Teravit

Genre: Open-World Action-RPG / Content Creation Tool / Misc.

Players: 1-64 Co-Op / Competitive (Online), Online Content Sharing

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Review:

WARNING: THIS GAME HEAVILY PUSHES MICROTRANSACTIONS

Teravit, released in 2023 on PC and Nintendo Switch, is a free-to-play game whose premise seems obvious right from starting it up – combining the gameplay and presentation of Minecraft with the user-created content of a game like Roblox. You can practically see the dollar signs popping into the eyes of the game’s creators.

Here’s thing, though. Minecraft is 12 years old now (older if you count the early builds, which go all the way back to 2009). Roblox is 17 years old. And while both games still have a strong following, Minecraft at least has countless clones and imitators, many of which are already on the Nintendo Switch.

That’s not to say Teravit doesn’t have its own innovations. There’s a nifty grappling hook tool, a Breath of the Wild-style glider, the ability to climb walls, and the content-creation angle is a good one… only… no, that’s been done too, and very well, in games like Dragon Quest Builders 2. Of course, this game is also free-to-play… but so is Trove…

Okay, so maybe this game isn’t doing anything truly new, but perhaps it does some of this stuff really well?

Well, the Minecraft side of things isn’t done especially well. The controls feel clunky, the world is large but not as vast as Minecraft’s virtually-endless procedurally-generated world, and so much about the gameplay design is jarring and unpolished.

Okay, what about the content-creation side of things? While certainly some players have managed to craft some impressive creations with Teravit, the game’s creation tools don’t seem especially accessible, with no tutorial for this section I could find.

Perhaps presentation is where this game shines, then? Well, I will credit this game on having some nice lighting, better-looking foliage than Minecraft, and some nice-looking water, but these improvements are undercut by absolutely abysmal framerates that can come crashing down even within the gameplay tutorial area. This is backed by fantasy-themed soundtrack that’s nice enough, but forgettable.

I should also mention that deciding to play Teravit means choosing to make a massive commitment. Oh, I’m not talking about the cost of microtransactions or the time you’d be sinking into a game like this… I’m talking about the 400-600MB size of this game’s save file. Not the game itself, the save file, and that’s just the size it starts at. In other words, that’s a massive amount of space you can’t offload onto a MicroSD card, it’ll just be stuck on your Nintendo Switch’s internal memory. Perhaps, given the countless elements that go into world creation here justifies that number, but that doesn’t make it any easier to swallow when you have to make space for this monstrosity.

Please don’t misunderstand me, I don’t think Teravit is outright bad, it’s just so astoundingly late to the party that there’s little here to convince anyone to play this game in 2023. By this point, if you fell in love with Minecraft or Roblox, you’re just going to stick with those games. If you enjoyed Dragon Quest Builders 2’s wonderful take on Minecraft’s formula, you’ve probably gotten your fill of that. If you just wanted something free, I guess you had Trove to fill that need. Pretty much all of these bases have been covered by this point. I suppose if you’ve just crawled out from under a rock and want something like Minecraft that’s free and has a user-made creative element, Teravit may be worth checking out. But for most other players, you likely already checked out the moment you saw “oh, another Minecraft clone…”

tl;dr – Teravit is a free-to-play game that seeks to combine Minecraft’s look and gameplay with a user-created marketplace a la Roblox. Unfortunately, not only are all of these elements extremely old and tired at this point, but nothing this game does is done especially well. And for a game that’s maybe the millionth Minecraft clone to hit the market, it really needed to do more than be yet another sub-par copycat game to add to the pile.

Grade: C-

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