Geek Review: TerraTech Worlds (Early Access)

Indie developer Payload Studios’ TerraTech Worlds is a curious game. After our initial few hours with the early access build, we were left with feelings that no gamer nor reviewer wants to have: dreariness and drudgery. TerraTech Worlds’ resource gathering grind was slow and tedious, and the rewards for all our efforts seemed unsatisfactory. However, we trudged on, and soon found ourselves glad to have done so. Timely developer hotfixes (this is an early access title after all) eased much of the initial drudgery, and the game’s combat, customisation, and exploration features all became increasingly rewarding and exciting. After many more hours spent, we are happy to report that there is a compelling game in TerraTech Worlds, and initial developer engagement bodes well for a game that, with a little bit of balancing, might just turn out to be an excellent addition to the exploration and excavation genre.

TerraTech Worlds is a game with a simple enough premise. You are a surveyor in an unfamiliar land tasked with gathering materials to send off-world. By “surveyor”, we mean an immensely customisable vehicle, and by “unfamiliar land” we mean an alien planet filled with violent plants, antagonistic vehicles, and extreme environments. To liven up this task, TerraTech Worlds invites you to upgrade and expand both your Tech (the vehicle you control) and the base you choose to operate out of. These three pillars of world exploration and excavation, Tech customisation, and base building form the core gameplay loop of TerraTech Worlds.

Through a short, basic, and optional tutorial, you are instructed on the fundamental movement, combat and mining mechanics of the survival-mining game. They are easy enough. You explore and traverse the world using your Tech. A helpful hop mechanic allows you to get out places you might find yourself stuck in, whether between a tree and a steep incline or atop an ore deposit. To gather resources you use a mining laser to essentially inflict damage onto natural structures including rocks, trees, ore deposits, etc, until they break, yielding the resources you need. 

The world is not visually stunning but still appealing nonetheless; the visual style is No Man’s Sky-esque with pastel colours and rounded designs. It’s a style not all will like but aesthetically we found it pleasant, though we would have preferred higher detail, better lightning and a richer soundscape. But for a S$26 early-access game, we found it acceptable. Menus are well crafted and well integrated – opening a crafting or storage menu did not take us out of the experience of being a technologically advanced surveyor on a foreign planet. All the menus, designed as holographic projections, felt like natural extensions of the Tech itself and appropriate for the setting.

After a brief introductory cutscene (the story is a barebones affair – really just light cladding for the game’s deeper survival, resource-gathering structure) you are set loose to explore and excavate this new frontier. This frontier is different from what modern gaming survival standards usually dictate. It’s not procedurally generated but rather a 300km² planet designed by developers. In our playtest, however, we did not find it wanting. With varied biomes and weather conditions – extreme cold, lightning storms – its forests, mountains, and beaches, provided much to take in, and much to be wary of.

Apart from naturally occurring structures and resource-yielding sites, the world is also host to a smattering of other seemingly randomly generated Techs. These Techs will attack if you get too close, and while they don’t put up too much of a fight, they can apply enough pressure that an early call to end a resource-gathering trip must be made. Apart from adding some danger to the world and the chance to use your offensive weaponry, these enemy Techs are great sources of new parts that you can customize your own Tech with.

Combat is simple, but enjoyable. It is quick and snappy (combat engagements rarely last longer than 15 seconds) and is mostly about placing yourself in a favourable position relative to enemy Techs, while concentrating your fire on identified points of vulnerability. Focusing fire on the enemy Tech’s weaponry will render them without offensive capabilities – making them a sitting duck – while taking out a wheel or key connector in their design will hamper their mobility so severely that they’ll be easy pickings for you. Destroying other Techs yields a random drop of items that can be picked up for storage, or immediately applied to your own Tech. Procuring parts from combat with other Techs is a much easier and significantly more enjoyable process than gathering resources and crafting them yourself (but more on that later). Catching sight of a Tech on the horizon and pursuing them in hopes of obtaining a new wheel, but being blessed by the RNG gods with a laser cannon is a feeling that kept us keenly on the hunt for enemy Techs.

Tech customisation is both incredibly simple, and profoundly deep. Parts connect like LEGO bricks, snapping together intuitively. You’ll only need a cab and as many wheels as physics demands to have an operable vehicle. However, the real thrill of Tech customisation is constructing a vehicle that fulfills the needs that you need it to. Interested in a resource harvesting build? Place more mining lasers on your Tech but make sure to give them some height differentiation so their line of sights don’t cross! Interested in waging war on the other Techs? Make sure to place armoured blocks to protect your Tech from enemies, saddle up your vehicle with weaponry, and fill your inventory with ammo. 

Tech customisation is immediate and can be done anywhere while in-game. By pressing the Tab key followed by the spacebar, your Tech is lifted into the air, and a holographic overlay appears, allowing you to remove, rearrange, and add new parts to your Tech. This customisation is well designed with multiple handy features, such as rotating your tech, zooming in and out, cloning/mirroring parts, making this aspect of the game truly enjoyable. The efficiency and operation of this system left us with no complaints. We were quite pleased to realise that the developers also added colour customisation options for your Tech right out of the gate, with no harvesting, mining, or grinding required.

