After having played Terraria for a few years and finally beating MMFTW, I wanted to try out Calamity since a lot of the videos online look cool (like the Exo Mechs).
I saw another review thread for the mod and thought I might make my own now that I've fought every boss in Calamity (though I haven't beaten the Exo Mechs or Supreme Calamitas).
To be transparent, I played in Expert Revengeance. I started nurse cheesing a lot around Skeletron Prime, and also started using Luiafk for infinite potions (I also used recipe browser, boss checklist, veinminer, and super fishing rod). I hit a wall with Devourer of Gods and fought him and Yharon in a normal, non-revengeance world.
My tl;dr is 'Calamity is a great mod, and the people who worked on it should be proud'. Any specific details I point out should be tempered by that. So, here are my overall thoughts:
Game Progression
-Early game
To me, I've always felt like regular/Journey's End Terraria features biomes and the world itself as 'mini-bosses'. The first real puzzle is how to survive night time (or, in FTW, how to survive a blue slime). Then you have to figure out vertical movement in caves, then find a way to jump or fight past the evil biomes. The Jungle is especially deadly early on, and the underground desert. Only after these challenges do you start fighting bosses. Then, again, in Hardmode, you have to deal with new biomes all over, up until the Jungle Temple and Hardmode Dungeon.
Calamity adds a lot of bosses, but feels like it removes that other progression. Right off the bat, you're given fairly good weapons and items, including a summon. It felt kind of like Journey Mode.
I was playing as Rogue, so all the items and armor were new to me. I felt like there was a TON of options (I ended up getting a bouncing eyeball drop from Blood Moon early on that carried me). Snow bandit armor, victide armor, aerialite armor, etc. It seemed like the game was throwing armor and accessories at me and that the classic ores and drops didn't really matter (of course there are no classic rogue weapons! They reclassified all the throwing stuff).
Overall, this really changed the feel of the early game for me from 'survival simulator' to 'boss hunter.'.
-Hardmode
Right before hardmode I started getting Draedon Arsenal weapons and boy, these carried the game for me. I'd say I killed the majority of bosses with Draedon Arsenal. The tracking disk's stealth strike just slaughters the slime god and wall of flesh. The frequency manipulator was incredible.
At this point all the extra recipes and bosses were imo quite fun. Combining everything to get crazy accessories, hunting down new ores, and fighting wild bosses like Leviathan was fun.
I did notice the game started trending towards its final state here: janky jumping/dodging simulator. I say 'janky' because regular Terraria dodging is mainly based around doing one dodge at exactly the right moment (avoiding Empress of Light's sun dance, Moon Lord's laser, Fishron's third stage charge) while Calamity mod is more like 'I want you to dance around a pseudo-random hail of bullets for a couple of minutes'. Cryogen was my first real introduction to this, and I learned a lot about him as I farmed for the Kelvin Catalyst (which was SOOOOOO not worth it, just mildly better than Prismaline).
This is a huge point about Calamity vs Journey's end. Journey's End tries to remove any strategies that make bosses trivial, so Deerclops is immune when far away (so you can't put it in a box and shoot it), Moon Lord's laser isn't blocked by blocks (so you can't Valhalla face tank it any more), etc. Beyond that, though, you're free to experiment, so you can kill Plantera with teleporter cheese, or teleport back to nurse with mirror during moon lord, or actuate a ton of blocks to make Golem easier.
Calamity, though, instead of taking away overpowered strategies, forces you into a single strategy. Every boss is designed around 'you can only beat these by dancing for two minutes'. Adaptive damage reduction, adding more and more projectiles as fights go on, invulnerable stages, mirrors being blocked, catchup mechanisms, enforced borders, one-hit and two-hit kills, it's like the author said 'you have to play exactly the way I want or I'm going home'.
-Post-Moonlord
I had a wild swing here. From vanilla Terraria, this is usually my endpoint, so I felt like I was done here, and providence was so hard I felt like giving up.
Once I beat providence though (Blood pact really came through since the stars can't crit, and turning off backgrounds helped a lot too), the post-moonlord game was AMAZING. Tons of new bosses and areas to explore, and so many items. The Wave Pounder has to be one of my favorite weapons ever; it's so fun seeing 12 or 15 invasion enemies and wiping them off the face of the earth with a stealth strike. It has surprisingly high single target damage, too; I beat all 3 envoys and polterghast with it.
