Terraria

Your first session is a wooden hut, a copper pickaxe and a growing suspicion that the cave under your feet goes much further down than it should.

A desktop sandbox in your pocket

This is the full desktop game rather than a trimmed mobile companion, and that one fact explains both why it is worth the asking price and where nearly all of its problems come from. It is for players who want somewhere to disappear into, who are happy to look things up, happy to lose to a boss and rebuild the arena, happy to spend an evening lining a corridor with torches so the spawns stop.

Pickaxes, bosses and the long climb

The loop is easy to describe and enormous in practice. Mine ore, smelt it, build better gear, use that gear to survive the places that killed you before. Feature parity with the desktop release means the boss roster, the events and the crafting tree arrived intact, so the game keeps opening up long after most mobile titles have shown you everything they hold.

What a single payment actually buys

No adverts. No energy meter. No currency shop wedged into the pause screen. You pay once and the whole thing is yours, which on this platform is close to remarkable and is the main reason it scores as well as it does.

Somewhere to build, not just to win

The sandbox half matters as much as the progression. People spend whole evenings on a house nothing in the game required, and the tools support that as seriously as they support the boss ladder.

The touchscreen tax

Controls are the wound that never quite heals, and the moment it bites is a hectic fight. You need to place a platform, swap weapon and dodge inside the same second, and both thumbs are covering the part of the screen you most need to see, so a misplaced block puts a wall where your escape route was. Unhurried mining and building are fine. Everything at speed is worse here than anywhere else this game exists. The interface being laid out for a monitor and merely shrunk makes the menus fiddlier on top of that, and most players end up solving all of it with a controller, which works but is a real mark against a paid mobile release.

If you have a controller in a drawer, or the patience to build muscle memory for the on-screen layout, this is an enormous amount of game for one payment. Give it a long evening rather than a bus ride, and let that first cave pull you under. The store page is below.