Terraria Takes Over Consoles Early 2013

I should be excited 505 Games is bringing its hit PC brick-building adventure game, Terraria, to consoles, but I'm not. Why? Because Terraria and I got along perhaps a little too well. It was one of those games that sunk its hooks in deep and stole far too many hours of my free time, making it difficult to keep up with a professional or social life. Now that it's coming to XBLA and PSN in early 2013 with brand new content, I know I'm going to have to quit my jobs and fake my own death in order to free up enough time to play it.

At first glance, it's easy to write Terraria off as a 2D Minecraft clone. The building, digging and exploration bits are all basically ripped from that game, but Terraria also features a huge emphasis on exploration and RPG adventure. You can build whatever your heart desires and, when you're not burning through all of the daylight hours doing that, you can craft items and armor, buy stuff from NPS, explore a dungeon, fight one of the game's many bosses, dig to the depths of hell, discover a hidden underground forest, mine for ore, be on the lookout for a floating island, defend your home against invading goblins, equip life-saving items and take part in about a billion other nifty pastimes.

Terraria is, quite literally, a do it yourself RPG. There isn't a lot of character interaction, but the randomly generated worlds are massive and absolutely overflowing with things to do. You can even jump into a friend's world or a randomly hosted world and adventure (or wage war) with fellow players.

In case all of that fanboy rambling didn't make it painfully clear, Terraria is an absolute treat for fans of the genre. I'm delighted a whole new audience will have the opportunity to experience the game when it releases for Xbox 360 and PS3 next year but, like I said, the promise of new content and being able to play it on my big screen TV has me more than a little frightened about how much more of my life the game is going to claim.