Terraria 1.4 Review

 Finishing what I started.

I remember first hearing about Terraria a long time ago through the same sort of grapevines through which Minecraft became known to me; which meant that for better or for worse I was going to forever equate the two games as shadows of one another. Hindsight obviously dispels that coincidence once we actually become familiar with each game; Minecraft is a game that revolves around empowering creativity first and providing gameplay content second whereas Terraria prides itself on gameplay improvements before coming around to pumping up building tools; but there's an obvious overlap in style and substance. (Even if one is 3d and technically infinite whilst the other is 2d and shaped around loot collection.) I remember once considering Terraria as a version of Minecraft that already comes pre-modded, which is a funny way of looking at it and a perspective I still think back on during some of the crazier moments of Terraria's endgame. (It certainly does feel as manic and unrestrained as you'd expect a modder to get.)

I first played Terraria back when it was ported to the consoles of the time, Xbox 360 and PS3; and that was a version of the game I considered to be largely friendly to the new comer. Whilst being feature-limited and supported at a much reduced rate to the PC version, the game had numerous quality of life improvements that made the early game more accessible to those who did not have the wiki open. Crafting trees specified craft-ables the moment you owned a single item in a recipe and displayed the missing materials you needed to collect to incentivise creativity; there was an entire in-built tutorial world that guided your hand all the way up to your first boss fight and the general world was a whole lot more hospitable towards the experimental gamers out there. In all the improvements that the modern Terraria has, I think some of that accessibility has become lost and could be a font of refocus before the team move onto their next project, whatever that ends up being.

 To the uninitiated; Terraria is a 2D survival crafting game (without food meters unless you play 2 secret map seeds) in which the focus of the game is gathering steadily improved equipment and weaponry to battle steadily more powerful monsters and bosses in a slow creep towards ultimate power. World generation is randomised but not infinitely expanding, biomes dictate the sort of wild enemies that will spawn, RNG decides a lot of the non-craftable equipment you'll be able to pick up, chance might dictate a few of the bosses you'll have available to you depending on the nature of the world you create and progression is tied to killing your way down a list of bosses, some of which contain literal keys to unlock the next state of the wider world. Essentially making the process of 'beating' Terraria a lot more functionally linear than Minecraft, whilst still being flexible to the players' play style. All of this is to say, Terraria isn't really Minecraft at all, they just share a similar aesthetic.

Much as you might find if you look on the wiki, I think assessing modern Terraria requires breaking down the play experience into the early game, mid game and endgame; comparing and contrasting the complications and vindications of each stage of the game. Every update is littered with improvements up and down that chain, so it's important to note that this review is made specifically in the wake of the 'Labour of Love' update for Terraria, because the game as it exists in the future could feel entirely different from where it's at today. The full game may have been out for a few years now, but until the Re-Logic team are dragged away from this code by force they'll never stop tweaking and adding things here and there to pimp up the weaker elements of the game.

The early game of Terraria is, go figure, the most simple if you've ever played a crafting game before. You are set off in a basic world where you mine and harvest materials and come to understand how the world around you works and functions. A lot of this is pretty intuitive and natural to the fresh player; you'll mine-up ore and the deeper it is the better quality of what you'll make with it. The evil Corruption biome (or Crimson, depending on the world generation) will flay you alive the first time you go there, indicating how conquering that place is probably the starter goal from the word 'go'. And the really observant might even start to identify the ways in which Terraria, even in the early game, resembles a looter-experience. There's flavour text indicating quality, DPS tally equipment and set bonuses. The early problems do start to flare up, however.

