In a world saturated with sandbox survival games, you have to start wondering what games will find their unique stake in the market to make themselves stand out from the rest. I want to say that TerraTech by Payload Studios meets that requirement, but at the same time, it doesn’t.
The basic premise of the game is that you go around with your car (which is controlled by a “cab”), killing stuff and doing missions and using loot to build on top of your car. It would seem like a really cool idea, but once you get past the gimmick, you realize that there just… isn’t much to it. To explain further, I mostly played the campaign mode. Here, you get plopped down on some random planet for the tutorial which explains what you’re supposed to do. Simple enough. They have you kill an enemy, steal its stuff to put on your car, set up batteries and repair stations, go to a shop/mission central node, and then you’re pretty much free to do what you want. But then you get to a loss of what to do, even. The missions are boring fetch quests, which I got pretty uninterested in quickly, so I just started roaming around and killing enemies for new blocks.
When I was playing, I would find an enemy with a new thing to steal, and then tack it on and often say to myself, “Okay, well now what?” That’s the main problem with this game. None of the blocks I encountered incurred any real noticeable or meaningful benefit other than making the car look ridiculous and ugly (then again, I’m bad at being creative in sandbox games). And for being the game’s main core loop, it was pretty lackluster. Maybe I didn’t get far enough for it to be interesting (I did see planes and flying cars in the trailer), but it quickly became a boring grind just spamming attacks on enemies and doing fetch quests. Plus, blocks die pretty easily and the shield and repair mechanic in addition to the recharging just made me not want to even bother. You have to place down a solar generator, place the battery on it to charge it, wait, then move the battery back to your car, for the shield/repair node to just die after 10 minutes anyway. It’s extremely tedious.
I tried drilling stuff on the planet to sell, but I quickly realized that none of the buyable items were even interesting enough to buy. Plus, item collection is really awkward because you only have space for 5 pieces of, say, ore, and then you have to go all the way back with this goofy stack of items floating vertically on top of your vehicle to the mission/shop node. Half the time, the node won’t even properly accept the items, so you have to keep rolling back and forth until it accepts it, and it takes forever. I read online that you can use these items to manufacture other things with conveyor belts, but I didn’t manage to make it that far, nor am I sure that I want to learn how that mechanic even works because it looks incredibly complicated.
As for the visual elements, I guess they’re alright. There are four types of blocks that I was able to tell that can exist: white, red + white + blue, yellow, and black. I’m not entirely sure what the difference between them is besides aesthetic reasons, and it’s pretty limited in that regard. The scenery is alright, but the world just seems, I don’t know, empty. Like, there are just sparse trees and rocks here and there and the odd enemy, with some unknown person communicating to you by radio. I mean, maybe it goes in line with how it’s a foreign planet without much going on, but still, it feels kind of bad from a video-game perspective and it’s hard to suspend my disbelief, as much as I want to. Once you realize that none of the diversity in the scenery really matters, it makes you realize how empty it really is. “Oh wow, there’s a yellow rock? Wow, there’s a BLUE rock? They drop different items?” And then you say, “Ah, they just sell for different values. Okay.”
The controls are obviously ported from PC to Switch, which always has issues because developers end up taking a lazy route of using a cursor to select menu items and using random buttons for menus. This game is no exception. I found the menus somewhat weird to navigate as there were some random bumper + ABXY button combinations to access certain things, but it was mostly okay otherwise. The cursor was also necessary, I suppose, to be able to tack on blocks in a precise manner, but it always feels awkward regardless of the game. I’m really not sure why more devs don’t just implement touch controls to solve that issue. But otherwise, tacking on blocks felt intuitive and easy, so I’m pretty satisfied about that.
At a fundamental level, the game has a really neat concept that I think it can build upon in the future. But as of right now, it is far from a finished game, and I honestly can’t recommend buying it because there just isn’t much to do, unless you like the sandbox nature and want to build a custom car from the remains of your enemies. I have to give it a 5/10, but hopefully it can bring that number up in the future.
Check Out the TerraTech Nintendo Switch Trailer:
TerraTech is available for Nintendo Switch, Xbox One via the Microsoft Store, PC via Steam, and PlayStation 4.
Nintendo Switch Review
Video games are my passion. I've played countless games for 15+ years on various different consoles ranging many genres. Favorites are action/adventure and RPG's just because they're so immersive and I love being able to lay out a strategy for going down tech trees and looking for loot, but I'll pretty much play anything that isn't a sports game.
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