Mario Bros. X,” I snatched up “Terraria,” knowing only that it was a 2D sidescroller.
Presentation
“Terraria” is a colorful, 2D, sprite-based game, with a world made up of three layers. The background layer is a series of parallax scrolling images that dynamically adjust depending on the player’s location within the game world, the middle layer consists of wall tiles and object sprites the player can walk in front of, and the foreground layer consists of individual squares of material that come in a huge variety of types as well as a limited number of interactive objects (like doors). Player characters and enemies also occupy the front layer, as the material squares comprise the ground and platforms where the player’s character walks. While the sprites do have a lot of variety and color, making it easy to identify gameplay features at a glance, the characters and enemies are not particularly well-animated, with only two frames for most actions. This lack of animation leaves the game feeling a bit stiff and basic compared to Re-Digit’s previous work.
The player’s character can be customized to a limited extent. There are two body types: Male and Female. In addition, there are 51 hair options available to either gender, and many of the character sprite’s colors can be adjusted via sliders at creation. None of these options are changeable after the fact, however.
Like everything in “Terraria,” however, character sprites, no matter how much effort the player puts into the customization process, all end up looking fairly similar and incredibly small. “Terraria’s” initial release had a fairly low, locked resolution. The current version of the game can be played at much higher resolutions, but ultimately doesn’t work very well because nothing in the game actually scales properly. Thus running the game at 1080p results in characters, enemies, and environmental squares that would seem more at home on a microscope slide. I had to run the game at 720p with a slight bit of blurriness in order to comfortably see the individual graphical elements.
The soundtrack in “Terraria” is a fairly generic collection of pseudo-chiptunes. The most interesting part of the soundtrack is the fact that it dynamically shifts between tunes depending on the player’s height/depth in the game world. I didn’t find any of the individual tunes to be particularly pleasant, though some of them are memorable in a negative way.
In all, “Terraria’s” presentation merely comes across as mediocre. As a modern-but-retro Indie game, “Terraria” doesn’t take artistic inspiration directly from any specific older game, nor does it have a bold artistic statement of its own. The whole experience ends up feeling rather generic because of it.
Story
“Terraria’s” biggest blunder is the fact that it has absolutely NO narrative value. I frequently give platformers the benefit of the doubt when it comes to narrative. As long as an action-driven game has an excuse to motivate the hero/player and a definitive ending to wrap things up, it’s enough (if the action is indeed the driving force). “Terraria” has neither of these things, and suffers greatly for it.
Upon creating a character and a world in “Terraria,” the player is plopped into their world at ground level in the dead center of the map (most of which is obscured by ‘fog of war’), with no other explanation. The only things within view are a few slime monsters and a human NPC named The Guide. Talking to the Guide provides only cryptic, unhelpful hints on how to get started playing “Terraria.” As the player makes progress, the Guide might say different things, but none of them are particularly helpful, ever.
After talking to the Guide and learning that I needed to build a house with walls, a door, a chair, and a table, I attempted to do as he asked, with no luck. I needed to consult the official “Terraria” wiki and a variety of online forums before I figured out that I was overthinking the process and that building ‘walls’ meant ‘placing foreground blocks, then filling the interior space of the blocks with middle-layer walls,’ while I had been trying to use only middle-layer walls, since they were the only item in my inventory with ‘wall’ in the name.
Talking to the Guide some more told me that I might be able to attract more NPCs if I kept a few empty houses and met other, unwritten requirements. So I was left to flail around, exploring the world, digging holes, spelunking caves, and stumbling across chests full of treasure, all while fending off nightly zombie attacks and other monsters. In the process of building my initial house, I learned of the crafting system, but had to stumble upon recipes by carrying random stuff in my inventory.
Eventually, after exploring for hours, I fulfilled some unwritten condition that triggered a boss fight… at my house. A giant eyeball monster appeared and I had to kill it. No rhyme or reason about it – it just happened. After running into a metaphorical wall in ‘progressing’ through the game, I decided to just Wiki the Hell out of it, which made ‘progress’ slightly better, but just as inscrutable. I have no idea how the people who wrote the Wiki initially stumbled upon the triggers for the game’s events, bosses, etc., but it must have taken thousands of hours of tedious trial-and-error.
After fighting three bosses and learning (from the Wiki) that the next boss on the hit list would inexorably change the tenor of the game from lighthearted sandboxing to a fervent race to control the environment and ride an upgrade treadmill for equipment, I decided to stop. There is no real ‘end’ to “Terraria,” nor is there a real point. It is a game of pure sandbox creativity that tries to escape from the casual, pointless Hell that “Minecraft” created for itself by adding an emphasis on loot gathering and boss battles. But instead of slotting progress and bosses into a structured narrative to help guide new players, the entire “Terraria” experience seems like it was made BY hardcore “Terraria” fans FOR hardcore “Terraria” fans. For someone who wants more out of the game experience than randomly stumbling around for hours and hours, “Terraria” is a complete dud. I enjoyed the freeform gameplay for about 30 hours before the lack of structure just lost me. Unless someone invites me to join a multi-player server at some point, I don’t have any desire to touch “Terraria” again, simply because it feels so pointless, vague, and user-hostile.
