Metascore

Generally favorable reviews - based on 29 Critics What's this?

User Score

Generally favorable reviews- based on 775 Ratings

  • Summary: Terraria offers players a chance to be an action gamer, master builder, a collector, and even an explorer.
Score distribution:
  1. Positive: 25 out of 29
  2. Negative: 0 out of 29
  1. Jun 1, 2011
    100
    Still, Terraria is a great adventure, one of the best sandbox games around, and an absolute steal for ten bucks on Steam. It's well worth checking out for anyone, regardless of how they feel about Minecraft. Despite having one fewer dimension, Terraria hides greater depth than its 3D cousin.
  2. Jun 23, 2011
    86
    After having created the toughest armor deep down in Hell, you will realize that you've seen and done everything that Terraria has to offer. But it'll take you about 30 hours to get to that point, plus, free expansions are already on their way.
  3. Oct 19, 2011
    85
    Terraria: The arrival on competition for Minecraft was only a matter of time. Terraria is a two dimensional mining game mixed with platformer and a little bit of Diablo. It's a fun concept, but the yanks can't outmine swedes. [June 2011]
  4. Mar 16, 2012
    70
    It's a title that will appeal to the adventurer, the explorer and the builder; not to mention those who appreciate a substantial amount of player freedom. If you happen to be all of those things, Terraria is a lightly tarnished treasure.

See all 29 Critic Reviews

Score distribution:
  1. Negative: 40 out of 378
  1. Terraria is a really fun game and should not be determined by the graphics. You can do anything from building a castle to making a hellevator. There is no end to this spectacular game Expand
  2. Comparing Minecraft to Terraria is like Halo to Half Life whilst they both share similarities it is only skin deep. If you go to play this game thinking it will be creative fiesta like Miencraft you will be dissapointed and if you go in thinking it will be a lousy 2D version of it you will be pleasantly suprised. The fun in Terraria is not in creating like Minecraft but in the exploration and gameplay. Expand
  3. Terraria is all about the crafting that it forgets to focus on core gameplay by offering balancing issues and bad appeal

    Terraria, at first g
    lance will look very reminiscent of something of a 2D clone of Minecraft with a sort of Super Mario Brothers feel to it. And in a very broad sense it is virtually exactly that, and if your the style of person who throws away a game after 10 minutes of nothing, this game just isn't for you. However spill some time into it, and you can get lost in a haven of randomly generated dungeons, start building an entire town for you and your friends in multi-player, and explore the devious world of The Corrupted lands in search of world eaters of the ever increasingly annoying Eye Of Cythulu if your friends continuously spawn it.
    When you start up Terraria for the first time you are instructed to create your very first character to explore the vast expansive worlds of Terraria. Now, as well as a few similar and crazy hairstyles, there's not much at your disposal to customize your character. Besides hairstyles, there is nothing to change, merely altar the colour, and even that is a little bit frustrating, as you use those RGB sliders. Most people, unless you want to be really picky because for the majority of the time you will wear armour anyway, will just keep the character as the default look. There is nothing wrong with this though, in-fact if you move the sliders to attempt to change the character you normally end up completely ruining it anyway. On the other hand, customization of armour and weapons when you get into the game is much, and I mean much better. Think of a random weapon or armour style in your head, and it is probably craft-able in Terraria. Ranging from the simple crafted items early on such as copper swords and basic handguns found in some underground caves, to star cannons, massive lava flails and even lightsabers! Armour varies a lot too, and if you want survive after nightfall when the zombies and weird floating eyeballs are out to kill you, your going to need to know which armour as better for your style of play. Want to rummage through underground caves without the need for torches? Go for the molten armour. Or how about for moving round really quickly? How about shadow armour? The possibilities are endless! This brings me to my next point, Terraria doesn't seem to want to teach people how to play there game at all. There's no tutorial mode, only a guide there which gives you very vague hints and tips now and again on how to do things, sometimes this doesn't really help at all either. The only way your going to even learn much about Terraria is if you have numerous hours on your hands to read through an entire wiki site dedicated to Terraria.
    The game-play mainly consists of crafting better and better items to survive in your randomly generated world and fend off enemies during the night. However if you build a house to stay in at night, you probably wont have much problems with enemies during the night. Also, Terraria does a good job of adding a different variety of random events to the game to vary it up a little at night. At times a bloodshot moon will occur and enemies will spawn at twice the rate and be twice as hard to defeat and be twice as powerful. Sometimes a massive goblin army will start to march towards your house and try to defeat you. And by defeating these this can normally get you some very respectable rewards. However these events don't happen on a regular enough basis, and so you can get bored of continuously fending off zombies as you try to build your house during the night. And your first shadow orb encounter can be a fun but surprising one. Unless you read the wiki, you'll try hitting it, it will disappear and an enemy boss, the eater of worlds will appear. Now if your unprepared, then be ready to die tonnes of times before you defeat him, because he will follow you whenever you spawn until you kill him, and he has tonnes of HP.
    These random events and enemy boss fights can make multi-player and playing with friends a blast. And what's more, opening up multi-player gives you and your friends even more choices to make on were to go and what to do! As long as your friends aren't jerks, you should have no trouble with massive boss fights as long as your mate doesn't keep spawning them.
    Recently Terraria released a new patch which contained a variety of new mobs such as jungles, bats and bigger deserts. The new mobs are great, but some rarely appear, and it's frustrating when you can't find the one your looking for. Overall, Terraria is a good enough game to have you playing for a long time, and there is enough new content in there to keep you playing for a long amount of time, but some things may not appeal to the more casual gamers such as the crafting system which can be over-complicated, and the mobs need to be balanced out a lot.
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  4. I tried so hard to like Terraria. I really, really did. For one thing, it was free. A friend bought it for me. It is a MAJOR waste when you can't learn to like something you didn't even pay for. Also, lots of my friends were playing it for a long time, and they wanted me to join them on their server, hence the free game. So my drive to like Terraria was threefold: it was free so it was wasteful not to play it, I didn't want to be rude and not play it with my friends who bought it for me, and I had heard from so many glowing reviews that there was this gem of a game somewhere beneath the surface.

