Game Reviews

After you’re done customizing your sprite character, Terraria dumps you on the colorful surface of a randomly generated pixel world with nothing more than a handful of toolsand the vague sense that you’re meant to build stuff, explore the terrain, and battle monsters. The Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 versions finally offer a proper tutorial, making it easier to get into the groove of what makes Terraria so great: freeform exploration and tinkering. That said, it's still recommended that you dip into the Terraria Wiki to guide you through the exhaustive list of crafting recipes and resource uses, since figuring out some of the trickier combinations remains unintuitive.

Though there isn’t any real story, and there are no epic quests to conquer, the strong fantasy trappings instill a desire to adventure nonetheless. There’s an abundance of magic, monsters, and mayhem waiting both on the surface and in the dark caverns below, and uncovering unexpected new prizes and perils is a big part of the charm.

Virtually everything in the entire world is destructible, and breaking blocks lets you collect basic resources like stone, wood, and iron that can be used to make cool gear or build structures, but the real prizes are buried deep in the ground. There's something incredibly satisfying about hunting down and mining rare ore, building a forge and smelting it into metal bars, merging it with other scavenged components, then crafting it into new useful gear. Unfortunately, the UI makes navigating the already-dense crafting interface a real pain. It takes patience to iron out where everything is located in the menu, and that's hard to come by when you've got monsters breathing down your neck. (The action doesn't pause when you're fiddling with menus.) The good news is the gamepad controls otherwise work quite comfortably when it comes to the very simple combat and exploration.

Hunting down the crucial resources requires an intrepid spirit. The rarest components are dropped when you slay various monsters or uncovered when you dig deeper into the subterranean underworld and its many different biomes, and for me, the drive to explore every nook and cranny of the landscape kicked in right away. But it’s important to temper your desire to set out exploring in hopes of amassing huge quantities of loot with the pressing need to build shelter and expand your spawn point’s home base.

Life on the surface happens to a day/night cycle. Exploring topside during the daytime is safer – you can pick flowers, roam around, chop trees, and kill weak slimes that roam too close. It’s also a perfect time to build houses that serve as shelter, because things get dicey when night falls. Zombie hordes and floating eyeball beasts come out in droves, forcing you to fight or flee. That’s less of an issue once you get a sturdy fortification started, so it lends a sense of urgency to the building.

This village development aspect is a clever addition. You can throw together bare-bones shacks or craft elaborate fortresses that tower upward into the heavens, but either way, you want to deck them out with enough crafted accoutrements to lure NPCs to your village. These support characters can heal you, sell you items, and offer other helpful services. You have to complete a specific task to attract them, and even then they only appear if you’ve created a room (complete with walls, furniture, lighting, etc.) for them to stay. This offers some tangible incentives to spend time building, beyond the desire to lord over a pimped-out stronghold.

Having a sweet and ever-expanding home base to return to on the surface is satisfying. However, the dark, foreboding underworld is where the real action is at. This is where Terraria’s gameplay feels more like an old-school action platformer, and where it really sinks its hooks into you. Digging for ore eventually uncovers sprawling caverns that are home to many varieties of creepy creatures. Giant slimes, skeletons, burrowing worms, and tougher beasties roam the dark, and they often come charging at you while you’re excavating. A world map that fills in as you explore makes navigating easy, and shows the locations of different tunnels, biomes, resource pockets, and other important landmarks to help you keep your bearing.

Exploring is a lot fun on its own, yet there’s a strong emphasis on combat that’s really appealing. For one thing, stopping to battle monsters breaks up the monotony of digging, which can get tedious on its own. There’s an added risk-vs-reward element to combat, too: getting killed causes you to re-spawn on the surface with your gear intact, but you’ll leave a chunk of your precious coin stash behind. That is, unless you're playing on Difficult or Hardcore modes, which force you to drop all of your items on death and implement permadeath, respectively.

The real impetus behind adventuring is driven by the insanely deep gear-crafting system. There are well over 100 different weapons and items to build, each with its own recipe. Though some equipment is more functional – like protective armor, grappling hooks that let you navigate with greater ease, and treasure chests for storing loot – most of the stuff designed for cleaving monsters into itty bits is just sheer badass. Magical boomerangs, laser pistols, spell books that shoot fireballs, light sabers, and ninja stars are just a handful of the crazier weapons you can craft. Hunting down the rare items you need to build all this cool stuff is obsession forming.

A few other cool nuances enhance the absorbing tasks of exploring, building, and battling away. Journey to the farther reaches of the surface world, and you’ll inevitably run into The Corruption – a teeming mass of demonic turf filled with extra danger and extra rewards. You’ll also uncover demonic altars for forging special items that can be used to summon spectacular bosses with awesome names like Skeletron and Eater of Worlds. Terraria’s multiplayer mode is a blast too, and it's graciously flexible and effortless to set up, whether by online friends list or on local split-screen play. The lack of an option to play with random strangers is the only bummer here – I'd love to be able to easily explore random people's worlds. Cooperatively exploring and building with friends is even more enjoyable than going solo, and switching over to PVP mode for dueling shenanigans is equally fun and seamless.