Review | Teratopia

A naughty sense of humor, this is how the developer describes Teratopia. The only bit of humor that can be linked to this game is poor players buying this horrendous game. I honestly hope this is the worst game I have to review in 2021 because I can’t imagine playing a more boring, broken, and terribly performing game. I’m not happy to write such negative words, I can imagine that developers from Ravegan S.A. won’t like to read this. It is our job to be honest here, Teratopia has a high chance to be the worst game of the year and we’ve only just started it.

We played this borefest of a game for way too long, five hours on Series X

What we liked!

• It is remarkable but nothing | I have nothing positive to write about Teratopia.

Somewhere between

• Colorful and charming visuals but poorly optimized, questionable design for an M-rated game | Teratopia doesn’t look bad on screenshots or even while playing. This is something that could run on Xbox 360 for example, nothing wrong with that but issues arise pretty fast after you start playing. To begin, parts of the world randomly disappear and start to suddenly pop up. Don’t get me wrong, this isn’t your normal ‘acceptable’ pop-up that you see in almost every game but entire level design popping centimeters before your character. The enemy design seems to be made for kids, despite the M-rating. Now, there is absolutely nothing wrong with that but it is a bit confusing. It’s like you have this M-rated Paw-Patrol or Super Lucky game, it just doesn’t make much sense. That said, the best thing about Teratopia is the visuals and that’s even below average but I suppose it gets the job done.

What we disliked

• Performance | I was playing on the high-end Xbox Series X, but still this poorly looking game performed incredibly bad. I can’t imagine how this must run on Xbox One or other platforms less powerful. Often the game simply freezes for a few seconds or the frame rate drops into single digits. Parts of the world disappear or simply won’t load for seconds. Button inputs are ignored, attacks don’t register or boss fights go game-breaking wrong forcing you to restart the entire level again. People that complain about Cyberpunk 2077 should play this… their minds will explode the multiverse. Absolutely baffling that Teratopia releases in this state.
• Stale and uninteresting gameplay loop | I applaud that they tried to do something different with the ability to summon minions but the combat system is totally lacking any kind of fun. You can’t expect to release an action brawler with a dull fighting system and expect that buyers love your product. In Teratopia you only continue to press the same button a million times to kill an uninspiring horde of enemies. It doesn’t mind what class you picked, melee, ranged or poison it is generally always the same. Picking the poison class comes with an entirely different issue, you have to stack the poison damage five times but good luck finishing levels with this class as the damage output is so low compared to the two other classes that I simply consider this class completely broken.
• This game doesn’t know about checkpoints | There is nothing more fun-killing to reach a boss-fight after spending twenty to half an hour on boring mobs fights and having to do all of that again because you failed to defeat the boss. Or worse, restart it because the boss fight is glitched. Not only is the questionable humor about a joint-smoking Jamaican weird, but I also hated him because he got stuck in a state where he couldn’t be damaged, multiple times! Forcing a complete restart of the level.
• My main annoyance was the sluggish controls combined with a terrible camera | I’m not a game designer so I don’t know how hard it is to match a button press with an animation. Considering most, if not all games don’t have this issue I don’t think it is that hard. It is for Teratopia though, I couldn’t count how many times my heavy attack failed because it didn’t register my longer button press. Couldn’t count how many times my sprint stopped for no reason at all. And couldn’t count how many times the camera decided to not be in front of me anymore.

CONCLUSION

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