Terraria

In 12 hours of gameplay I “destroyed” a little over 10.000 tiles, built myself a nice house where three NPCs live, but only saw a small part of what the game has to offer. You can generate new worlds and port your character between them. You have a perma-death mode for your character, if that’s what you’re into. From what I experienced, the game is pretty relaxed, and I enjoyed playing it while listening to podcasts or watching, actually mostly listening, to something else on a second monitor. Pros: you can make lots and lots of items in a world that has a pretty artwork. Cons: you don’t know what you can build unless you already have all the materials for it. Rating: one furious unicorn. http://pixelloot.com

Okay. First off, I think this game is very good at what it does. It's got a ton of material-gathering, crafting, monster-fighting, exploring, etc... Lots of stuff to find, build and do, and for this reason alone, it merits more than one good play-through. It may have the most comprehensive crafting system I've ever seen, which is saying something. However, after a couple weeks of playing this game, I realized that I, in particular, was not having very much fun, because I wasn't sure what I was supposed to do. There's no obvious, in-game goal to achieve. Sure, you can beat new bosses and unlock new things, but the game has neither a story nor an end goal, and without those things, I'm afraid it comes across as more of an art canvas than a game to me. That said, for an art canvas, there sure are a lot of hard enemies, and they don't become much easier. You can use certain items to permanently upgrade your HP and MP, but beyond that, all of the strength-increases that you experience in the game come from your equipment. Remove it, and you're no stronger after 80 hours of playing than you were after 1. I'm the kind of gamer who isn't crazy about futility or time-wasting in video games, and this is definitely the sort of game where you can waste 20 minutes tunneling, monster-fighting and exploring, then get killed by a hidden enemy and it was all for nothing. You're no stronger, you have less money, etc... Those are 20 minutes you can't get back. The crafting system is basic; open the crafting window near the required bench/anvil/etc and select what you want to make. Not very involving, as crafting goes. At night, zombies attack, and you need to hide inside until it's over, but there's no way to speed up time, like in the sims, so you have to waste another 12 minutes of your real life, waiting for the night to end. Given all I'd heard people had done with this game, I was hoping for more. It does a lot of things well, but not what I'm after.

The game is excellent, a trully must have. The only issue I have with it is the lack of cloud saves on GOG.

I completed 700+ hours yesterday (on Steam) and I realized that this game is infinite. I have been playing for years and I still have a lot of things that I want to do. This game will keep you busy for a while and it is really easy to get addicted by all of the things it offers. You can play as you want, you can be a warrior and defeat monsters, you can be an explorer and get an epic loot, you can be a builder and make magnificent structures, you can create complex mechanical creations (which are better than Minecraft's Redstone I have to admit), and you can even play golf. If the game is already made to be infinite wait until you try its mods, there's a tremendous library of mods which you can easily install and it will augment the fun amazingly. Also, developers made an utter effort with this game, it is flawless and it is playable on almost all devices, you don't need a high-end PC in order to get the best quality and I love that. To sum up, this is game is a must play, and the 1.4 update adds more things that you can imagine and it makes me upset that this is the final update. (By the way, 1.4 is coming also to iOS and Android and let me tell you that the mobile version is outstanding too if you don't want to spend hours in a computer).

Why 5 stars? I have easily 1k+ hours in terraria, yes i am a bit biased. Terraria is a sandbox-pixelart-builder-adventure. It imo truly deserves to be called sandbox, and yes, this box is indeed filled with alot of content If you just "need" cryengine level graphics and someone to hold your hand, this is probably not for you. If you like exploration and building(kinda, yes, minecraftish) combined with light (item based) rpg mechanics... i long searched for a game like it, and terraria is.