I’d like to begin things by wishing Terraria a happy 8th birthday coming up on May 16th, I still can’t believe how time flies. Terraria, known to most as ‘2D Minecraft’, was developed and published by Re:Logic in 2011 to very high praise. Terraria is the only game developed by them, as the rest of their library consists of stuff they’ve only published, as in Pixel Piracy and Pixel Privateers.

With another update for PC coming to Terraria soon, it seems they have no plans on slowing down with said updates, which is very impressive and admirable, really. A lot of indie devs struggle to get one or two updates out for their games, yet Re: Logic has been steadily doing it for nearly 10 years now without crowdfunding or the likes. I imagine it’s one of the few indie studios that are an inspiration to many others.

That being said comparing Terraria to Minecraft is quite jarringly different, the similarities end after the digging and building part, everything else is quite different including the contents they both have compared to one another. Terraria is a lot more fun with friends, to say the least, but it’s perfectly good on its own as well. The game has so many weapons, tasks you can do, NPC’s and technically side quests. There’s so much that it holds despite it being randomly generated worlds, it feels like it was all pre-planned somehow.

Terraria has one big flaw though, in that it gets boring after some time. There is simply so much to do that it kind of overwhelms itself, melee weapons are almost completely redundant as well now due to all the other options, especially compared with the almighty yo-yo. The boredom becomes more prominent in the sudden difficulty ramp, the game starts off in easy mode until you beat the biggest boss early on the wall of flesh in hell at the bottom of the world, (yes it is actually called hell in Terraria, it’s very refreshing to not have any beating around the bush on the naming.) Which is actually a lot easier than you’d think, especially with some goons at your side to battle.

When the wall of flesh is beaten hard mode officially begins. It unlocks more content, another type of corruption begins in the world and all new bosses have a chance to appear; mechanized variants of the first three bosses you defeated. Yes, the bosses all ‘scale’ with the respective amount of players, which as per usual means just cranking their health through the roof. The problem with these new bosses is their sheer, overwhelming power. There simply is no way to beat any of them at first no matter how many players there are, essentially forcing people to abuse The Destroyer’s lack of ability to climb too far above the ground. There aren’t really many choices to it, and in my near 400 hours of playtime, we’ve never been able to beat it without this strategy.

To top THAT off there is the obligatory amount of grind, enemies having a certain % chance to drop items or the likes or a certain material you desperately need. Some enemies are of course very aggravating to fight, taking chunks out of your health while you have barely any invincibility frames so they can tear you in half within seconds. Terraria is far harder without a mouse and keyboard which is why all versions except PC are a bit starved when it comes to content.This game is on a lot of platforms and I wouldn’t be surprised if Terraria comes to the Nintendo Switch in the future. Other versions of the game have certain materials, items, bosses exclusive to them. In the end, they aren’t enough to really justify it, compared to the PC version that has everything and more on the way.

The modding community for Terraria is even more impressive in some regards though, such as N Terraria that turns the game into an RPG. Or Thorium which rivals Tremor for how large they both are, just like the Calamity mod as well. Yes, you need to jump through a few hoops to install said mods, and it’s not all easy said and done or the likes, but it’s well worth it! You can even use these mods in multiplayer with some extra work.

TL;DR:

Terraria is very much worth its price, continuing to constantly grow even after all this time, and is very fun with others despite the fact after a while it feels like you’re fighting an uphill battle on the side of a mountain during an avalanche. Challenge lovers will adore that much, and the console ports don’t withhold nearly half as much content as the PC version does.