"Terraria is a land of adventure! A land of mystery! A land that's yours to shape, to defend and to enjoy. Your options in Terraria are limitless, are you an action gamer with an itchy trigger finger? A master builder? A collector? An explorer? There's something for everyone here."

I took this directly from the Terraria wiki, since we spent almost the entire game with it open; I thought it best to consult it first. This brief introduction defines well what Terraria is and what you can expect from the game. Terraria is easily one of my favorite indie games, I'm not sure where it would rank in my list, but it would definitely be among the top five I like the most. But what makes this game incredible?

Terraria emerged at a time when Minetrash was starting to gain popularity, meaning comparisons between the two are inevitable, but the similarities are limited to just the basic concepts: procedurally generated worlds, mining, and the crafting workbench. However, Terraria has undergone many more changes over the years and has received almost a decade of free updates. This demonstrates the care that the developers have for the game.

At first glance, Terraria may not seem very appealing; it is visually simple and can easily be mistaken for just another generic sandbox title. But as you explore the landscape, it becomes evident how creative the game is. It goes beyond mere building and ore collection, delving much deeper into the basic mechanics of a sandbox. Here, there is a genuine reason to construct things, not just for aesthetic purposes; it is crucial for the game's progression. Yes, there is indeed a progression in the game, along with an overwhelming amount of content such as bosses, events, NPCs, tons of weapons, accessories, and many other items that will aid you on your journey – over 5000 items at your disposal. The game's progression is measured by the bosses you defeat, and by doing so, you gain access to new items like stronger pickaxes, allowing you to gather new resources and become even more formidable to face the next boss.

Overall, Terraria offers an extremely satisfying experience and deserves all the praise it receives. Obviously, this is just a simplistic view in the face of the grandeur that the game represents. Each generated world is a unique experience, after all, being a sandbox, the way you explore the world, build structures, or defeat the bosses is entirely up to the player.

Terraria kind of left me feeling… mixed? IDK, at least the main quest, made me feel kind of sour afterwards. It really isn't a bad game; hell, I enjoyed it quite a bit and still do. But I do feel like the game kind of got better, and simultaneously fell off in hardmode. If you didn’t know, most of Terraria’s progression is based on killing bosses. Many of these bosses are pretty well designed; particularly in the EARLY game. But the late hardmode bosses are really, really dogshit. A lot of them feel poorly designed around the player’s moveset and hitboxes, but not even considering that, a lot are a fucking bitch to summon, PARTICULARLY in hardmode. While the mech bosses and the Golem are pretty easy to summon on their own, the rest are quite annoying to even attempt. Plantera requires you to find a small bulb in the Jungle Underground, which takes forever. And then you have to go through the process of building an arena, prepping your NPCs, potions, etc. And if you die? Find a new bulb, because fuck you. And then the Moon Lord can be annoying to summon because if you fail too many times, you have to start the whole Lunar Events over again. That's just an annoying design choice IMO, maybe they could've had Moon Lord be a random spawn at night like the Eye of Cthulhu? And if you aren't ready to face him, just go underground for a few minutes. I get that they want players to get prepared for the harder fights in the game, but still. As a random example, The Binding of Isaac (which has a lot of parallels I could make here) has you face bosses needed for progression that you could face by chance, but they also had guaranteed methods (albeit more difficult methods) of achieving the same end goal. For example, you can kill Hush by taking Mama Mega in a shop, or by killing Mom’s Heart in 30 minutes. I could totally imagine something like this working for Terraria too, and they actually DO this, but only for certain bosses. And then we have the boss fights themselves. What happened here? Golem is probably my least favorite fight in the whole game. You're in a cramped as fuck area and there's traps everywhere. You can't even mine around you to build a semi-decent arena. So you just end up getting your shit wrecked with barely any room to dodge. And while I found the Lunatic Cultists to be a really great fight, the Towers were such an anti-climax. They're not even that hard, they're just annoying. You have to kill a hundred enemies that deal nearly a fourth of your HP. They aren't that hard to dodge, but they trip me up on occasion. And then you fight the Tower… and they suck, too. They barely even attack you, so you can just spam the Terra Blade until they die. At least they have good drops! And the Moon Lord himself… this fight just confuses me if anything. There's so much small shit on screen that deals a bunch of damage, and the massive ”fuck you” laser (with NO visual telegraph btw) does a shit ton of damage. It felt like a fluke if anything when I killed the boss. Now, to any of these, you could say “skill issue”. And TBH yeah I see where you're coming from. But I did nearly everything according to the wiki (minus one accessory and getting 500 HP; I had 480), and I still wasn't sure why I died at points. But for every bad thing I have to say about Terraria, I still think I can recommend this game. For one, the boss fights! For every Moon Lord and the four fucking Towers, there are lots of good bosses! The Empress of Light is easily the best fight in the game, being a great test of your moveset, being ACTUALLY FUCKING TELEGRAPHED, and also just being visually stunning. Also, the fucking music. That's all. While I don't like summoning Plantera, making his arena and finally killing him was very satisfying. It helps that he’s an easier boss to kill. I'm a fan of the Mechanical bosses, too. They were a nice upgrade in difficulty from the original bosses. Another thing I love about Terraria is its music. Do I even need to say anything about the Terraria soundtrack? It's popular for a reason. My favorite tracks would be “Mushrooms”, “Boss 1”, “Boss 2”, and of course, “Empress of Light”. I also love the fact that Terraria has progressive difficulty, making sure the game is never too easy, nor too hard. And despite my quarrels with Terraria’s Hardmode bosses, I absolutely love the new items in Hardmode. They transform Terraria from “oh it's just 2d minecraft” into something that can easily stand on it's own. And do I even need to say anything about the large amount of content in Terraria? One of my best friends on the internet (@DragonMals) has over 3000 hours in it, and more in tModLoader. I myself have been enjoying it for years at this point. So yeah, I do like this game. Quite a bit, actually. But I'm not head over heels for it, per se. I might go back for a few playthroughs every now and then, but for now at least, I think I'm finished. Overall, I'd give it around an 6/10. A good game, but it's a loooooong shot from a masterpiece.

