What if I told you about a random generated 8-bit world, where you could only go with nothing more than a handful of basic tools to explore the land, build stuff, and battle monsters? No, don't let the title tease you, I'm not talking about Minecraft. Although virtually everything in the world is destructible, and by breaking blocks you find resources like wood, stone, and iron, and the overall concepts of the game are very similar, these two games are indeed different.
I'm talking about Terraria. It's an RPG where you play not as a human, but as a sprite. You get a feeling of fantasy with a desire to adventure and uncover secrets driven by your own curiousity and your own creativity. You can develop hobbies in the game and spend time doing or not doing whatever you want, according to your preferences, but still almost always being challenged by the difficulty in searching for hard-to-find discoveries and the interference of monsters. You can be a hunter, or a blacksmith, or a tailor, or a paleontologist, or a miner, or an architect, or nothing, or all of the above. The upfront strategy of the game is to hunt and dig up and cut down necessary materials to craft into useful tools, or gear to customise your character.
Exploration and combat in the game is easy, thanks to the simple gamepad controls. And the same rules of common sense in the real world apply here too. The deeper you dig, the harder you look, the bigger the challenge, the better the come up.
Like Minecraft, what happens on the surface is determined by a day/night cycle. During the day, it is safe. You can pick flowers and harvest crops without being disturbed. However, when the sun goes down, the monsters come out. Floating eyeballs, hideous earthworms and zombie hordes hunt you down and want to challenge your power, forcing you to either fight or flee.
Now, unlike Minecraft, there are special helpers called NPC's. NPC's come in different forms like guide, merchant, nurse, wizard, and even Santa Claus. They can sell you items, heal you, and offer other helpful services. However, if you want one of your own, there are several tasks you need to perform in order to attract one. You get the Guide right off the back, but the others are special, and the things you have to do for one to spawn including using a Heart Crystal, getting wealthy, exploring dungeons, and slaying beasts. This can inspire you to attempt quests rather than spend your time trying to pimp out your pad or craft things you dont really need, basically it gives you something to do rather than just kill time.
While exploring can be fun, the combat in the game is what I love about it. For one thing, monsters can find you out of nowhere, and can interrupt your digging or crafting or whatever youre doing. Its frustrating, but its that pissed off challenged drive that makes it fun. Furthermore, when youre killed, determined by what difficulty you have your game set on, it effects what happens when you die and respawn. For example, an easy setting allows you to respawn with your gear intact , but with a good chunk of coins missing. Then, if youre playing at a harder difficulty, you'd be forced to drop all your items, gear, and coins, respectively.
Though at first it may just sound like a Minecraft knock-off, it expands on fantasy elements and highlights the fun in combat and adventure that proves it to be exciting. With a slur of monsters to kill and a wicked pixelised experience, it does not look so demeaning once you start digging.