I think crafting is a big early game issue, from the fact that unlike it's peers, Terraria will only tell you what you can craft when you have the right amount materials and are standing in front of the correct workbench; essentially requiring you to know exactly what it is you're going to craft before you even approach it in the first place. Now nothing in the early game necessitates blind recipe-guessing, but this does introduce the idea that if you want to get to that upper echelon of enjoying the game it's almost necessary to have the wikia open to check what you're doing. I think that any game which necessitates out-of-game interaction sacrifices accessibility for unrestrained complexity and hiding secrets and Easter eggs is not the same as refusing to even hint at how key pieces of early game furniture are made such as freaking beds! (Without a bed handy, Blood Moon nights get real boring, real fast!)

By the mid game stages of Terraria, the player has come to understand the loop of unlocking new tiers of play and crafting better gear for those better damage numbers. This will also be around about the time that enough equipment starts arriving for the player to understand the different classes they can adopt. Warrior, Ranger, Summoner and Mage are all unofficial class-types that players can adopt, all of which possess accessories and tools that synergise to make playing towards a specific class advantageous. Warriors get in the face of enemies with melee weapons, Rangers use bows and guns, mages use weapons that drain on their magic meter and summoners call forth minions who keep enemies at bay for them. Playing as a mix of all is very possible and actually how I beat Terraria for my first time, but for those that really want to engage in set bonuses and all those stat improvements, picking a specific field to specialise in is the way to go. And entirely unofficial.

It really is surprising how little hand-holding Terraria does for the player, partially out of a trust for the faculties of their audience and partially, I believe, out of an insulation within their community that numbs the developers to the struggles of new adopters trying to understand the game they're approaching. The wikia is the only place that you can find strategy guides telling you how to approach certain styles of play when even games like Rimworld and Kenshi offer bare basics so that fresh players can get started on the road to becoming skilled. It's very possible for a non-internet browsing Terraria player to hit a wall with no idea what to do and just become stuck there. The achievement system provides a bare basic idea of where the next milestone is, but a lot of the time it's not really enough to go on. ('Beat the Lunatic Cultist!' That's great- Where is he?)

Those that push forward onto the endgame of Terraria have probably heavily integrated themselves in the tools of the community in order to do so and have developed a fairly rudimentary understanding of the systems at hand. The players of Terraria are a great resource for understanding the bigger strategies of the game and the tools necessary for fighting her greatest challenges. Unfortunately, this also becomes the point at which a lot of the early game content becomes utterly trivialised and thus inconsequential, which is both a weakness of this style of game and a ego boost for those that blast by it. There's going to be a point in looter games where the content they engage in is funnelled specifically to whatever it is that can still offer a challenge; and when that style of world is an open one, rather than a specifically guided linear world like Borderlands, it becomes easy to miss pockets of content when they're relevant and thus miss out on the fun of enjoying that challenge. I only managed to grind the pirate invasion after crafting The Zenith. As any who knows what that means can imagine, that event was short lived.

On the otherhand, there's not really a common-sense solution to that problem. Games that utilise a 'challenge scaling' feature tend to run into a trivialisation of the power wall, which makes players feel like everything they've earned is useless because they never get better at handling their enemies. At least with ignoring that scaling, Terraria can throw increadibly brutal content that provides that rush of adrenaline once the player pushes through. After the endgame, Terraria does sort of lack reasons to keep playing beyond building cool creations, and since that was never really the gameplay focus to start with I'd imagine most players will find little reason to keep playing beyond beating the final boss. Minecraft doesn't have that problem because the gameplay cycle it focuses on doesn't really have that end-point, whilst Terraria inherently does. Of course, whether you see that as a problem, or a boon because this game actually as a goal you can reach and feel accomplished for beating; is a matter of personal preference.

Personally I think the loot-based progression system of any game is only as good as quality of the loot itself. How that loot feels to play around with and how diverse it all is. The Labour of Love update specifically brought big improvements here, as every weapon aside from the bare basic beginning tools features some unique visual flair or complexity to use that makes them worth collecting and having fun with. With how many pieces of loot there are in the game, that level on intricacy is something of an incredible achievement for the team that I find really quite engaging. Those that do stick around with the game long enough for a replay can really find their early game experience transformed into something that feels completely different to the last time purely because of some RNG chest loot which reshapes the gameplay. Having focused the game so long on the loot, it's no incredible surprise that it's currently this good to play about with, but you can take that as evidence this team succeeds where they strive to.