The amount of content here is stunning. Killing devourer of gods for the first time (alas, in a normal world, due to the one-hit kills), there is SO MUCH to craft and play around with, especially all the ultimate accessories that combine everything in the game.
I can't beat Exo Mechs and Supreme Calamitas (although I just tried both for the first time last night), but now that I've seen everything I'm satisfied and excited to try another class.
Graphics, themes, and music
I know there's been past problems with fans bashing both of these, so I'd first like to say 'Calamity's art is extremely impressive and is far beyond the quality of most non-commercial products'. The music is excellent.
Highlights to me include astral biome and enemies/bosses, providence and the crazy beasts that spawn in her areas (like the giant rock beast), the sunken sea, the aquatic scourge, the envoys of the devourer and the devourer himself, the arsenal labs, etc. All of the music was great, super catchy.
One problem with a community-led project is the lack of oversight and general lack of time. This leads to some mismatches with the base game and with the mod itself.
For instance, Journey's end does a good job of indicating strength via sprite appearance. Consider the zombie merman, the hemoglobin shark, and the dreadnautilus. If you showed someone all three and asked them to rank them by how strong they look, they'd get it right almost all the time. And weapons have a nice progression too, with stronger weapons generally having cooler effects as you go but not generally more elaborate sprites. For instance, look at the progression of mace->flaming mace->blue moon->sunfury->drippler crippler/flower pao->flairon. It goes from no effects or particles to some dust effects to single projectiles to a cloud of projectiles that home. The size of the actual weapon increases up to sunfury but after that changes focus on shape. Similarly, swords get bigger at first but max out around molten fury, later focusing on projectiles that get cool visual effects but not really larger.
Calamity strength signaling is all over the place. The Desert Scourge visually looks stronger than most pre-hardmode bosses and some of its drops (like a javelin) look incredibly elaborate while being very early-game material. Some new enemies like the dogs are huge while being very weak. The size of the weapons becomes entirely ludicrous at the end. When you've had a late-game rogue fight and the ground is littered with shards of Pentumbra, you look like a little kid wandering a grown-up's battlefield. And the weapons become 'the mega super weapon. The mega mega mega superweapon', and fire increasingly more projectiles. The best new Journey's end weapons focus on either whimsy (like the Pew-matic) or lighting effects (storm spear, blade staff, empress weapons).
Because it's all over the place, there are exploits. For instance, Nychthemeron is a wall-piercing homing weapon with high damage. Vanilla terraria rarely hands out any of those things until late game and I'm not sure it ever hands out a homing, wall piercing weapon (besides the best summons, like desert tiger staff and stardust dragon) becomes it trivializes so much of the game. But here you can get it right when hardmode starts.
Overall, the game is much darker and edgier. There is some humor, but even a lot of that is hard-edged humor (like the haha I'm an alcoholic NPC). All the lore is about torture, destruction, profaned things. Journey's end is more like 'haha funny skeleton...but what if it murdered you?' while Calamity Mod is like 'This skeleton is the amalgam of thousands of tortured souls. Its unbearable burden will not end even in death. I have seen this for millenia, and yet it is nothing compared to the further horrors that await you'.
If I could change one sprite in the game it'd be the squirrel staff. It's your first introduction to new calamity sprites and it is honestly a bit of a letdown compared to the rest of the mod.
Bosses
Let's compare calamity's new bosses to the Journey's end bosses (Queen Slime, Empress of Light, Deerclops and Dreadnautilus).
Both sets of bosses are focused on dodging. Queen Slime's bouncy slimes, Empress of Light's ethereal lances, and Deerclops' boulders are all pretty tricky to dodge, especially when multiple things are happening at once (like Sun Dance or the claws). These are quite similar to bosses like Cryogen, Slime God or Providence. The biggest difference to me is that Journey's End bosses tend to be smaller with a lot of focus on easily visible detail (like Deerclop's face or the Empress's beautiful wings), while Calamity bosses tend to be really ornate all over (which honestly isn't bad).
