I have more recorded hours in Terraria than any single other game, well over 1000, It was one of the first games I ever played on Steam way back in 2014. I remember expecting it to be like 2D Minecraft, despite my brother’s gift message telling me exactly otherwise. I quickly was charmed by just how much there was to discover and how it was, under the surface, really more of a 2D RPG action game than a Minecraft-like sandbox game.
It started off a simple enjoyable experience, but after the 1.3 update came out the summer between 8th and 9th grade I developed an obsession with it. In the span of a month in the summer, I played through a whole normal mode save up to beating the Moon Lord and I still remember those days fondly.
The perfect integration of steam multiplayer was a game changer for me. See, back then, when I was living with my parents I was in an incredibly rural area, and had only access to satellite internet. This meant that I had a connection mostly incapable of online games. Yet, despite this, I managed to have quite a bit of great experiences playing online with friends from school as I became so accustomed to the nature of the game’s lag, that as long I wasn’t experiencing disconnects, I could play fairly well. It even served as the motive for bringing my whole desktop computer over to my buddy Jwalsky’s place for the first time, a habit I kept throughout all of highschool and led me to my first experience with many other games that I will surely review in the future.
This game is fun and full of content, the controls are tight and the variety in enemy types and player tools keeps combat consistently exciting throughout the progression of the game. You never stop having fun new types of equipment to go after at each tier of difficulty, and the enemies, especially bosses are constantly finding new ways to trip you up and challenge you as your world changes with each stage of progression.
The character progression is incomparable to any other sandbox game that I have played and is why I tend to consider the game as more of an action RPG than anything else. It contains a somewhat hidden equipment based class system that encourages different playstyles as well as multiplayer. Characters being separate from worlds is a fantastic mechanic that ties into this perfectly as particularly in the latter half of the game, each class has a large variety of different tools a player could seek out or farm materials for, encouraging you and your friends to each have your own worlds, play on your own time and help each other out.
In addition to tying into character progression mechanics and ease of multiplayer, the separation between characters and worlds allows for more flexibility in the difficulty options as characters themselves can choose between three difficulty types concerning what happens when they die, and worlds have three difficulty settings of their own which concern the difficulty of enemies as well as rarity of items. On expert mode and above, bosses health scales to number of players and each player gets a separate loot bag. This makes for an extremely satisfying experience in multiplayer and thrills that my friends and I have tried to chase after for years since our golden era of playing this game.
Unfortunately, each attempt in the last 5+ years for me to start a new long term session of playing this game has failed. Countless worlds and characters started over and over again and then dropped for several months only to start fresh the next time we get the itch. One day, I dream of having a group of friends interested in committing to a playthrough of this epic game with me and all seeing it through to the end, getting truly hooked on this excellent experience like I did as a teenager and not worrying about the “legitimacy” of a beginning to end playthrough. That’s unfortunate side effect of the incredibly open multiplayer and ability for any character to join your world, sequence breaking is so accessible that it can hardly even be considered a break, meaning its quite easy to convince yourself that a run is “tainted” if everyone playing is not at the same stage of progression. That’s just how my brain works, but its held me back from truly enjoying this game for years.
Oh, also, I love fishing in this game. It rocks.
It started off a simple enjoyable experience, but after the 1.3 update came out the summer between 8th and 9th grade I developed an obsession with it. In the span of a month in the summer, I played through a whole normal mode save up to beating the Moon Lord and I still remember those days fondly.
The perfect integration of steam multiplayer was a game changer for me. See, back then, when I was living with my parents I was in an incredibly rural area, and had only access to satellite internet. This meant that I had a connection mostly incapable of online games. Yet, despite this, I managed to have quite a bit of great experiences playing online with friends from school as I became so accustomed to the nature of the game’s lag, that as long I wasn’t experiencing disconnects, I could play fairly well. It even served as the motive for bringing my whole desktop computer over to my buddy Jwalsky’s place for the first time, a habit I kept throughout all of highschool and led me to my first experience with many other games that I will surely review in the future.
This game is fun and full of content, the controls are tight and the variety in enemy types and player tools keeps combat consistently exciting throughout the progression of the game. You never stop having fun new types of equipment to go after at each tier of difficulty, and the enemies, especially bosses are constantly finding new ways to trip you up and challenge you as your world changes with each stage of progression.
The character progression is incomparable to any other sandbox game that I have played and is why I tend to consider the game as more of an action RPG than anything else. It contains a somewhat hidden equipment based class system that encourages different playstyles as well as multiplayer. Characters being separate from worlds is a fantastic mechanic that ties into this perfectly as particularly in the latter half of the game, each class has a large variety of different tools a player could seek out or farm materials for, encouraging you and your friends to each have your own worlds, play on your own time and help each other out.
In addition to tying into character progression mechanics and ease of multiplayer, the separation between characters and worlds allows for more flexibility in the difficulty options as characters themselves can choose between three difficulty types concerning what happens when they die, and worlds have three difficulty settings of their own which concern the difficulty of enemies as well as rarity of items. On expert mode and above, bosses health scales to number of players and each player gets a separate loot bag. This makes for an extremely satisfying experience in multiplayer and thrills that my friends and I have tried to chase after for years since our golden era of playing this game.
Unfortunately, each attempt in the last 5+ years for me to start a new long term session of playing this game has failed. Countless worlds and characters started over and over again and then dropped for several months only to start fresh the next time we get the itch. One day, I dream of having a group of friends interested in committing to a playthrough of this epic game with me and all seeing it through to the end, getting truly hooked on this excellent experience like I did as a teenager and not worrying about the “legitimacy” of a beginning to end playthrough. That’s unfortunate side effect of the incredibly open multiplayer and ability for any character to join your world, sequence breaking is so accessible that it can hardly even be considered a break, meaning its quite easy to convince yourself that a run is “tainted” if everyone playing is not at the same stage of progression. That’s just how my brain works, but its held me back from truly enjoying this game for years.
Oh, also, I love fishing in this game. It rocks.