I honestly didn’t expect much for this game but it was better than I thought.


Terraria is an interesting handled great in some way and questionable in others. I actually started playing Terraria in early 2021 because my best friend kept bugging me to play it with him. Before I even played, I really had no interest whatsoever and it thanks to my friend I was able to have a lot of fun. First off I just want to say I love the soundtrack. It suits the game very well and fits in perfectly with the pixel art style. This is pretty much a survival game where you can build what you want and go out into the world to collect resources to better improve yourself with many caves, secrets and loot to find. All with lots of enemy variety that will can sometimes kill you easily if you’re not prepared. And the boss fight are a great challenge to take on with friends. I also just want to say that I LOVE the amount of different weapons. With will have basic weapons to weapons with unique abilities and some simply just taken from media I love and enjoy. That also goes for clothing as well since I acquired a creeper costume from Minecraft. Exploring cave not knowing what I’ll find most of the time was just incredible and the art style made me get so invested to observe many of the biomes or caves I explore. But even with all of that I did often get boring. For me it just got repetitive after a while and it got to a point where I wouldn’t even play on my own time and that brings us to 2023. I really only played Terraria when my best friend came over and we would also play along with his girlfriend. Something I hated how the cross play is handled. In 2021 I was able to play on my PS5 while my friend played on his mobile phone. Back then it worked fine but today we can’t do that and we eventually started playing on our Switches instead. No idea what the developers did but that felt like a major low blow that they never addressed.

You can even do quests for random characters you’ll meet in the world you generate. It’s fun and all but other than that there isn’t really a story which is fine since not every video game needs a story to be cool like Terraria.

I think Terraria is a chill and fascinating game that executes many of its idea perfectly. The problem is these kinds of games don’t generally appeal since I’m not exactly the most creative gamer out there. I’ll continue to play at least when my friend is around, but this is where I stop generally playing Terraria and consider myself retired from this game.

Meu sandbox favorito de todos, esse jogo é ideal pra qualquer um que gosta desse gênero de jogo de grindar, explorar, evoluir, matar boss... Ele tem uma sensação de recompensa muito cativante e imersiva, o que também deixa o jogo muito mais divertido de explorar e entender. Qualquer pessoa que nunca experimentou Terraria e gosta desse tipo de gameplay, com certeza vai ficar grudado no jogo por muito tempo. Mesmo que a cara dele pareça simples, simplesmente um sandbox 2D, vale muito a pena dar uma chance, sem comentar na trilha sonora que é absurdamente relaxante, já me peguei parada uns 5 minutos sem fazer nada no jogo só curtindo a musiquinha.

