I remember enjoying Starbound. It's just hard to remember why. Starbound is *serviceable*. The music is great. The controls are not, sort of floaty and slippery at the same time. The story is aggressively bland. It's fun and easy to make a great-looking base, there's just not much to do inside it. Stutter and tear on some machines, but a pretty cute "soft" aesthetic. Lots of pros and cons that balance out to an overall "eh". I don't think it's the passage of time, either. Sure there's a lot more games in the vein now (I wonder if the Terraria comparisons are in part because that's about the only thing we could compare it to at the time), but I can still go back to something like Halo CE and say "yeah, this slaps". Not so much with Starbound. Now, a *modded* copy of Starbound is a good time. Maybe there's some irony in that, given the controversy surrounding the publisher's treatment of unpaid interns. But thanks to modders, Starbound lives on as a janky gem, especially when played with friends. Gotta give it a star for that. With the recent announcement that, after half a decade of radio silence, Starbound is coming to Xbox (where presumably it won't be moddable), I had to drop by to see how ol' Starbound was doing. Yep, still forgettable on its own. Yep, still a good time with mods. Good enough to recommend you drop $15 on it? Eh.
AI War 1 is near and dear to my heart. As someone who loves the spirit of strategy games but rarely the mechanics, AI War 1 gave me what I've been looking for. Feels different than other games I've played (Starcraft, Civ, AoEII, whatever) in a good way. Good enough that I was hesitant to pick up 2, thus this review comes in two pieces: folks who've never played 1, folks who've played 1. Folks who've never played 1: I feel like the game's various descriptions across the internet make it sound less approachable than it is. Problem may be that the game's different enough that folks struggle to explain it, which wrongly gives it the vibe of that movie your friend insists you're TOTALLY gonna love dude, okay, yeah you need to read the source books and wiki first, and it's a little rocky to start-- So hey, different approach. Do you play strategy games but get bored because it feels like you're either abusing the AI or need to become a god of micro and stats? Do you like making grand strategic decisions and watching them play out epic space battles involving thousands of ships that are still in your control if you WANT to shift them around? Give it a go, refund if you don't like it, I think you will but I'm just text on the internet. Folks who've played 1: Even less micro...sort of, There's some real great tweaks, the UI is lovely, I dig the changes to ship/turret acquisition, turret caps, etc. Be warned the system replacing hull types takes some getting used to...there's more numbers now (if a ship does 1.2x to >= 70mm armor and another does 1.5x to >=90mm, but it's less than 12 seconds since you exited the wormhole so you're getting a bonus to a third, and there's an astro train heading west from the station--), but I've largely ignored them outside big bonuses and that's working at dif7. Also, you can upgrade the botnet golem. 10/10. Verdict: Why don't people talk about this game? I'd say go for it, without DLC if it's a cost thing (base game is huge).
