Wading into combat without shields isn’t advisable – dying means either paying a hefty sum in gold to get your vehicle back, or taking the option of a free starter vehicle and investing the not insignificant time it takes to re-build a creation capable of taking on larger opponents (though the free vehicle is at least scaled somewhat to your mission level). However, early game survivability is low which leads to frustration – players will have to wait a fair while before they can obtain larger batteries to power their shield and healing bubbles, but stopping regularly to recharge batteries is unnecessarily arduous. Block and resource chunks each have their own corresponding collector devices, though you can always just stick interesting blocks to your vehicle to nail that classic “picked up furniture without measuring the car” aesthetic.Ĭombat in TerraTech is a mixed bag – there’s a definite joy in filling every surface of a large vehicle with small cannon and greeting roaming vehicles with a hail of bullets. Alternatively, players can earn blocks (and gold) through completing the missions also dispensed at trading posts, or salvaging blocks from vehicles they defeat in combat (though you often destroy the best blocks in the process). Once extracted, you could run these chunks through a complex manufacturing base to refine and fabricate the blocks you need for your creations, but this is an intimidating option in need of a more robust tutorial than the game provides, and unlikely to be the route most players take considering the campaign offers far simpler alternatives.īuilding blocks can instead be more easily acquired by taking resource chunks to trading posts to earn gold, which can then be simply used to purchase new blocks. The game’s raw resource chunks are instead solely locked up inside the trees, rocks and mineral patches that pepper the land, ready to be bashed or mined out with various pieces of equipment.
The undulating hills of Terratech’s landscapes are obviously conceptually more true to reality than the Minecraft’s bizarre, blocky worlds (a hell of a lot easier to drive on too), but they’re also non-interactive and entirely unmalleable. The focus on player-controllable vehicles does mean that Terratech misses out one of the most interesting parts of that Minecraft formula: a world entirely composed of building blocks you can reshape into your own creations. Tellingly, there is no touchscreen support in handheld mode. Something like Banjo-Kazooie: Nuts & Bolts was far more successful in this regard.
A good chunk of the interface works under the assumption that dragging and dropping items into place is an easy and comfortable motion – true for a mouse, but something to be tolerated on a controller. Though the principles of construction are delightfully easy to understand, the actual process can become exhausting on a controller.
The controller mapping is a valiant attempt at marshalling the complexity of the construction system, but it is all too easy to forget that you are in a certain editing mode or sub menu, and what that means for the function of each button.
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Overall, there is a sense that all aspects of control and user interface needed a more ambitious overhaul when transitioning from PC to console. Descriptions of blocks in your inventory feature no useful statistics to aid comparison – furthermore, whether you’re playing docked or undocked, the whole game is plagued by small fonts that make reading what text there is uncomfortable. TerraTech definitely provides an interesting construction set, but it can be difficult to discover and enjoy its nuances. There is a range of sizes, with diverse aesthetic and mechanical functions that allow imaginative players to make and enjoy in the game’s generated worlds. These cover grey military hardware, yellow construction vehicles, colourful racing vehicles and black stealthy builds. Blocks fall into four distinct mechanical themes, associated with the rival corporations of the game’s lore.
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