You have probably heard a gazillion times that this game is my favorite game. For those that know me, you should know that my most favorite game of all time is this one, Terarria. Developed by Andrew "Redigit" Spinks with Re-Logic in May 16th in 2011, Terarria I done hell of a unique sandbox game for it's time period, featuring  a lot of elements of exploration, combat, and even building! Every feature that the game provides us useful in every way, and I believe that this review will be the ultimate guide for those that have asked me, why is Terarria the game of all time.

Well  for starters, I do want to also get into a point that a good amount of players are familiar with: Terraria is just 2d Minecraft. Before you start ge/gathering the pitch forks, I'm an here to say that there's reason for everything, even if its a saying like this one. The reason for this? Terarria came out 2 years after Minecraft's 1.0 release, if I'm getting my information correct. And during both of their early stages, they lacked features that made the games unique. Yeah there were still bosses, NPCs and such within Terraria, but that wasn't enough to change people's comparisons of the game as a whole. BUT as time goes, more features for the two games have been added, and at the time of 1.2.4.1 (last 1.2 update for Terraria) it would've made sense for at least the veterans to stop making the comparisons because there's clearly a difference. Probably much earlier when 1.1 was done, but 1. 2 I believe would be a good solid point.

Another problem that I notice within this game is how new players tackle this game. From my experience, a lot of them would tend too mess around with the game, figuring out the absolute basics on what you can do in pre-hardmode, and using the wiki to guide them whether it comes from the in game guide, or the wiki.gg guide that's lore helpful. Anyway that you look at it, there's nothing wrong with looking up something in this age to figure out what you're supposed to do. For my first consecutive playthroughs on 1.1 mobile, I've done the daunting task of figuring them out myself too even find a flaw in the games system to make me create duplicated of my characters to cheat and such, and was sticking to the same method for a while until I've learned to get over it. Whichever way you learn, the result will be you learning more about the game though it's many ways. Normally, I would've said that cheating would make the experience bad and morally speaking it still applies, but cheating does have it's perks: it makes you feel what the game is going to become in the future, having later game stuff in the progress that you've had, and when it comes to figuring out how you've normally get it, its rather easy to find it out becsuse it'll become one of your most favorite weapons to use against enemies and bosses. I've done this primarily with modded Terarria (Which I  over in this review) due to the different nature's of the other mods.

Coming from a  veteran, there's no bad way to play this game. Using the wiki.gg wiki is your best bet in terms of playing the game as normal as you cam. Or using the Guide works! Whichever way you play it, it'll help with connecting you into the world of the game had to offer, and that's where I talk about it's gameplay. When I usually review games, the gameplay is one of my most important details rhat I discover about, and for Terraria? The gameplay is magnificent in every way. EVEN if pre-hardmode is boring. Wanna know why it's boring at least in my opinion? Because it's the initial test to see if you've done enough of what tbe game has to offer before you move onto hardnode. No matter what difficulty you're playing on, you're going to always see pre-hardmode as the most boring part because barely anything is happening. You don't know what to do. You need help with what to do. Now the Wiki has you covered in terms of figuring out what to do next, along with the in game guide! But yet despite this, a lot of people would never end up past even Skeletron because the game can't seem to have it's essnece be captured by its viewers. It's all of a matter of time and dedication. Becsuse the game can't play by itself. A good way to circumvent this is by playing the game with the person that introduced you to it and purposefully take long within that stages of the game so they can get used to the task of having to deal with said obstacles. They won't like it and they will usually say to hurry up to the better stage of hardnode but you need to make them learn about the importance of pre-hardmode and hard mode once you finally get into that point.

I'm going to take this paragraph to talk about the goblin Invasion one of the many kinds of invasions are going to get into Terraria. pretty much what happened is that a bunch of goblins come from the west or the East at a random point in the game  to come take over your world. They're not that hard of a challenge because most of the enemies just have the usual fighter ai and can be a easily defeated the more they are. If you want to hear more about invasions, just stick to reading more of this thread (even if it's long) because pre hardnode in terms of invasions is honestly not interesting outside of the goblin tinkerer, an important character that is rigged helps you with modifications to your tools to give them upgrades to make them the worst or the best.

Speaking of Hardnode, why don't we get into that stage of the game? Hardnode is one of the well known parts of Terarria, and honestly makes things much more streamlined and linear to the path into defeating the god of this game, the moon lord. But, from just beating tbe Wall of Flesh to either beating your first mech or queen slime is going to be definitely rough. The game will introduce you to hardnode with keeping the gear hay you've have but the core elements of hardnode will make things difficult. Your job at this stage is to take a long gander at your evil biome, to break the altars that lie there in order to gain access to better ores with the molten pickaxe that you've crafted from hell stone. After that, it's a matter of going through another adventure throughout your world because hardnode doesn't being anything extremely new to the table in world generation outside of the hallow, a place that's supposed to be the purifier of both of the evils in the story. Idrk if I can really get more into the story in this review because I am a little fuzzy on what this game provides officially and the developers stating that some of the info are false and just a better way to mess up with some popular things fans theorize about the game. Back to what I was saying though.

