Starbound – A large and empty mansion

[WARNING! READING AHEAD!]

[some wise words…….. by some wise person]

So, I played starbound, I’ve beaten the game (with mods of course), I spent 261 hours on the game…..do I think it was time well spent? To be honest, I don’t think so.

Starbound is an interestingly unique game, it has many features ranging from time travel to different races, its like a large mansion, its extremely large, giving you lots of exploration where you can explore space endlessly (I mean it, it keeps on generating planets), lots of weapons and magic for you to play with, different races that react to you differently, capturing monsters and making them your ally and the list goes on.

But the longer you play, the more it’s flaws starts to show, whenever you start the game fresh with a new character, you always have to do a mission before you can go the space exploration portion of the game and depending on your luck, it could take a very long before you can do so, there isn’t much variety on how the villages and communities do, you find a community, do some quests related to the villages and if you are lucky, they become your crew mates and if you tried to take some of their stuff, they become aggressive towards you, that’s pretty much it.

The way you handle mission is very linear, you can’t go to any boss in any order even though the game should do that due to its open world nature, despite on how large the entire game is, there are no side bosses, only main bosses (unless you wanna count ancient bosses as side bosses). The crew AI isn’t very good, they jump into lava and acid as if though they are in a swimming pool, even though you can take only 2 crew members, it becomes a hassle as you try to select certain items and they’re in the way.

The game is like a very very large mansion, but it feels somewhat empty because after long hours into the game, it starts to become boring and you just start farming food hoping it doesn’t spoil on you, I am trying to refrain myself from comparing starbound to terraria because they are two different games with unique gameplays but I hope starbound takes some ideas from terraria like improving the grappling, unique side bosses, flying islands, special events and such. Starbound can go so many directions since there are many things can be added to the game.

In the end, I wanna say starbound is a good game but it still has ways to go before it could rival against terraria in terms of content.