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Terraria

I tried Terraria about 5 years ago and completely dismissed it as a "worse graphics version of Starbound". Having since played Starbound to death and really wanting to scratch that creative mining itch, I gave Terraria another go and was really glad I did. What a huge game. There's a ton of content buried in here if you manage to get past the first few minutes; I got totally absorbed for 160 hours and didn't actually finish it. Aside from all the mining and base building, it's loosely focused around killing bosses to progress. I have a few negative points - like lack of information in-game, but can thoroughly recommend it for people who want a great 2D combat game, mining and base building.

Pros

  • Huge amount of content
  • tModLoader has a huge amount of mods that you can browse and install from within the game. The main problem with this is that it's a separate game, and therefore also no achievements, and a separate Steam timer
  • You can move existing characters to other worlds, like Valheim
  • Fun background music (although it gets old pretty quickly)
  • Has been updated constantly for 10 years
  • Has a toggleable "smart cursor" that helps with placing torches and mining
  • Items have a huge impact on your character. Flippers for swimming, climbing gloves, potions that let you see treasure etc
  • Glowsticks you can chuck into water
  • Water physics. Moving water around by mining is pretty cool
  • Has a "quick stack" built in for quick depositing items to nearby chests
  • You can meet people out in the world that will move into your little town if you build them a house
  • Bosses, with summoning items you can craft
  • Grappling hook!
  • Really interesting weapons. I used a yoyo for quite a while. Also had a ball on a chain, a harpoon, then a bow that turned arrows into bees
  • Huge number of events (goblin attack, slime rain)
  • In-game achievements serve as a sort of "what to do next" list of quests, although it took about 10 hours to notice that
  • Your trinket slots are limited, but you meet an NPC who lets your merge trinket effects. There's a huge chain of trinkets that all merge into a single very powerful one
  • There are items in-game that help with building bases, like a tape measure

Cons

  • Without the wiki, the game would be pretty much unplayable. There are so many unexplained things that you're basically forced to constantly have it open. It's a shame really, I think about 70% of the content most people will never see, because it's hidden or unexplained. Such as:
    • Finding out what you can craft
    • How to summon bosses (most summon items only work in a specific place or time of day, but if you use them in the wrong place, it doesn't give you a message why it doesn't do anything)
    • How the game calculates the size of fishing lakes
    • Where to find the next set of armour to let you survive the next boss
  • After killing the Wall of Flesh and unlocking "hard mode", there is an extreme spike in difficulty. It took me another 40 hours or so to kill the first non-easy boss
  • The UI is ugly, and difficult to navigate. The crafting menu is a just a huge scrolling list of icons, There's a grid view too, but the icons are so small it's often hard to see what they are. There's no search or filter
  • You can't see recipes for things you don't currently have the ingredients for
  • There's no pause button
  • When you save & exit, then start the game, you're always back on the surface - so it's basically a free teleport out of danger
  • No story, at all
  • No way to see your stats other than changing gear and looking at your weapons
  • I guess by the nature of being a 2D game, there are some major drawbacks with things like combat and bosses. For example, Skeletron Prime spawned just now. It flies around the screen, not hindered by the blocks or landscape, flies on and off the screen, and flails around. You're stuck jumping around on blocks, blocked by solid ground, and have to dodge random flailing limbs that pass through the earth
  • Don't even think about hardcore mode (1 life) in a game where you can just be instakilled for no reason, like INVISIBLE EXPLOSIVES
  • For the first few dozen hours of the game, every time I went down to the bottom of the world, the final boss randomly spawned because the Guide died for no reason. I later discovered that there are enemies carrying voodoo dolls, and when the die, the drop the doll. The last easy-mode boss is summoned when the doll falls into lava.
  • I killed the Wall of Flesh (first easy mode boss) by chance, just because it spawned randomly and I didn't want to die. This apparently put the game into "hard mode", which means the world slowly converts to corruption-ground. Without knowing this in advance, you basically lose the whole world without realising it and have to start again
  • Following the above point... there's a complicated and annoying mechanic where the world starts getting corrupted after killing the last easy mode boss. You either have to spend hours and hours digging tunnels to separate your world into segments to avoid that , or use a world editor. This also isn't explained anywhere other than extensive online guides and wikis, and completely changes the game
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