While you have your ore collecting, enemies drop other items and materials to further expand the items you're able to craft and collect. Most of them are usually optimal into beating the hardnode bosses whole some of them can be shown as gimmicks just for fun, but it's always best to try them out against the bosses to make you know which item is for next. But primarily, the mech bosses are your main targets: Destroyer, Twins, and Skeletron Prime. If you're a master of the bosses they're based on (Eater of Worlds (no brain variant LOL), eye of however you're supposed to pronounce it, and Skeletron), most of these shouldn't really been an issue. Although It's still best to understand how the boss works by either playing the game or for more specifically finding out  using the wiki to find some tactics. It's much better fighting them and suffering the consequence yourself though be sure you're able to easily develop a strategy to fighting the bosses even if they appear officially in the wiki or as a strat other people say.

Now we are at post mech, and honestly, this part of the game is the mort confusing one of the bunch. This is before Plantera, and there's not much in stock. While you have the Pirate army (another invasion similar to the Goblin invasion talked about previously), you also have an upgraded goblin army, the frost legion, the solar eclipse, and the frost/pumpkin moon. All of these are great ways to becone stronger in Terraria, and it's up for you to figure that out because I'm probably reaching that hidden cap on this site. With that said, I should talk about post Plantera. There's a bunch of opportunities opportunities that you can do at this stage like fighting Golem,to then tackle the pillars and then eventually beating moon lord finishing the game. Or actually doing what this paragraph has originally talked about, fighting the invasions again! At post plantera, most would say that this is the most confusing part of the game because you're so strong that you're able to cheese through most of the bosses with the gear that you've have. With the difficulties it can make things a bit mroe challenging than just running into the bosses, but still if you know what you're doing, you're better off just finishing things off with Golem and the rest.

But after you finish the Moon Lord, what do you have else to do? All I know is that THAT IS NOT ENDING SHIT. you might believe that you have no reason to play this game anymore, but YOU'RE WRONG. you're always free to play this game by yourself again changing certain elements (the class system you can follow within those restrictions Melee, Ranged, Mage, and Summoner), you can play adventure maps (pre constructed maps made by fans that have their own little objectives and such), play the game with more people doing what I've already said, building, cleaning your entire world's evil, whatever you can possibly think of. If you ever wished to play with me, I am almost ALWAYS down to play it. Especially if you're new! But, this unfortunately concludes my ultimate Terarria Review. I will be editing this sometime to include a tldr and to remove this message because it'll be good for those that don't read through these long reviews and only learn information through small increments. I hope you had an AWESOME time reading this, and to reconsider your last playthrough if you didn't touch it much.

It's very addictive, but I don't really see the point of it.

I started off building a shelter, which then I started expanding into a series of tunnels to safely traverse the map. I was very careful to isolate myself completely from the rest of the world. Eventually the enemies started spawning within my tunnels, at which point I felt like my hours of work were for nothing.

The very reason for constructing the tunnels was to explore the map and see what the goal of the game is. Because after hours of playing it I still cannot understand it. I suppose, if I invest 10-20 hours it'll become clear, but the ratio of valuable experience per invested time is extremely low. I could've watched two life-changing movies in the time I spent building those tunnels, which ended up compromised and amounted to a complete waste of time.

This feels like a game for people who have a lot of free time on their hands. I don't.

But the music was amazing though.

A game that I went into thinking was just "2D Minecraft" and ended up blowing my expectations out of the water, even though playing the game often feels like pushing a boulder up a hill.

Terraria simultaneously does a good and terrible job at on-boarding. On the one hand, it starts quite slow and lets you figure out what the game is truly capable of at a pace you can set yourself based on much you do or do not want to do. On the other hand, the systems in Terraria are so incredibly opaque and unintuitive that you could go the entire game without figuring stuff out if you don't plan on heavily relying on the internet.