Journey's end bosses tend to have exploitable weaknesses that benefit over-preparers without rendering the fight trivial. A long skybridge and mount for Queen Slime, a flying mount and heavy single-target-damage weapon for Empress of light, a high platform for Deerclops. But none of that helps you in calamity; over-preparing with weapons gets your damage nerfed through adaptive damage reduction, and flying mounts are much slower than wings.
Biomes:
Calamity did really well here. The music for the sunken sea is beauitful. Astral infection looks awesome. Planetoids make space fun (although it does contribute to trivializing progression). The real draw for me is the abyss. I've always been intrigued by the water accessories but they're not useful by the time you get them in-game. The abyss makes water exploration frightening, rewarding, and fun. If I could take one part of Calamity into the main game, it would be this.
Journey's end adds more interesting structures to underground desert and adds oases and a few other mini-biomes which I think look visually quite lovely. The ocean caves do make water exploration a little more fun but not nearly as much as the abyss.
Non-combat part of the game
This is where calamity is the weakest, I think. Journey's end shows what's possible: beautiful micro-structures, really striking and distinguished new furniture sets (like bamboo) and purchasable items (like potted trees). Town pets, decorative trees, rain effects, cool pets like the pikachu one. And even though torch luck was frustrating at first, the new version of it really encourages some beautiful lighting effects.
I really missed pylons in Calamity; they make the game feel 'alive' in Journey's end, with the NPCs interacting. Pylons and conches make travel so convenient, I can't wait for them to be integrated.
Calamity adds a lot of furniture sets but since NPC houses don't really matter and there is so much content, I didn't really feel a strong reason to use them. Many of the sets looked visually the same, although the ueilbloom set was pretty cool! Endgame armors don't really stand out from each other. If someone showed you tarragon, bloodcore (?) armor, god-slayer armor and auric tesla armor and asked you if it was stronger than victide or daedalus armor, how would you know?
Overall conclusion:
The nice things is that you don't have to pick between them. Hopefully, Calamity will be updated to include Journey's end. Calamity mod is fantastic, and I can recommend it to anyone who like boss fights.
The things I appreciated most from Journey's End after playing calamity is how good the people doing lighting at Re-Logic are. Storm spear, eventide, empress's wings, they all look so good!
I saw another review thread for the mod and thought I might make my own now that I've fought every boss in Calamity (though I haven't beaten the Exo Mechs or Supreme Calamitas).
To be transparent, I played in Expert Revengeance. I started nurse cheesing a lot around Skeletron Prime, and also started using Luiafk for infinite potions (I also used recipe browser, boss checklist, veinminer, and super fishing rod). I hit a wall with Devourer of Gods and fought him and Yharon in a normal, non-revengeance world.
My tl;dr is 'Calamity is a great mod, and the people who worked on it should be proud'. Any specific details I point out should be tempered by that. So, here are my overall thoughts:
Game Progression
-Early game
To me, I've always felt like regular/Journey's End Terraria features biomes and the world itself as 'mini-bosses'. The first real puzzle is how to survive night time (or, in FTW, how to survive a blue slime). Then you have to figure out vertical movement in caves, then find a way to jump or fight past the evil biomes. The Jungle is especially deadly early on, and the underground desert. Only after these challenges do you start fighting bosses. Then, again, in Hardmode, you have to deal with new biomes all over, up until the Jungle Temple and Hardmode Dungeon.
Calamity adds a lot of bosses, but feels like it removes that other progression. Right off the bat, you're given fairly good weapons and items, including a summon. It felt kind of like Journey Mode.
I was playing as Rogue, so all the items and armor were new to me. I felt like there was a TON of options (I ended up getting a bouncing eyeball drop from Blood Moon early on that carried me). Snow bandit armor, victide armor, aerialite armor, etc. It seemed like the game was throwing armor and accessories at me and that the classic ores and drops didn't really matter (of course there are no classic rogue weapons! They reclassified all the throwing stuff).
Overall, this really changed the feel of the early game for me from 'survival simulator' to 'boss hunter.'.
-Hardmode
Right before hardmode I started getting Draedon Arsenal weapons and boy, these carried the game for me. I'd say I killed the majority of bosses with Draedon Arsenal. The tracking disk's stealth strike just slaughters the slime god and wall of flesh. The frequency manipulator was incredible.
