Terraria, Terraria, Terraria. What to say that won't have been said already? Nothing, probably, but I'll do my best;

Terraria throws you into what appears to be some form of fantasy post-apocolytical world with no instructions, story, nothing. As a player you then sandbox your way through surviving the nights in a fusion of combat, exploration and crafting scenarios. Whilst there is a story and objectives to the game, ultimately it is fully player oriented. You'll quickly form your own goals and set about pursuing those, probably for hours on end as you traverse expanse caverns, biomes, discover loot and build up a house, a village and defensive/offensive equipment.

The game suits mostly explorer and killer archetypes; there's big bad bosses to fight, but they won't appear until you've done certain things, which require a level of skill/ability to make sure they won't just surprise you when you're weak. Explorers will love the randomly generated terrain and finding all the potential secrets and underground houses which appear in different places, with different contents every time. Combine this with a friend or few and...well...there goes your holiday.

There is difficulty, however, for players to simply launch into a multiplayer option. There's no simple inbuilt obvious system to facilitate simply creating and joining a game, you need to be either knowledgable in servers, IPs and such or look it up online. I resorted to using Hamachi just because it was the simplest for me to learn and teach others, but I know there's other (probably better) techniques out there. Regardless, some proper multiplayer support would go a long way.

Additionally some players may get bored without having the set goals and tasks apparent, especially if you launch into it with no knowledge of anything and find the whole discovery of the item creation and exploration frustrating. For the most part, however, the game is a shining example of simple polished mechanics, and caters nicely to most through a consistent increase in difficulty and risk/reward type situations. The recent updates which were a surprise added a lot of extra content which is more than enough to get you to return to the game, and the world offers unlimited replayability.

Overall, Terraria is a fantastic game, albeit simple. It has strong mechanics and greatly encourages player oriented goals and can entertain one for yonks. The multiplayer can be fiddly, but works well enough once you figure it out and adds a lot to the fun of the world. There's heaps to do, always new things to find and offers endless replayability, suitable to keep in your library and revisit biannually for about 40 hour blocks (in my exp). Players who enjoy exploring, creating, killing, skill like games, self discovery, sandbox and some social aspects will get a lot of mileage from this game. Those chasing stories less so, although there's unspoken and aesthetically conveyed stuff there under the surface.

9.5/10