Starbound

During the development of Starbound, it was a fairly amazing and varied game. But during the crunch to 1.0 because they just suddenly decided, "screw it", and the game became a massive shell of its former self. This game wasn't neutered. It was castrated. Individual stories and reasons for escaping/going into space? Replaced with the biggest sci fi cliche; you're all now protectors of the galaxy in a generic federation. Yes, even the Florans (who happily eat other sentients) and the medieval Glitch. Randomized monsters of which you would expect to find many have been largely replaced with set monsters that just somehow spread into the deep corners of the galaxy. The main line of the game all runs on set pieces and scanning now, and these set pieces range from "okay sized" to "insultingly small", getting smaller as it becomes obvious that they threw things together at the last moment and threw a tarp over the details. Many promised features and mechanics exist in the game, but have been commented out for...reasons? It isn't entirely clear why things like the racial AI or unique starting weapons were removed, especially seeing as the unique ships are kept, in spite of being part of the Generic Federation of Peace, Love, and Friends. You can recruit crew unto your ship, and (for some reason) this is required to upgrade your ship (unless you'd rather dump pixels into a fake licence), but the big problem with the crew is that they don't scale or advance with you. If you pick up a wuss from a level 1 planet, he remains a wuss. The options to tweak this game are threadbare at best. You can change the sound, the resolution, the keybinds, and if you want to adjust anything else you can go suck lemons. Oh, and this game doesn't have controller support. Enjoy! In conclusion: How this game went from something amazing to "Terraria but in space but somehow worse" is utterly baffling.

The base game itself has a number of issues. Poorly optimized, includes calling for steam API on launch even on the GOG version, and a horribly neutered plot post 1.0 to name but a few. But for every one of those issues and more there's a mod for that. There's a mod for nearly everything you could think of add to this game, and that alone makes it worth buying The biggest issue with that? 3RD PARTY DOWNLOAD OF STEAM MODS ARE ENTIRELY DISABLED For whatever unfathomable reason Chucklefish themselves required Steam to disable 3rd party (such as via an off-site tool) downloading of the game's mods, as well as disabling even the ability to comment or even contact the author of a mod unless you own it on steam. Of course, as with all things, people will find a way around. Skymods is a lifesaver for this, I'd really recommend checking there if you can't find a steam mod for this game elsewhere. Thank god for the russians.

Is it worth full price as of right now? I'd say yes. Purchased a while ago, the journey has been long and interesting. Every major update was a decent time to check on progress. Often that meant a dozen hours with friends, realistically still a good value. Now with the full release we have an actual story line. Or ignore it to go exploring, build stuff, do the pokemon thing, create colonies, farm the flora and fauna, etc. Plus the Chucklefish, the developer, has stated support will continue post release. Will be coming back to update my reviews as I play more. And most likely giving it 5 stars after getting more in to the new content.

This is a game that has a great promise, but an abysmal development team. Every update seems to "overhaul" a system only for the devs to either roll back the changes or rework the system again in the next patch. The game's combat is clunky and confusing even after the "combat update" and the game is slowly losing a lot of its procedural-generated charm. Case-in-point, a lot of monsters that previously were randomly-made are now customized monsters you will see over and over. The game, in general, needs to be simplified instead of indulging in every one of the dev's personal pet projects (in one case a literal pet project where you get a pet on your ship that you can take care of... or not... it really doesn't give a shit) and needs to actually have engaging systems instead of cobbled together pieces from other popular games.