At this point all the extra recipes and bosses were imo quite fun. Combining everything to get crazy accessories, hunting down new ores, and fighting wild bosses like Leviathan was fun.
I did notice the game started trending towards its final state here: janky jumping/dodging simulator. I say 'janky' because regular Terraria dodging is mainly based around doing one dodge at exactly the right moment (avoiding Empress of Light's sun dance, Moon Lord's laser, Fishron's third stage charge) while Calamity mod is more like 'I want you to dance around a pseudo-random hail of bullets for a couple of minutes'. Cryogen was my first real introduction to this, and I learned a lot about him as I farmed for the Kelvin Catalyst (which was SOOOOOO not worth it, just mildly better than Prismaline).
This is a huge point about Calamity vs Journey's end. Journey's End tries to remove any strategies that make bosses trivial, so Deerclops is immune when far away (so you can't put it in a box and shoot it), Moon Lord's laser isn't blocked by blocks (so you can't Valhalla face tank it any more), etc. Beyond that, though, you're free to experiment, so you can kill Plantera with teleporter cheese, or teleport back to nurse with mirror during moon lord, or actuate a ton of blocks to make Golem easier.
Calamity, though, instead of taking away overpowered strategies, forces you into a single strategy. Every boss is designed around 'you can only beat these by dancing for two minutes'. Adaptive damage reduction, adding more and more projectiles as fights go on, invulnerable stages, mirrors being blocked, catchup mechanisms, enforced borders, one-hit and two-hit kills, it's like the author said 'you have to play exactly the way I want or I'm going home'.
-Post-Moonlord
I had a wild swing here. From vanilla Terraria, this is usually my endpoint, so I felt like I was done here, and providence was so hard I felt like giving up.
Once I beat providence though (Blood pact really came through since the stars can't crit, and turning off backgrounds helped a lot too), the post-moonlord game was AMAZING. Tons of new bosses and areas to explore, and so many items. The Wave Pounder has to be one of my favorite weapons ever; it's so fun seeing 12 or 15 invasion enemies and wiping them off the face of the earth with a stealth strike. It has surprisingly high single target damage, too; I beat all 3 envoys and polterghast with it.
The amount of content here is stunning. Killing devourer of gods for the first time (alas, in a normal world, due to the one-hit kills), there is SO MUCH to craft and play around with, especially all the ultimate accessories that combine everything in the game.
I can't beat Exo Mechs and Supreme Calamitas (although I just tried both for the first time last night), but now that I've seen everything I'm satisfied and excited to try another class.
Graphics, themes, and music
I know there's been past problems with fans bashing both of these, so I'd first like to say 'Calamity's art is extremely impressive and is far beyond the quality of most non-commercial products'. The music is excellent.
Highlights to me include astral biome and enemies/bosses, providence and the crazy beasts that spawn in her areas (like the giant rock beast), the sunken sea, the aquatic scourge, the envoys of the devourer and the devourer himself, the arsenal labs, etc. All of the music was great, super catchy.
One problem with a community-led project is the lack of oversight and general lack of time. This leads to some mismatches with the base game and with the mod itself.
For instance, Journey's end does a good job of indicating strength via sprite appearance. Consider the zombie merman, the hemoglobin shark, and the dreadnautilus. If you showed someone all three and asked them to rank them by how strong they look, they'd get it right almost all the time. And weapons have a nice progression too, with stronger weapons generally having cooler effects as you go but not generally more elaborate sprites. For instance, look at the progression of mace->flaming mace->blue moon->sunfury->drippler crippler/flower pao->flairon. It goes from no effects or particles to some dust effects to single projectiles to a cloud of projectiles that home. The size of the actual weapon increases up to sunfury but after that changes focus on shape. Similarly, swords get bigger at first but max out around molten fury, later focusing on projectiles that get cool visual effects but not really larger.
Calamity strength signaling is all over the place. The Desert Scourge visually looks stronger than most pre-hardmode bosses and some of its drops (like a javelin) look incredibly elaborate while being very early-game material. Some new enemies like the dogs are huge while being very weak. The size of the weapons becomes entirely ludicrous at the end. When you've had a late-game rogue fight and the ground is littered with shards of Pentumbra, you look like a little kid wandering a grown-up's battlefield. And the weapons become 'the mega super weapon. The mega mega mega superweapon', and fire increasingly more projectiles. The best new Journey's end weapons focus on either whimsy (like the Pew-matic) or lighting effects (storm spear, blade staff, empress weapons).
