As a reviewer, I just want to say that I have a rather long history of playing games from the JP developer CyberStep and honestly, it’s not really a good one. Keep in mind that on some occasions, I’ve had fun with their releases….especially with the Cosmic Break franchise. CyberStep games are not very popular in the West, that’s a known fact but they’re played regardless and certain people like them so it’s not all bad but one thing is common with most of their games: they’re hella Pay-2-Win & unbalanced, especially in the Cosmic Break series. To this day, I’m still salty and burned over how Cosmic Break 2, a game that is leaps and bounds better than its predecessor, managed to shut down faster than any of its other games yet they have the nerve to re-release Cosmic Break on Steam!? What the living FU….
I’m getting ahead of myself here though. Not all CyberStep games have been bad (to some degree) like Onigiri. I mean, if it can last this long online from it’s very beginning in 2014, then it’s doing something right to stay afloat (I hope). But like all online service games, they must end and I don’t expect the re-release of Cosmic Break & Onigiri to last for many more years from now so CyberStep has to pump out something to keep the money flowing. So what better way than to go for what’s one of the most profitable genres out right now – The Sandbox Builder MMO – and what better game to follow than the leading sandbox game out right now…..Minecraft. With that being said, CyberStep decided to take a leap into this field and bring they’re own take on the genre with their newly released online title TERVIT (I thought it was supposed to be Terabit….I don’t know but let’s just roll with it for now).
Teravit is an online sandbox game…..errr, engine….umm….to be quite honest, it’s rather hard to categorize exactly what Teravit wants to be. Originally during the alpha, Teravit was thrown in as a sandbox online game with a gameplay loop similar to that of Dragon Quest Builders where there was an actual story narrative revolving around the saving of a world while building what you need to accomplish this. CyberStep decided to completely scrap this idea almost entirely and made the game into some sort of creative game engine for players to play with. This was made apparent when the Builders Beta came out and players were only able to create worlds and playing fields, gone was the story narrative that was in the alpha build. To be honest, this soured a lot of players who played the alpha, including myself. This carried onto the games eventual official release.
Since the games release, there have been numerous updates which added new game mechanics and items for players to tinker with to help build their worlds more easily and or to allow players to interact in them. In inclusion of this, new game modes were also added such as the much requested Adventure Mode which is the return of the story narrative gameplay that was in the alpha build but with some restrictions. Along with this came other modes such as the battle royale Shooter Mode, Union Mode, and even a showcase Streamer Mode where content creators could stream in the game world to show off.
The looks of the game uses very colorful voxel graphics that makes the game look somewhat similar to that of the PS3 game 3D Dot Heroes (why this game never got a re-release, I’ll never know) in almost every aspect of its design from the enemies, weapons, equipment, and even your player character. This is the main drawing point for Teravit, Cyberstep wants you to be able to create anything and this is especially so for your player character. Teravit comes with a few voxel characters in which you can purchase with the games premium currency or you can go the creators way and make it yourself. This involves you having to download a external voxel character creation program called MagicaVoxel. It takes some time to get used to but you’re able to use the Teravit default models as a template for editing and creating your own characters with it. There a slew of premium characters you can buy if you’re not into making your own character. Doing so not only benefits you but it also benefits the person who made the model. Oh yeah, there is a little something you should know about this game as to why Cyberstep pushes the building aspect of this game so hard to players. The content you create in this game can benefit you by you – the creator – getting paid for it but it requires you to go to the official Teravit website and register into the games Creators Program (it’s free so no worries). After doing so, just make a few characters here and there, decide on a price for it (in in-game premium currency), and hope someone buys your model.
Being part of the Teravit Creators Program can earn you money paid out to you in premium in-game currency…..or in actual money. That’s right….actual money that’ll be paid to your paypal account or such (I forgot the other methods of payouts). The more content you create, the more you accumulate in creator points in the Creators Program. You can then log into your account and decide if you want to cash out and have CyberStep either pay you in in-game premium currency or with IRL money (Cyberstep pays out in Japanese Yen by default so you’ll need to use a currency converter to see how much you’ll actually get back if you go with this method). I have very conflicted feelings about this as it makes me feel Cyberstep is doing whatever they can to get people to play their game but not by the games merits but by monetary incentives instead. To some, it speaks volumes as to how people perceive what they think how much a company believes in their product.
All of this sounds good until you start to forget that this game is a live service online game…..something that Minecraft isn’t entirely. With Minecraft, you don’t need to be online to build your worlds or to just play the game. Teravit requires you to be online at all times to play every single aspect of the game. From the shooter modes, to the single-player adventure story mode, & even its world builder mode….nothing you do in this game is saved locally but is instead saved on the Teravit servers. The only thing you can probably keep locally on your system from this game are the voxel characters you make & screenshots. Unlike Minecraft, you can’t run your own server for your world for Teravit which is obviously a huge draw to why people like Minecraft. The world you create is only accessible only if you allow it to be seen in the world directory in-game. Building a world has you doing the usual stuff like you do in Minecraft and you need to save your data before stopping (the game also auto-saves periodically for you as well) but not being able to do anything with Teravit offline is a huge blow as to why some people just don’t bother playing the game. People who know about Cyberstep games know not to get too invested in them with the ever-looming danger of the game shutting down lingering over everyone’s minds.
The only reason I can think of as to why the game doesn’t allow offline building is because one of the items you can place in your game world is a Gacha Machine. I feel that Cyberstep knows that if the game had offline building, there is no possible way they can allow players to tinker around with the only main revenue mechanic in the game outside of buying premium currency. In all honesty, they could disable the gacha mechanic entirely for offline building or devise a way for the game to do periodic checks to make sure that there was no tampering with the system. I don’t know but I believe the because of this, it hampers on players getting some sort of offline capabilities for the game, let alone make and operate their own servers.
Honesty, I’ll say give the game a try since it’s free and see how you feel about it. I really like this game aesthetics over Minecraft but it’s systems and always online mambo jumbo just drives me away to look for other avenues to satisify my needs (IE: Craftopia, Palworld, Ylands) and going by the mostly negative score on Steam, I think the majority of the Western player base feels the same. Keep in mind, this game is doing somewhat okay in Japan and don’t let the Steam player count tell you that the game is dead. This game is available on multiple platforms and most of the players in Japan use the stand-alone client rather than the Steam version. All we can do is hope that Cyberstep actually figures out what they want to do with this game and actually inplement some actual changes that would get Western players to look at the game a little bit more than what it is now.
Teravit is available on PC (via stand-alone client or Steam), iOS, Android, & Nintendo Switch. A Playstation 4 / 5 version is currently in the works.