TerraTech Worlds offers a large variety of parts to customise your Tech with. For example, while playing we would pick up a surprising number of wheels, all with different features. Some offered greater offroad capability and propulsion, while others offered more maneuverability and some just looked like they suited the style of build we wanted. But customisation is not unlimited however, and users have to be careful not to overload the onboard reactor, which can overwhelm and destroy the Tech. Gamers have to manage their Techs weight too as heavy Techs that are weighed down by too many parts become slow and maneuver poorly. The physics of the game were appropriate and Tech creation and design is a logical affair; a poorly designed Tech was a poorly performing Tech.

Certain parts offer extra buffs such as increasing reactor efficiency, increasing storage or adding extra battery power for mining lasers. Interestingly enough, the global environment factored into Tech operation too.The extreme cold on mountains would allow you to overload your Tech “safely” as the cold kept overall Tech temperatures down. Paying attention to the environment is important in TerraTech Worlds. The Tech customisation is a standout feature of this game and we found ourselves enjoying many hours designing, redesigning and imagining new Tech builds. At times however, and quite frustratingly so, the weight and reactor capacities did limit our creativity, serving as bothersome lines in the sand in an otherwise expansive sandbox!

Apart from via the aforementioned combat encounters, parts can be obtained via crafting through base facilities. This is where the game really struggles to keep players having a good time as the requisite resource gathering is so tedious, and slow. Destroying ore deposits take far too long; lasers run out of battery too quickly resulting in frequent waits as they cooled down; resource yields are low, and inventory space is lacking. Resources are also sometimes hard to identify and locate. So imagine coming across recipes that required aluminum, or iron, or copper, or silicon, only to ask yourself time and time again, ‘Where did resource X come from again?’. Not fun. These balancing issues unfortunately severely slow down the fundamental resource-gathering process and general enjoyment of the game.

The crafting process is laborious in its own way too. Crafting takes more time than is pleasant, as items have to be gathered from vastly different locations, and sometimes require the slow process of refining. Through all of this, the base still requires enough power for structures to run but the generators only have space for 30 pieces of carbon to burn! Crafting items doesn’t feel like a fetch quest, but rather a mixture of fetch quests that are drawn out by long crafting times, low resource yields, high resource requirements, taxing inventory management, and generators that consume fuel all too quickly. Additionally, the game is not the most helpful in guiding players to understand what structures work for what purpose and where resources could be found. Again, we definitely felt a bit confused and overwhelmed by the sheer number of things we could build in our base, and found ourselves at a loss in identifying which ore to seek when resource gathering for specific items.

Exhausting resource gathering aside, building and designing your base as a feature is as enjoyable as customising your tech. New base structures also open new avenues of resource refining (automation included) and Tech customization further deepening the gameplay loop. TerraTech Worlds truly has a huge sandbox to play in. Like with Tech customisation, base parts snap together like LEGO, and there is such a variety of structures to build, with so many permutations that the options just feel endless. Unfortunately, like with the procurement of Tech parts, the drudgery of resource gathering and crafting means that we are more likely to procure base structures by raiding and looting enemy structures, than crafting our own. However, the challenge in procuring parts for both your Tech and your base feel more like balance issues, than fundamental gameplay issues.

TerraTech Worlds is a demanding game, especially in its first few hours. But because it is, figuring things out and running your base well feels like a genuine achievement. While there are no levels to gain, or achievements to unlock, running your base more efficiently and managing power supplies are the ranks to gain, and the “achievements” to unlock. Through our review period, developers released a patch that quite immediately dealt with some of what we found to be quite serious teething issues. Resource gathering time was cut down, yields were increased, laser use was prolonged, and Tech reactor limits were increased. This engagement bodes well for the game. When TerraTech Worlds struggles, it doesn’t do so because it is a bad game, but because it is a poorly balanced game. Fundamentally, we feel like TerraTech Worlds is a good game, and with a bit of balancing through this early access period it might just turn into an excellent one.

Almost 15 years ago, a few gamers, myself included, purchased Minecraft Beta Version 1.2 by making a PayPal payment through an unsophisticated webpage, with no idea of the exciting future ahead, and the many, many, many hours we would eventually spend in the game. While we doubt TerraTech Worlds will reach the mass-appeal of Minecraft, the potential of a long-running game is here and with continued tweaks and balances, it can definitely provide hours upon hours of enjoyable exploration and excavation for its players.

This type of gaming is not for the faint of heart, but for those willing to figure it out, there is serious satisfaction to be found. We feel like we barely scratched the surface of the potential and possibilities of TerraTech Worlds, but what we did realise is that it has both potential and possibilities in spades. TerraTech Worlds has an exciting future filled with new worlds, aerial vehicles, terraforming and more ahead of it, but even as it stands now, for those willing to brave the growing pains of early access, TerraTech Worlds offers a whole load of fun for a fair price.