Because it's all over the place, there are exploits. For instance, Nychthemeron is a wall-piercing homing weapon with high damage. Vanilla terraria rarely hands out any of those things until late game and I'm not sure it ever hands out a homing, wall piercing weapon (besides the best summons, like desert tiger staff and stardust dragon) becomes it trivializes so much of the game. But here you can get it right when hardmode starts.
Overall, the game is much darker and edgier. There is some humor, but even a lot of that is hard-edged humor (like the haha I'm an alcoholic NPC). All the lore is about torture, destruction, profaned things. Journey's end is more like 'haha funny skeleton...but what if it murdered you?' while Calamity Mod is like 'This skeleton is the amalgam of thousands of tortured souls. Its unbearable burden will not end even in death. I have seen this for millenia, and yet it is nothing compared to the further horrors that await you'.
If I could change one sprite in the game it'd be the squirrel staff. It's your first introduction to new calamity sprites and it is honestly a bit of a letdown compared to the rest of the mod.
Bosses
Let's compare calamity's new bosses to the Journey's end bosses (Queen Slime, Empress of Light, Deerclops and Dreadnautilus).
Both sets of bosses are focused on dodging. Queen Slime's bouncy slimes, Empress of Light's ethereal lances, and Deerclops' boulders are all pretty tricky to dodge, especially when multiple things are happening at once (like Sun Dance or the claws). These are quite similar to bosses like Cryogen, Slime God or Providence. The biggest difference to me is that Journey's End bosses tend to be smaller with a lot of focus on easily visible detail (like Deerclop's face or the Empress's beautiful wings), while Calamity bosses tend to be really ornate all over (which honestly isn't bad).
Journey's end bosses tend to have exploitable weaknesses that benefit over-preparers without rendering the fight trivial. A long skybridge and mount for Queen Slime, a flying mount and heavy single-target-damage weapon for Empress of light, a high platform for Deerclops. But none of that helps you in calamity; over-preparing with weapons gets your damage nerfed through adaptive damage reduction, and flying mounts are much slower than wings.
Biomes:
Calamity did really well here. The music for the sunken sea is beauitful. Astral infection looks awesome. Planetoids make space fun (although it does contribute to trivializing progression). The real draw for me is the abyss. I've always been intrigued by the water accessories but they're not useful by the time you get them in-game. The abyss makes water exploration frightening, rewarding, and fun. If I could take one part of Calamity into the main game, it would be this.
Journey's end adds more interesting structures to underground desert and adds oases and a few other mini-biomes which I think look visually quite lovely. The ocean caves do make water exploration a little more fun but not nearly as much as the abyss.
Non-combat part of the game
This is where calamity is the weakest, I think. Journey's end shows what's possible: beautiful micro-structures, really striking and distinguished new furniture sets (like bamboo) and purchasable items (like potted trees). Town pets, decorative trees, rain effects, cool pets like the pikachu one. And even though torch luck was frustrating at first, the new version of it really encourages some beautiful lighting effects.
I really missed pylons in Calamity; they make the game feel 'alive' in Journey's end, with the NPCs interacting. Pylons and conches make travel so convenient, I can't wait for them to be integrated.
Calamity adds a lot of furniture sets but since NPC houses don't really matter and there is so much content, I didn't really feel a strong reason to use them. Many of the sets looked visually the same, although the ueilbloom set was pretty cool! Endgame armors don't really stand out from each other. If someone showed you tarragon, bloodcore (?) armor, god-slayer armor and auric tesla armor and asked you if it was stronger than victide or daedalus armor, how would you know?
Overall conclusion:
The nice things is that you don't have to pick between them. Hopefully, Calamity will be updated to include Journey's end. Calamity mod is fantastic, and I can recommend it to anyone who like boss fights.
The things I appreciated most from Journey's End after playing calamity is how good the people doing lighting at Re-Logic are. Storm spear, eventide, empress's wings, they all look so good!
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