Miserable, buggy early game. Terraria enemies are low quality. "Progression" far too restrictive.

Playtime – 13 hours. There wasn’t a good representative option between Short (5 hours) and Moderate (20 hours) when making this review.

Frankly speaking, I genuinely do not understand why people were so insistent on this modpack’s quality. The modpack is focused on the combat and progression through combat, but the bosses themselves are poor in quality, and the progression is extraordinarily restrictive. Prodigium attempts to transform Minecraft closer to Terraria, but mostly takes more negatives than positives from Terraria, which is exacerbated by Minecraft being in a 3D space.

For the most part, a large amount of the gripe regarding combat comes solely from the mod Terra Entity, which are required for progression. They are essentially buggy 1 to 1 replicas of Terraria bosses and enemies. This might sound fine on paper, but the bosses only really work and are only fun to fight with Terraria’s relatively high mobility (both vertically and horizontally) 2D platforming. However, with Terra Entity for Minecraft, these bosses instead speedily clip and teleport through walls and floors, while the player lumbers along at a snail’s pace. While the quick movement is fine with Terraria given said bosses will always be within vision regardless, this translates incredibly poorly for Minecraft. Keeping proper line of sight on these bosses is very difficult. Combined with a general lack of tells for when a boss is going to actually attack, it makes fighting them generally very draining. This is also exacerbated by the bosses being incredible health sponges.

Let me detail how awful it is to fight these transplanted Terraria bosses, starting with the literal first one of the pack. The first boss, an incredibly buggy King Slime, has a whopping 700+ HP, even ignoring the armor it gets. The player, at this time, really has only an iron sword as the highest damaging weapon, which might have some degree of Sharpness on it. King Slime, like in Terraria, teleports in order to approach the player. Unlike in Terraria, it cares absolutely nothing about distance, and spams small blue slime minions at a far greater frequency than in Terraria. So what ends up happening is that King Slime will constantly and persistently teleport regardless of distance from the player (during which he is invincible), spawn minions to soak up damage, and then proceed to jump out of the player’s damaging range every 2 or so seconds to do a ground slam attack. So that 700+ HP ends up being a lot more when the enemy cannot be damaged for the vast majority of the time. It took me from dawn to dusk, in Minecraft, to finish the fight. Just under 20 minutes, for a boss that was incapable of hurting me due to low damage, and I was only barely capable of hurting it due to its obscene tankiness and perpetually disappearing hitbox.

I took a looong break from bossing after winning this fight, because it was awful despite the victory. I ended up exploring the various structures for hours, with each structure rewarding me with… maybe 5 iron or gold ingots if I’m lucky and maybe a curio that will do absolutely nothing for me. Though usually it’ll be useless stuff like 50 million wheat seeds, flint, or feathers, and nothing that will actually help with progression. I’m slowly chipping away at the other goals around this time. Setting up and building nice houses for the NPCs, taming whatever I can find for fun and having an easier time with the next boss (BTW, the pack DOES have Domestication Innovation… which it does NOT tell you about! It doesn’t even tell new players what the hell pets can even do, nevermind that they’re immortal if you use pet beds!), and completing tertiary goals. Eye of Cthulhu wasn’t as awful as King Slime, though it did fall into the “too fast to damage or see properly without playing on Quake Pro FoV” category in the 2nd stage. Bellringer and Swampjaw were… okay. Meet Your Fight is kind of a mediocre bossing mod as well, but isn’t particularly offensive like Terra Entity. It more or less just exists. Then, with decent confidence, I went in with my melee build into fighting a buggy invincible second-phase Brain of Cthulhu, who then proceeded to spawncamp me despite me initiating the fight over 9 chunks away from my spawn point. This isn’t even Terra Entity, this is a custom boss made for the Prodigium modpack, and it’s impossibly buggy, and what made me stop my playthrough completely. The first phase was excruciating due to the horrible hitboxes on the eye minions, and second phase it took literally no damage from any melee attack (And I mean 0 damage. Sword swings weren't even registering.) but the 3 or so damage from the Eye of Cthulhu shield bash. It then proceeded to heal to full health and attack me in my house before I could even consider preparing for a rematch, despite having fought it about 9 chunks away.

Now, I might have actually powered through this had I even been given the chance to actually respec early without having to enter creative mode. Because for some reason, UNLIKE IN TERRARIA, the armor that you can even equip is RESTRICTED based on an intrinsic EXP based skill system, and SWAPPING IS FURTHER PUNISHED by draining EXP put into specializations, if the player ever decides to change their mind. It takes away player flexibility to focus on shoehorning in equipment restricted classes, which effectively add nothing except various flavors of “more damage” or “more health”. Don’t get me started on restricting item pickups like the occasional diamond until after the player’s slogged through about 5+ completely unrelated bosses that don't offer rewards relevant or useful for the player’s class, like an arbitrary checklist. The “progression” is mostly defined by arbitrary rules and artificial restrictions that don’t serve to do anything but pad out game length rather than add actual depth.