The second half of cool loot is, of course, cool Bosses to use that loot against, and Terraria does have some pretty creative and imaginative bosses that get somewhat wild in the second half of the game. I was somewhat disappointed with the absolute endgame bosses, however, in that they were really just an 'avoid the projectile and shoot back' affair. I thought the endgame might be a point at which to introduce mechanics beyond out-damaging the enemy or playing cut and mouse with projectiles. But if you're not looking for mechanics-based brawls than Terraria scales itself about as well as you can hope for up to it's endgame. It's just... I don't usually sat this but the final boss felt a little lacklustre after everything that came before. Perhaps that was a lack of any really transformative second stages apart from the split-off body parts. Maybe that's Dark Souls style bosses spoiling me, but Plantera and even the early pre-hardmode bosses all had gameplay-shifting second forms. The final boss felt strangely static by comparison. 

Visually Terraria rocks an iconic pixel art visual style that is immediately indicative towards it's own brand. At times the size of the pixels prohibits artistic creativity and there's a hard-to-mistake blocky functionality to the world that limits it's natural beauty, even with the dynamically shifting block sprites. But Terraria is not an ugly or even bad looking game at any point; and actually some of the endgame specific visualisations are cool enough to make me wish we'd seen more of the game with those sorts of motifs present. I'm not quite as big a fan of the music tracks the game has. They're all, again, iconic and inseparable from Terraria, but some of the peppier and happier tracks have a direct link towards my nausea gland. I know it's my own fault for overplaying the game back in the day, but nowadays I literally can't play the game with my headphones on or a I get lightheaded and can't play the game for the next twelve hours. Again, not the composer's fault; but a personal gripe of mine. (The cave and boss tracks are fine for me; I'm not sure why.)

The overall challenge of Terraria is a point worth considering in a review given how much more geared this game is towards boss fights and gear collection. I've already addressed the problem with scaling and gear collecting, but when your facing the right challenge at the right time there is a level of challenge that might scare off the casual player. You need solid reaction times and finger skills in order to avoid attacks and survive long enough to retort, and even if you want to go the Dark Souls route and grind yourself above the challenge before you get there; you'll hit brick wall limits because a lot of the time world progression is tied to boss progression. Plus, in mediumcore (the default difficulty where you drop your gear when you die) It's quite feasible to softlock yourself out of progression by losing the wrong piece of gear. Maybe you lock yourself out of dungeon that can only be broken into with a Pickaxe that is only dropped by the boss inside that dungeon. (I had to learn a wall glitch trick to worm my way out of that snafu.) There's a tough face worn by Terraria, and it can be somewhat brutal if you're not prepared for what you're facing. But it's never eye-wateringly painful. (At least, not until you start getting into Master difficulty; but at that point you're really getting exactly what you signed up for.)  

In conclusion, Terraria is a deep and versatile looter-style builder game with some problems when it comes to approachability and accessibility. There's a definite barrier to entry for people who don't have the time to invest in a title like this, or the resources available to really enjoy this game without resorting to banging their head against the wall. I think that in it's current state Terraria offers a great spread of content and even some replayability potential, all of which demonstrates the professional sheen of a game refined feverishly over the past eleven years. It's a difficult one to really score, and I'll have a very subjective score when I consider all the factor's I've discussed to reach this point, but I'm decently happy giving Terraria a B Grade in my arbitrary rating board. Along with a slapped on recommendation for lovers of looter games and power creep gameplay loops, with a much more moderated recommendation for those who are fans of building, and even then only if you're a pixel artist. I did really enjoy my time with Terraria and would certainly be eager for any follow up game the team creates if, indeed, they ever actually make a follow-up.