Terraria: The Minecraft Ripoff?

Yes, this is going to be all about a little indie game known as Terraria, after Minecraft's release and it was immensely popular, many games popped up trying to gain just a little bit of the popularity of the sandbox building/fighting game.

One of these, was Re-Logic's Terraria, and while, when I first read about Terraria, thought 'Oh God, another rip-off.' Having got it from a friend over Steam, it sat there for a good 3 or so months until this firend persuaded me to get on and actually give it a go.

Let it be said, that this guy has awesome judgement, while like Minecraft, it has a rather steep learning curve as to what to do and how to do it, the content provided with the game, feels so much more, expansive than that of Minecraft, while I have, and still do put plenty of time into Minecraft, being able to jump into Terraria, load up my character and world, then Rocket Boot around looking for bosses is much more fulfilling than logging into Minecraft and thinking, well what can I build today?

Truth be told, I didn't have to suffer through the initial material gathering, panic before night-time hits start up, as aforementioned friend decided to provide me with lots of yummy equipment and armor.

Now, on the crafting side of things, you can craft certain items straight away just by going into the inventory menu, such as a torch, sword or worktable, once you've built said worktable, the crafting menu is extended to allow the new items available. This system specialises into such crafting items as a Loom(for beds and the like) and the furnace(armors, metalwork).

Combat is simple to learn; left mouse click to attack, but due to the variation in creatures to fight, some have different mechanics, such as the Eater of Worlds, by hitting this almost centipede-like boss, it separates the segments, making multiple copies to fight at the same time, meaning to have an easy(ish) fight, you'll want to continually hit the head.

All in all, Terraria is a fun game to play, but like most, takes a little while to get into the swing of things, even with your friend's charity.

I'm going to give it a 7.5/10

Game 1: Dead Island

Hello to my (currently nonexistent) fans, first review or rundown is Dead Island!

Right....where to start,
Voice acting seems like a good place to begin, ugh mostly due to the fact that I am Australian, was it too hard to get actual Australian voice actors? There's got to be some at least. These poorly imitated and horribly stereotypical accents seem to give the intention that Deep Silver wanted players that weren't so pedantic as I am about accents that are horribly overdone, now, I understand that they wanted players to be able to instantly identify with the characters they're playing, but seriously? With content as Aussie rich as Dead Island is, you don't need them to all be bigger bogans than Steve Irwin for international, RE: Non-Australian players to recognise who these NPCs are.

Gameplay: I've currently been playing as Sam B the blunt "expert" because, why wouldn't I want to hit zombies with a solid object. But it doesn't feel to me that I'm actually hitting these zombies, I don't get any feeling of satisfaction from it, whereas in "Burn Zombie Burn" the baseball bat has a satisfying crunch at the end of a swing, confirming that I did indeed hit said zombie.

Story: I honestly haven't gotten that far into it, and I'm not going to spoil it, but while the possibility of a zombie apocalypse is indeed unlikely, it's just a bit too fantastic for me.

Overall: I'm going to give it a 5/10 being that while I did enjoy playing, it just doesn't provide me with enough entertainment to keep playing.

How about you? What are your thoughts, leave a comment detailing what you thought, and a game you'd like to see reviewed.