Starbound

It is a big game, but there is very little to do. The game's lack of any kind of map function is frustratingly annoying, dying deep underground and losing all your harvested materials with no way to find them will likely make you rage quit. Combat is dull, for being a "space game" there are very few ranged weapons. Almost 15 hours in, and I have several crates worth of melee weapons (swords and spears), but have only ever found one gun. The developers also seem to have abandoned this title.

I cannot recommend Starbound on the basis of it being a better game in its early development stages than its release form. The *best* way to summarize it is that the game does a horrible job at "showing, not telling." 1.0 Starbound introduced a story that shoves literally everything in your face with 0 wonder and atmosphere the pre-release builds had. You're stuck to doing hand-holding quests for everything. Even worse, they turn their "examine" button into part of a quest where you must scan EVERYTHING and read ALL the lore on every object in an area. Being forced to do it in a quest is just stupid. What's more is that the descriptions used to have flavor and varied with races, but now they're just flatly and plainly written out. Stupid game mechanic changes. Pickaxes used ores to mine faster than your tool. They were removed because "they didn't fit in the world." All you do now is hold down LMB to mine. Completely linearized. No resource management. Added "build times" in 1.0. Items used to ( except for stuff that made sense like crafting ores in a furnace) instantly craft. Instead, to create a workbench, you spend 5-10 seconds watching a tiny bar in your UI with your crafting things fill up. With a sound. Who thought this was a good idea? IT NEVER NEEDED IT. There's no animation. Just arbitrary waiting and a sound. You have to wait there until it's done. The UI was retweaked for 1.0 and is functionally worse in every way as well. Instead of quick slots, we have 6 now. It's also harder to click and drag into and out of them for some reason (it was fine pre-release). Art assets (notably all the randomly generated monsters and some random colored trees) were stripped out in favor of a more "directed" and linear experience. Instead you get so called "unique" monsters that appear the same at each "unique" biome. This killed it for me at the end of the day. The EA builds were actually more fun and open and had better game design.

The game is really lovely (I own it on Steam). Sadly, the second I learned that it was made by the exploitation of many different (often underage) artists who were overworked, given contradictory direction and often did not get paid, I couldn't open it again. I am really saddened by this because the game was very successful. If the head honcho had simply paid the dues I would give this 4 or 5 stars, but he never did. He left people hanging and took off with the profits. I realize the reviews are meant to only be about the game, but I believe this is about the game. It's an awesome game made by many people with a lot of passion. But buying or playing the game doesn't support any of them. It supports the predator who exploited them. (GOG, if this violates the terms for reviews, please take it down. I would then however posit that there should be some way to visibly communicate the working conditions for developers or ongoing scandals of games. Apologies for any inconvenience.)

I ll try to be short. Did you play terraria? Did you like it? If your answer was "yes" - feel free to avoid this game. Its not that bad, if you have nothing to compare with, but, otherway - not that good either. Main problem of this game is that devs didnt know, what the hell do they wanna from it. Starbound was in development for 5 years, and, for this time, they rebuilt it almost from the ground few times. When people became angry enough, they simply got what they had, cut off everything unfinished (no jokes - whole giraffe (name of current major version) was all about cutting away content, added before - armor/weapons, story, locations, mechs, etc etc) and released game "as it is". For example - they've only added villages of one of races in 1.1. And not only that - this "I wanna make terraria-like game with everything in it" isnt only about content, but about gameplay itself: nailed-down linear storymode (in sandbox game, yes), dumb AI, terrible perfomance (there are people with high end PCs, who still get fps drops), etc etc. And yeah, if you are looking for "universe with dozens of planets" - there is same problem, as in No Man's Sky: very few presets and lack of overall things, make each biome look same and barren. Yep, game is still getting updates and looks like everything will be fixed, sooner or later (for example - last posts in dev's blog was about re-adding mechas and rebalancing space. Also there are tonns of mods, which re-add removed content and fix nailed things (where possible. Like "make storymode optional by adding every npc to outpost since the very beginning", or "add trap for ship pets, so - if you dont want them, just catch them once")), but, right now, I cant recommend this game

I'll start my review by simply saying I've already own and played the Steam version. Having seen it evolves from it's earliest day to it's current update, I'm thinking of using the recent discount on GoG.com to give gift this game to friends too. Which says a lot. I'll add I'm a fan of both 2D platformers and sandbox games, but specifically those allowing me to build large towns and villages that look good to me. But I'm a picky player as I dislike of building something if it is only to sit empty without a massive multiplayer server to populate it, and Starbound serves me better than others when it comes to populating my creation with NPCs. And then it goes out of it's way to even provide me with more. Building stuff is very -nicely- streamlined currently. Background/foreground blocks are just a matter of left or right click when placing a block. And with a now universal(and upgradable) matter manipulator it is the same thing when removing blocks, without any fumbling trying to recall the "proper tool for the task". It's very easy to eventually build literal towns of your own. And like said, recent updates even allow you to populate them with your own NPCs which, being generated, means you will never run "out" of NPCs or wonder which NPC you need to relocate to a new outpost away from the main town to "populate" it. Plus, those NPCs not only pay you rent. A recent update even make them able to give you procedural quests! You creations feels much more lively. Combat used to be a "stiff" experience with often similar "generated" monsters, but they are now joined by a lot of much more diverse "handcrafted" monsters with much more interesting combat styles. Weapons also got a LOT of new special attacks ontop of the likes of new guided rocket launchers. Adding a sense of purpose are also new handcrafted dungeon "instances", populated with unique monsters and literal "boss rooms" challenges now. This is all CURRENTLY there. And more is coming.