PREEMPTIVE STRIKE! Terraria Xbox 360 Edition – Slimes! Slimes everywhere!

I loved Minecraft, but eventually called it quits after reaching a point where I couldn’t force myself to destroy and build yet another floating castle. My girlfriend played the hell out of Terraria for PC last year, but I passed it up since I don’t really do the whole PC thing. Now that Terraria is available for consoles, I picked it up last night only to get sucked in to yet another time sink.

"Here we go again", I thought. 40 hours of doing nothing.

Terraria is often labeled as a "2D Minecraft", and I can agree with that to an extent. In my opinion, Terraria does offer a lot of similarities to Minecraft where you spend a lot of your time harvesting materials used to craft weapons, armor and building a fortress to keep the monsters at bay when night falls. That’s really where the similarities end, though.

Terraria offers NPCs that can act as vendors, a currancy system used to purchase additional items and the ability to summon large bosses to fight in an old-school RPG showdown. At its root, it’s still a very bare bones time sink, but the ability to seek out and destroy massive bosses for better loot caters to my inner RPG nerd a lot more than the crafting focus of Minecraft. Unfortunately, there is still no story to keep things moving, but that was to be expect.

The controls seemed to port over nicely from the PC version, using the right analog to aim in two different ways. The default way moves the cursor in the direction you move it, but will snap back in black when you let it go. By clicking in the right analog, it now acts as a mouse cursor that sticks in place. The default option works well if you’re digging or fighting monsters, but the secondary option works nicely when you’re trying to build with precision or place torches.

So far we’re both enjoying Terraria on the 360 via split-screen co-op, even with this being her second go at the game albeit on a different platform. If you’ve played either version, what did or didn’t you like about it? Do you prefer Minecraft or Terraria?