Gameplay
Think of a big box of LEGOs. Now imagine that these LEGOs can only be viewed from the side. Now, take a LEGO minifig and give it a sword, pickaxe, regular axe, and hammer, each of which can be used to destroy certain bricks in the environment. That’s “Terraria” in a nutshell.
Of course, the main draw of “Terraria,” for those inclined to be drawn to such things, is the complete randomness of the worlds. Each game world in “Terraria” is procedurally generated and procedurally populated with chests full of loot. Upon world creation, the player can choose Small, Medium, or Large, depending on how much time they want to spend digging into all the nooks and crannies. I created a Medium world, thinking it would be nice and average, like ‘medium’ difficulty in most games. In hindsight, I should have created a Small world, and I would like to see an option added in the next update for an Extra-Small world. “Terraria” is an absolutely HUGE game, but due to the procedural and random nature of it, most of the hugeness is populated with meaningless stuff, leaving the few meaningful elements of a world (which always generate) in random, spread-out locations.
The procedurally generated worlds in “Terraria” can consist of a variety of ‘biomes’ or environments, which don’t always appear in every world. Some, such as the Dungeon and Jungle, always appear. Others, like Snow and Desert, might be completely missing from a world, all by random chance. Regardless of the biomes present in a world, it takes a ridiculously long amount of time to traverse the entire surface, let alone digging beneath it. “Terraria” would be vastly improved if it had a simple fast-travel system. The game does eventually introduce teleporters (I never got that far), but they are of limited range and very tedious to build.
What loot the player doesn’t come across by chance in treasure chests must be crafted. As previously mentioned, the crafting system in “Terraria” is completely vague, and there is no list of recipes included IN the game, mandating use of the Wiki to do even simple things. Many recipes require special crafting stations, which must themselves be crafted, leading to a long chain of turning materials into other materials before finally creating useful objects and tools. After playing a significant ways into the game’s nonsensical progression, it becomes possible to reforge equipment in order to gain affixes that grant bonuses, leading to a bit of a “Diablo” feel to loot.
Other than the randomness and the crafting, “Terraria” is a simple 2D platformer with destructible environments as its main gimmick. I had fun constructing an impenetrable base for my NPCs to live in that would protect them from the nightly zombie attacks (which ended up essentially being an insane asylum, since the NPCs will happily leave their doors open at night or wander off if their doors aren’t barricaded). My fun was tempered, however, by specific events that allow enemies to spawn inside a completely enclosed structure.
The enemy spawn rate is my main beef with “Terraria’s” actual gameplay. It is setup in such a way that enemies can spawn on any surface that doesn’t have a middle-layer, player-placed wall (except during the previously mentioned events where they can spawn ANYwhere). Thus I frequently had zombies spawning on my castle roof and falling into the courtyard. Also, while exploring underground enemies constantly appear to harass the player. The incessant spawn rate wasn’t that big of a deal until I reached the Dungeon, in which the first enemies appear with projectile attacks that can PASS THROUGH WALLS. The player never gets a long range attack that can do that, and constantly having to stop digging to track down a projectile-lobbing enemy was too aggravating to put up with for long. I felt like the game was actively trying to make me stop playing… so I did.
Finally, “Terraria” needs to be called out for a completely awful design decision for the PC version: It only supports mouse/keyboard. There are console versions of “Terraria” that support the controller, so it is extremely lazy on Re-Logic’s part to not add this control system as an option in the PC version. Playing “Terraria” with a keyboard and mouse is absolutely painful, since the game is, in large part, a 2D platformer. Fortunately, an enterprising “Terraria” fan by the handle Greencat decided to port a version of the “Terraria” console controls to the PC version with his “Xbox Controller Mod.” While the benefits of this mod aren’t immediately obvious (much like everything else in “Terraria”) after fumbling around with it for a couple hours and figuring out how it works, I went from HATING the entire game to liking it quite a bit, before settling on apathy after I got bored with it. There is no excuse for Re-Logic not to incorporate Greencat’s mod into the next update for the game… it’s ESSENTIAL.
Overall
As a LEGO-inspired sandbox game with old-school videogame combat and a “Diablo” lite loot system, “Terraria” can provide quite a bit of free-form, creative fun for a few dozen hours. But as an experience, “Terraria” falls flat with its lack of clarity, trial-and-error gameplay, overlarge environments, and complete lack of anything resembling sensible progression or structure. For the easily entertained, however, “Terraria” can provide thousands of hours of something to do, be it randomly digging holes or the time-devouring process of building world-spanning structures.
Presentation: 3/5
Story: 0/5
Gameplay: 4/5
Overall (not an average): 3/5
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