Overview
Impatience kills, or at least it killed me in Terra Randoma. Over, and over again. Terra Randoma plays in a deceptively simple way that flows so fast that it’s easy to forget that it’s a turn-based roguelike game. That is until I’m suddenly looking at the game over the screen because I just HAD to push further into that dungeon.
You can find a video version of this review on YouTube!
The core of the game is simple, you make a move, and time passes. Hours if you’re in the overworld, less if you’re in a battle. This generally means that you take a turn, and then your enemies take a turn. However, your speed stat can sometimes grant you an “extra” turn so to speak.
In Terra Randoma, you explore a procedurally generated world, visit towns, take on quests, brew potions, and cook food as you navigate the world attempting to…do…something…I can’t actually remember what it was I was supposed to be doing, mainly because I died a lot and my Hall of Legends is filled to the brim with my failures.
| Gideon’s Bias | Terra Randoma Information |
|---|---|
| Review Copy Used: No | Publisher: Deniz K. |
| Hours Played: 10+ | Type: Full Game |
| Reviewed On: PC | Platforms: PC |
| Fan of Genre: Yes | Genre: Roguelike |
| Mode Played: Normal, Ironman | Price: $14.99 |
A Non-Randoma Fate
Despite me lamenting my failures, those failures stem from Terra Randoma specifically allowing me to fail the way I chose. There is a variety of difficulty settings in Terra Randoma, but that statement isn’t doing true justice to the plethora of choices you have. While it does have your standard easy, normal, and hard modes. You also choose other variables that affect your experience.
For example, the layout of the map drastically affects the difficulty as sailing isn’t cheap and bigger maps mean longer journeys, which means more food and rest will be needed. Beyond that, you always choose how the game handles failure. You can choose to have no real penalty upon death, some penalties, or go straight to Iron Man mode where it deletes your character upon when you die.
I exclusively played with Ironman mode simply because that’s how I prefer to play these types of games. You, however, don’t have to do that. Terra Randoma gives you plenty of choices about how to play the game, and that’s fantastic.
It’s really important to me that these difficulty dials don’t only go lower, but higher as well. That’s something games these days tend to put on the cutting board.
Yer a Witcher Harry
You pick a starting class and astrological sign, but your character’s development is up to you. Be a head-strong axe-wielding pile of muscles, a bookworm that calls down death from the sky, a sneaky sneak with a silver tongue, or any combination thereof.
Every playstyle feels different, although no matter what I played, I often felt like the world’s worst Witcher. That’s because there are a few key principles to actually doing well in Terra Randoma. Patience and Prep. If there’s a dungeon, it pays to be prepared. Stock up on a variety of potions and elixirs, be fully rested, have plenty of food packed, and keep your gear in tip-top shape.
Once you are actually down in the muck, you should most certainly not just click the mouse making your little figure bump uglies with the uglies until one of you dies. The number of times I did that is embarrassing as my impatience often got the best of me. I would say, “I totally got this!” when I did not, in fact, not have it.
The game is upfront with all its information and you have to pay attention to the enemy types and what sorts of abilities they are packing and act accordingly. Funnel them into choke points, pick your targets, and sometimes, flee to survive another day, even if you lose some reputation with the various towns. You can’t make a name for yourself if you’re dead. Just ask all the heroes I lost, oh wait, you can’t because they are dead.
The combat is pretty clever. You have basic melee and ranged attacks that you perform just by clicking, but you also obtain talent stones that make up special abilities and spells. Talents have a cooldown and consume stamina. If you’re low on stamina, you get hungry faster. If it gets too low, your speed drops, which means enemies get extra turns for every turn you take.
Assuming no enemies are around, you can just wait a while to regain some stamina. But stamina potions are gonna be your best friend here, allowing you to fight and use talents without relying on the passage of time. You have to carefully manage your health, stamina, hunger, and resources to succeed, and that pre-dungeon prep definitely makes it more satisfying when you manage to do well.
Choose Your Own Adventure
Terra Randoma is interesting because it offers a fairly simple framework, but your playstyle alters how you interact with it. On paper, you’re really just moving from town to quest location and back again. But it’s the choices you make and how you’ve built your character that matters.
For example, no matter what type of character you play, you are going to need food and potions. If you play a character with cooking and alchemical skills, you can be somewhat self-sufficient, especially if you also have points in the Wilderness skill. At the same time, you might be lacking in other important areas.
If you don’t have those skills, you are probably stronger in some respects but have to pony up gold for potions and food. Perhaps you stick around an Alchemist’s tower and deliver ingredients to them for the extra cash since you aren’t using them.
If you have speechcraft, you can get better rewards and talk your way out of certain situations. While thievery lets you steal and get scouting advantages. You can be a heavily armored tank of a warrior, or a wise sage who reads books before selling them to the library.
If you have the right skills, you can fish for food, mine ore for weapon upgrades, forage for supplies, and more. And if you don’t, you have to improvise with what you do have to make up the difference and that’s pretty neat.
Your skills, attributes, and equipment affect all of your statistics, but your talents aren’t gated by any of them. You can walk around as a big dumb warrior with a big hammer and still use the poison arrow and frost cone talents, for example. They are just more or less effective based on your character. I really enjoy the flexibility present in Terra Randoma.
You choose your quests, what towns to gain reputation in, when to chase down treasures from the lore you spend, and how to react to the myriad of random choices and events you come across. An open-world roguelike is a pretty cool idea and Terra Randoma uses it well.
Verdict
Terra Randoma is a great little roguelike with a bunch of replay value that makes it more than worth its meager asking price. It’s not as deep as many other roguelikes out there, but it’s also nowhere near as complicated and offers you a wide variety of ways to play with its character-building and difficulty settings. If you enjoy permadeath like I do, it’s there. If you don’t, you don’t have to play with it.
Its lightweight survival elements mesh great with the resource management nature of its combat and its open world makes for an interesting sandbox of possibilities as you choose where to go, what to do, and why.
Terra Randoma is a pick-up-and-play roguelike which is in itself a pretty rare thing. Yet it still offers plenty to think about, and several dials you can turn to choose just how hard you want to think in any given run.
