Terraria Review

Many games set out to be a sandbox--an interactive world filled with options and untapped potential--but Terraria embodies this concept in a way few games do. The game drops you into a 2D pixelated world with a handful of tools and tells you to explore, dig, build, and, oh yeah, survive. Now that the adventure is on consoles, there's one more way to lose hours mining for ore, and you can do it with a friend or three on the same screen.

Sometimes exploring is more fun with friends, especially if they're on the same couch as you.

Since its release on the PC in 2011, Terraria has sometimes been referred to as a two-dimensional Minecraft, and though that comparison is somewhat unfair, you'll notice the structural similarities between the two games straight away. Progressing through Terraria means chopping down a lot of trees, digging a lot of dirt, mining a lot of stone, and fighting a lot of monsters. Just about everything you cut through with your pickaxe, axe, sword, or hammer provides a resource with which to build and craft new items. Wood can be fashioned into shelter or platforms. Ore can be used to build armor and tools. Even cobwebs are valuable for making fabric, which in turn can help you craft things like flags or robes. There are a wealth of opportunities in the world, and it all starts with a few tools and some trees. What follows is up to you.

While the PC release dropped you into a randomly generated world with no instructions, the console version of Terraria includes a tutorial that gets you up to speed with gathering resources, changing the environment, and building shelter, all of which are essential skills if you are going to survive your first night. It also gives you a primer on crafting items such as torches and walls, which are just the tip of the iceberg in terms of how many things you eventually have the means to create, including impenetrable armor, magic potions, fancy furniture, and boots that let you double-jump.

It will take a long time before you can build anything even remotely this cool, but the journey there is very satisfying.

Even so, Terraria is a game you might want to play with a guide close at hand, whether it's a more experienced friend or a source on the Internet. While the game's crafting system is good at telling you what you can build with what you have in your inventory, it's not always great at telling you what might be crafted if you find additional resources. Also, the game's bosses and non-player characters tend to have very specific summoning criteria, which you're unlikely to stumble into without countless hours of exploration. An in-game guide (the first NPC you encounter in the game) is there to consult for some early help and crafting advice, but his menus can be a bit unwieldy, and his tips cover only so much.

Then again, maybe you don't want the help. There's certainly a lot of joy in the untainted discovery--in choosing a direction, saying "I'm going to go that way," and seeing what happens. Maybe you'll dig deep and find hidden caves and treasure. Maybe you'll journey upward and find a floating island. So what if you don't discover how to get the best armor. So what if you don't fight every type of monster. Maybe that's not what the game is about for you, and that's OK. Terraria lets you play how you want to play.