Starbound

I have been a Terarria Fanboy for a few years now. When I first saw this game I thought "what a rip-off! Nothing can compare to Terarria!" However, the more I watched the trailers and read the comments I slowly became enticed by the idea of having an actual storyline and having a space adventure... So... I got it on sale. Just saying, for me, Terarria has been dethroned. I will always love Terarria, but this game is so much more polished in ways that Terarria can't touch. -First off, the graphics. Slightly more polished. Larger trees, characters, and such. A little more cartoonish, and rightfully so. (Though some of the aliens resemble some Pokemon...) -Second, the music is actually much more my taste. It's more instrumental. I think it suits the "I'm alone on a strange planet trying to survive" theme. -Third, there's an actual storyline! With Terarria you wake up in a strange place and there's a guide who tells you that you need to survive, and a little of how to do so. In Starbound there's a TUTORIAL and a storyline that involves your character ending up on a strange planet all alone, with the ship's A.I. system telling you how to proceed. -Starbound has spaceships, boats, and mechs... enough said. -Mechanics feel smoother, too. Your character can crouch because of the larger character models. -There's multiple races. This adds a lil sci-fi flare to the whole thing. Each race has it's own history and such, which makes the lore feel better all around. -Gardening is actually fun. (And necessary if you play in survival mode, where hunger can kill you. However you can play on casual mode and hunger isn't a threat.) -The building aspect feels smoother because of the larger graphic design. I'm not dealing with tiny little squares anymore. I have the option to place 4 in a block if I want. I could go on, but I'm working with limited characters here and getting close to the cap. I'll just end by saying I love this game and wish I'd tried it sooner.

i played starbound, when it was still in development, saw some changes, but when the game was fully released, the requirements were too high for my pc back then. i remember i wasn't happy with all changes that happened during developement, but compared to what i remember from the pre release version, i'm also not happy with the finished game. it felt like there is so much to discover, like i can find something interesting on every new planet and i spent a lot of time playing the game back then, but today, in the completed version, it feels like there is so little variety, like if you've seen one planet of a type, you've almost seen all. i reached the point, where i didn't even wanted to explore anything anymore and just wanted to get everything done on a planet, so i can leave. it's not just nostalgia, maybe the game wasn't as good as i remember, but i remember prefering it over terraria back then and even if i prefer starbounds look and "gamefeel", terraria is still as good as i remember and starbound isn't. with terraria i feel like i had a good time, but i've played it enough and with starbound i just feel like i'm wasting my time at some point.

DRM-free is nice and all, but unfortunately for something like starbound, the better option is to get it on steam, mainly for two reasons. One, you can get mods elsewhere, but it's much easier to manage with the Steam Workshop. That part of the starbound community is VERY active to this day too. Second thing is multiplayer. While you can connect to others via ip, it is a hot mess to do so manually more often than not. So to play with friends, you're usually forced to go in a server or play locally if you or your friend can't do the manual hosting process correctly. There's also a third thing before you consider playing this game: It runs better under most Linux enviroments as compared to Windows.

As they faced a lot of problems during the development they removed all the cool promised features. The end result is a big open world sandbox with a simple cliché quest-driven story without enough engaging content. There is things to do beside the story but most of then feel like pointless mini games and none of them are really integrated within the game's progression systems. Pro Tip: Don't buy anything based on promises.

TL;DR - Quick, early fun, but lacking in quality of life and long-term content. I bought this shortly after it arrived on GOG.com. I wanted a follow up to Terraria, of which I played since v1.0.6.1. Starbound, in it current state as of this writing, it a odd mix of Terraria and I would say Kerbal Space Program. It's resemblance to Terraria is a given, but I mention KSP for a reason: KSP was an un-optimized mess on full release with a relative lack of in-game content. (KSP relies quite a bit on the modding community.) Right now, Starbound reminds of Terraria back in Terraria's early days. There's a lack of long-term content. (Beyond the creativity/construction mechanic. Terraria's had a 5 year head-start on fixing that though.) Unfortunately, Starbound has a few of KSP's more glaring faults. I understand that SB is more complex than Terraria (and more ambition), but it's a mess in terms of performance on an i7-4771 with 16GB RAM and a AMD 7970 GPU. Gameplay mechanics barely interact with one another in meaningful ways. Not much depth to them either. (Though not as bad as KSP very much so after-thought token gameplay mechanics.) Progress is relatively linear and straight forward due partially (mostly?) to the lack of depth. Equipment is mostly randomly generated but not very exciting in most cases. (The unique items aren't bad though.) The weapon types are fairly well differentiated in behavior though. The UI, however, takes the cake in terms of sheer annoyance. Given the type of game this is, much of the interaction with the UI is more tedious than it should (especially given the level of polish that Terraria has shown to be available in this type of sandbox game.) All UI windows open up in the middle of the screen where the player character typically is. You can move them, but they reset on close. Hard to interact with the world when your inventory window is backing you. At this point, I can't recommend this. It has promise, so wait and see is all I can say.