    Well I've tried, and tried, and I just can't get excited about Terraria. Anytime I play this game, I am bored stiff. Here's where I think the problem lies:

    Yes, there's all the comparisons to Minecraft. Let me tell you, I don't give a crap about any of that. Yes , I've played Minecraft and I liked it a lot. No, I don't care if Terraria "ripped it off" or not. A game can rip of or be inspired by other games as much as it wants. If the end result is fun, we're all the more merry for it. So it's not that it's like Minecraft.

    Same goes for all the comparisons to "Metroidvania" games. Fine with me, so it's not that it's like Metroidvania games. The problem, I believe, is that it's not ENOUGH like either a Metroidvania game or a Minecraft game. That's the feeling I couldn't shake when playing this... this game is just so... lukewarm. Let's look at it from the Minecraft side. As a Minecraft-esque game, i.e. a creative tool with adventure elements, it doesn't stand up. It's just not as fun to create things in 2d. You can't think of the crazy, creative ideas that you can in something like Minecraft because there's just one less plane to work with. On top of that, if you do want to approach it mainly as a way to let out your creativity, you are going to be sorely taxed as monsters crawl up your butt from every angle. You're going to be spending just as much material making yourself new weapons to deal with your enemies as you do making structures. There is too large a helping of action for the arm-chair architect. Also, your creativity will be stunted in the Crafting department. There is no playing around with materials and discovering new combinations here. If you have the raw goods in your inventory, what you can make with them is laid out before you. As a creative tool, Terraria just doesn't stand up. It's just not as good.

    Now let's look at Metroidvania aspect. The same thing has happened here, the action and adventure has been deluded by the crafty-half. The game doesn't respond or play like your standard Metroid shooter/platformer. The physics of your character are clunky and your weapons imprecise. You can tell this game was NOT coded with simply high-quality side-scrolling action in mind.

    What happens with this game is simply this: they tried to combine two niches and wound up watering down both. If you want to play a side-scrolling indie action game on the PC, for god sake, play Capsized or something. After coming back from that, you won't be able to stand Terraria. If you want to build something, play Minecraft. If you really are the niche player these programmers were looking for and you simply MUST have side-scrolling action and building/crafting in the same game... well... then I guess you will love this thing. If you ask me though, you'll only love it because there's nothing better out there in the genre at the moment, just this I gave this a negative score, despite the fact that the structure of the game is basically sound, because the game isn't even entertaining to me in a bad way. It is frustratingly bland.
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See all 378 User Reviews