TwilightBard: Wait wait wait wait wait....Metroidvania is old school now? Shit, I feel old...or are we talking about how ass confusing the original Metroid was?

Virama: Hmmm just saw this on steam for ten bucks... It looks JAM PACKED with content. But I want a real review from someone who has actually played it.

Is it fun?

Metro09: Well, considering I was playing Metroid and Castlevania on the NES in 1986ish, then yeah, I would think that qualifies as 'old school.'

Sogi-Ya: bloody Steam got their $10, but I'll be damned if I install that client.

... 'nuff said about that.

Fujek: My bad, I should have stated that I meant distinct kind of monsters as in requiring a different tactics/strategy, or even actually requiring strategy at all. Oh, wait. I did...

I've seen and fought every single opponent in the game, thanks for the link though.

SPOILER WARNING! PLEASE DO NOT READ IF YOU WANT TO EXPLORE ON YOUR OWN!

There are three and only three different monsters in Terraria today, if you ignore variance in Hitpoints and graphics, which simply doesn't qualify as distinctively different to me.

1) You have various incarnation of plain, dumb, jump and run, follow the target creatures, namely Angry Bones, Goblin Peon, Goblin Thief, Goblin Warrior, Man Eater (slight variation here), Skeleton, Slime (including Pinky) and Zombie.

2) You have the many a fly around enemies (which you could group further into ignoring ground or not if it would really make a big enough difference) including Bone Serpent, Burning Skull, Demon Eye, Devourer, Eater of Souls, Eater of Worlds, Eye of Cthulu, Giant Worm, Hornet, Meteor Head and Servant of Cthulu.

3) There are some teleport and shoot monsters like Dark Caster, Fire Imp and Goblin Sorcerer.

And that's it. As for the difficulty, I doubt that you require more than 8 health potions for Skeletron and it shouldn't get you even remotely close to danger. The whole Goblin invasion ended up draining me a whole single health potion, simply because I was getting a bit lax towards the end. The only real threat I found was in the dungeon, simply because of the mass of enemies spawning while trying to open chests and bone serpents pushing you into lava.
Non of the creatures required me to take a different approach from 'stand there and shoot/hit', occasionally dodging an attack.

There's a plethora of possibilities to create a challenging and different encounter with distinct creatures and I'd be happy to iterate on my vision of the concept if you want.

DrakeFox: It needs DirectX as well as the XNA framework.

superfly2000: By just looking at videos I must say it looks childish compared to Minecraft, which just looks cool....

Also probably it seems more aimed at the PvP kidz?

Then its not 3D either....which adds a lot to the spacial feeling in Minecraft....

drmlessgames: This is one of the first commercial games written in xna, isn it? That makes it windows only unfortunately.

Metro09: Well, considering I was playing Metroid and Castlevania on the NES in 1986ish, then yeah, I would think that qualifies as 'old school.'

Sogi-Ya: *shrug* not like it's a big secret, so why not ...

Raise your right hand and swear that you will not only pay for a copy on steam, but also that you will buy a second copy should the game's developer see fit to pull their heads out of their asses and release a non steam dependent version ... additionally you acknowledge that despite paying for a copy of the game you are still technically pirating it because the licence you purchased from Steam dictates that you let them cram that client up your ass and then bark like a dog about how much you love it. So if, for some dumb fuck reason, you get caught and subsequently have your steam account baned: crying "well I didn't know I wasn't supposed to ..." is total bull shit; man up and own your actions that continuing in this endeavor is intentionally breaking the TOS on your steam account.

k, now that that is out of the way:

There's a cracked version out there, no idea if it's exactly the same version of what you can get off of steam not, but it works: do a search for "Terraria non steam."

all you gotta do is install the XNA framework redistributable and .net 4 (both included), naturally online wont work correctly because the steam dependency has been hacked ... true to form though it seems like people have even figured out how to get around that using a VPN client.