If you want to just build a little house and explore, you can do that. If you want to build a complex rail system that connects every corner of the map, you can also do that! If you want to set out to get the dopest armor and weapons in the game, you can! And in many ways, Terraria actually does some of that stuff better than Minecraft. Crafting doesn't require unrealistic amount of resources so you can spend just a little farming wood and you'll be set for hours. Getting around the world is faster thanks to potions of teleportation and the low cost of building rail systems. The entire inventory system where you can have various enchanted items with cool effects is a huge step-up from Minecraft's extremely time-intensive and limiting enchantment system. And yet, despite all these improvements, it still often feels like you're playing a less good version of Minecraft.

Playing Terraria on console is extremely rough thanks to some of the worst controller mapping I've ever seen in a game. Trying to get the hang of actually playing this game with a controller genuinely almost made my group of friends quit. Thankfully, we pushed through, but even after 60 hours of playing the game, we were still constantly hitting the wrong buttons to do things.

Terraria ended up being a perfect game to play once or twice a week with our group of friends. There was a little something for everyone in the game whether it was combat, exploration, or crafting. It was always fun to start a new project and work together to complete it. After 60 hours with the game, we finally beat all the main story bosses and cleared out the dungeons. And yet, after all that time, it still felt like we only scratched the surface of what the game is capable of. I made the theoretical best armor in the game, but there was still so much left to discover. We cleared out all the dungeons, but our map was only about 40% complete. If we wanted to, and if we had the time, I'm sure it would take us another 60 hours to really 100% finish our world, but we were pretty happy with what we saw in the time we spent.

+ Terrific Minecraft-like that also sets itself apart in meaningful ways
+ Great multiplayer game
+ Seemingly endless supply of things to do, build, explore, and collect

- Some of the worst controller controls of all time
- Extremely opaque systems that require frequent use of the internet
- Trophies don't really work for everyone present

Ten years ago, this game was mine and my friends’ Minecraft. We would play for hours and hours, and out of every game I own on Steam, ten years on, this game was the one with the most hours logged at 114 (low to many others, I’m sure, but a lot for me). I finally had an urge to go back and play this game, and when I did, I found myself intensely addicted. There is something to the exploration loop of this game that really tickles my ape brain to the point where, out of all of the games I’ve grown to love, this one has eaten up the longest play sessions. The way the caves are designed to be half-naturally forming allows for you to easily discover a path underground as you dig. With a small-sized world, too, a single player will find lots and lots to discover. For better or for worse.

I definitely appreciate this game’s exploration loop a lot more than its combat/campaign progression loop. It is so satisfying to be digging and discover another natural clearing in the map that leads you to different biomes, watching your map fill with the different colors of the different areas. There’s just something off about how one obtains better materials, etc. and how not-inuitive-at-all it is to craft things outside of the normal building/equipment that one might need during everyday gameplay. At first it’s simple but as soon as you see all of what you can craft you realize you’re dealing with a game with nearly 15 years of extra content inside of it. Once I found the first chest with a bunch of potions and bombs I realized how quickly this game can make you feel in over your head. Then I summoned the last boss on accident as I was exploring the lower depths of the world and that just made me feel a little intimidated. That was, until, after defeating only a few more bosses, I found myself in posession of items that made me feel incredibly powerful.

I guess something I didn’t remember from my youthful days of playing this is that the world of Terraria is incredibly hostile. While I didn’t have a lot of fun tracking down boss fights, there are enough surprises within the caverns of the depths of this world that even if you completely ignored every boss battle, you will still accrue a large collection of ways to die. Something I thought about a lot while playing this game is the fine line between a game that offers a difficult and sometimes-frustrating, but rewarding and sincere challenge, and a game that has at least the slightest disdain for its player base. Does a game you’re playing ever feel like it’s laughing at you? Does that make you have less fun?

Terraria is definitely having a chuckle to itself, especially when you activate the billionth boulder trap and find yourself hiking back meters and meters to wherever you lost all that coin. There is something to say about creating new scenarios and adjusting the entire game around the power creep caused, naturally, by years worth of new additions. I found myself constantly cycling through different weapon options throughout the game. Magical staves, muskets, maces, lances, lasers, yo-yos, bee shooters. That doesn’t even scratch the surface of all of the different accessories and equipment that you’ll cycle through, as you explore different biomes each with their own hazards and own personal hells.

I do have to wonder if the overall design of this game is a failure since the driving force of my play was revealing as much of the map as possible until it looked full enough that I was satisfied, and once I had I found myself a little tired of it all. Just for now, though, I do kind of find myself curious in playing an older version of this game on an older console without the latest updates. Though, for now, I definitely need to cut out this timesink from my life so I can focus on better things.

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