Starbound Reviews

This game is the absolute KING of cheap, unfair deaths. Fall damage is OP and enemies are arbitrarily powerful. Strongly recommend Keep Items On Death and Keep Pixels On Death mods. The game is an unfair grinding slog without them, but with them the game is greatly enjoyable.

I really wanted to like this game. This game is trying to be terraria and no mans sky at the same time, which is ambitious. However, it fails miserably. I'm going to make lots of comparisons to terraria since its obvious that it was the inspiration for this game. What I liked: 1. Amazing pixel art, soundtrack 2. Interesting level designs and dungeons What I disliked: 1. Shitty progression where you just move from tier to tier, and the power ups you gain are just through new ores or quest rewards. In terraria, I genuinely feel more powerful each time I move up a tier. Each tier in terraria is fundamentally different from the previous tier. You get speed, flight, teleportation etc. Here I get to do slightly more damage and face the same enemies just slightly buffed 2. Procedurally generated planets are cool for a while but the novelty wears off quick. Each planet starts to resemble each other after a while of gameplay. 3. I like that the devs tried to implement different planets with different conditions but it does not help with "freshness" and each planet is just the old planet with another restriction (e.g. radiation, heat, poison) 4. Shitty quests and shitty quest rewards. The side quests you can take from NPCs are either escort quests, fetch quests or gardening quests. The quests are a chore to do and the reward is a reward bag that can possibly grant you a singular manipulator upgrade module. Higher tier upgrades need 30 of those. Don't get me started on the tech perks for your character, and ship upgrade modules. 5. Shitty elemental damage system that is not explained AT ALL. Sometimes my gun does 3 damage and sometimes it does 30 damage. Given how you don't craft most of the weapons you use, you are just stuck with one or two strong weapons that you find. 6. The entire "mech" questline seems like a sinkhole where you are just doing space quests to get more stuff to upgrade your mech so you can do more space quests -> circular logic 7. The lack of mobility is INSANE. Trying to get from the bottom of the world back to the surface is a fucking chore that isn't helped by the 2182010 enemies that spawn and have crazy knockback. In terraria, you literally get access to recall potions that bring you home 10 minutes into booting up into a new world. 8. Shitty main storyline quest that involves lots of scanning different shit that i'm supposed to be paying attention to while fighting enemies that kill me in 2 hits. Finished scanning this shit? Retrieve this shit. Ah you are done retrieving it? Go scan more of this shit. Did I mention its complete RNG that you run into the race that you need to scan things for? 9. You don't get to choose your playstyle. In terraria, you get to choose between 4 classes, and it is completely up to you how you allocate your resources into a certain class. In Starbound, you are playing as the "class" with the strongest weapon you just found. Is there even a class system?

I loved the concept for this game when I first bought it, but that was before any story existed in the game. But coming back to it this many years later, I almost wish I never bought it. There is 'some' fun to be had, but there's more disappointment than joy it seems. - useful gear has been removed from the game, rather than being adjusted so it's not OP. - Incredibly repetitive quests/chores. - Upgrading gear doesn't feel worth the effort - No way to store currency until later in game, and it's expensive - Dying is way too easy, especially early on. - The game has been abandoned, Apparently, and I don't see improvements happening?. I'll keep playing for now, but i can see it ending up in the pile of 'sad dusty code'.

Escapism. The final frontier. There are few games that immediately wash the real world away like so much dust when you click on the cheery little icons. This is one of them. There are flaws, no doubt, and a turbulent history behind the making of this game, but none of that changes the fact that Starbound is one of the few things that makes life just a little easier to bear. In space, no one can hear me scream. Trust me, it's better that way.

Very half-assed. The story is unbelievably boring and the novelty of procedurally generated planets doesn't really awe you if you ever played in another procedurally generated world and know how shallow they are.

Abandoned by the devs, and failed to meet development promises. Employees working on the game were exploited, and it's easy to pirate.

came for the goated early access, stayed for the excellent modders that salvaged and continue to salvage chucklefish's impressive streak of continual fuckups on this game

I hate the story but the community develop a "Skip the story" I love this mod so if you want to skip the story download this mod and SKIP ALREADY, I hate so much the story and the first mission!

Abandonware that sadly does not fulfill any of the developer promises. Starbound is a ocean that is a puddle deep. Beyond the pretty graphics and the few neat mechanics the game showcases, it's ultimately an unintuitive, clunky, and unrewarding game which doesn't respect your time. It didn't used to be this way, but Chucklefish has decided that a hamfisted attempt at a story, and stripping the player of exciting tools over the course of several agonizing updates, is the way the game was meant to be played. Chucklefish is a disgusting & morally bankrupt company which has abused & exploited workers. Modders are continuing to keep this game alive, and have an indefinitely more robust skillset towards making Starbound the game it was MEANT to be. Also, make sure to get the game for free, don't give Chucklefish a penny.

not a terraria clone at all. i was thinking like that at first too but it's really not even close. it sets itself to be so different and unique, it is literally a whole nother game, and it's so peak too.