Starbound
Last updated: 2025-05-18
- Vast, explorable universe with great depth.
- Fun, engaging gameplay with customization.
- Extensive modding support and community available.
- Clunky, unbalanced, repetitive combat.
- Game feels unfinished and abandoned.
- Repetitive, shallow story and planets.
Verdict
Mostly positive
Summary
Positive 86% · Negative 14%. Score: 14 / 100
Positives:
- The game has extensive modding support and a thriving community that creates a wealth of content. Mods enhance the game by adding new features, fixing issues, and expanding gameplay possibilities. Some reviewers feel the game is incomplete without mods.
- The game offers a vast universe to explore, with procedurally generated planets, diverse biomes, and countless quests. Players can spend hundreds of hours exploring, building, and discovering new content. The game world is rich with lore and details, making each playthrough feel fresh and surprising.
- The game is enjoyable and fun, especially when playing with friends in multiplayer mode. Reviewers praise the game's atmosphere, music, and simple yet engaging gameplay. The game offers multiple difficulty modes to cater to different player preferences.
- The game features a vast galaxy system with numerous planets to explore, each with unique alien races, topography, and mini-stories. Players can travel between star systems in a customizable spaceship, encountering diverse biomes, creatures, and resources. The game combines space exploration with sandbox elements, allowing players to build colonies, recruit crew members, and reshape entire planets.
- The game offers extensive customization and building options, allowing players to express their creativity. Reviewers often compare the game to Terraria, noting improvements in crafting interface, building mechanics, and character customization. The game provides a sandbox experience with freedom to build bases, villages, or entire space stations.
Negatives:
- Combat is described as clunky, shallow, and repetitive, with weapons feeling similar and enemies lacking variety. The game's balance is inconsistent, with some bosses being too easy while others are overly difficult. Many reviewers found the combat system unengaging and frustrating.
- Many reviewers feel the game is unfinished and lacking in content, with underdeveloped aspects and a sense of wasted potential. The developers have abandoned the game, with no updates or new content being released, leading to disappointment and a reliance on mods to improve the experience.
- The story and main questline are criticized for being generic, short, and repetitive, often involving fetch quests and lacking depth. Planets also feel similar, with repetitive structures and limited unique content, making exploration monotonous. Many reviewers express disappointment with the story's uninspired nature and the lack of meaningful progression.
- The game is often compared unfavorably to Terraria, with reviewers noting that Starbound lacks the charm, depth, and satisfying progression of its competitor. Movement and digging mechanics are also criticized as being clunky and less enjoyable than in Terraria.
- The game's progression system is criticized for being grindy, unclear, and unrewarding, with a lack of guidance on how to acquire better items. Crafting is also described as convoluted and tedious, with many crafting stations becoming obsolete after the early game.
Gameplay:
- The game includes a main storyline and side quests that provide direction and context, but the main focus is on sandbox gameplay. Some reviewers find the main quest repetitive, while others appreciate it as a guide through the game's mechanics and world.
- Crafting and base building are core mechanics, allowing players to create tools, weapons, furniture, and structures. Farming and resource gathering are also essential for survival and progression.
- The game features a tiered progression system, where players must acquire better gear to explore more challenging planets. This system encourages exploration and resource gathering.
- The game has extensive mod support, with mods like FrackinUniverse adding significant amounts of content and complexity. Some reviewers recommend completing the base game before installing mods to avoid confusion.
- Players can build colonies and attract tenants, adding a relaxing and rewarding element to the game. Quests from colonists add life to the settlements.
Performance:
- The game suffers from significant optimization issues, leading to FPS drops, stuttering, freezes, and lag, even on high-end systems. These performance problems are exacerbated by large bases, numerous entities, parallax changes, and opening the furniture catalog, sometimes causing gameplay-breaking bugs.
- Mods can cause performance issues and compatibility problems, sometimes requiring restarts to resolve. OpenStarbound (OSB) is reported to improve performance when using mods.
- The game lacks an in-game Vsync option, requiring players to manually adjust the setting in the configuration file. This makes it less accessible for players who want to manage screen tearing or improve performance.
- Zoom level affects performance and gameplay. Lower zoom levels can slow down map loading and cause players to get stuck, while higher zoom levels improve smoothness but reduce the visible screen area.
- The game has a massive memory leak known as 'The Pixel Printer'. This can lead to performance degradation and crashes over time, especially during long play sessions.
Recommendations:
- A significant number of reviewers emphasize that the game's true potential is unlocked through modding, with some even stating that the base game feels incomplete without them. Mods are credited with fixing issues, adding content, and greatly enhancing replayability. Some recommend playing vanilla first, while others suggest modding from the start.
- Many reviewers recommend the game, citing its engaging gameplay, extensive content, and overall value, especially when purchased on sale. The game is often compared favorably to similar titles like Terraria and Minecraft, and is considered a must-have for fans of the sandbox genre. Some reviewers specifically suggest purchasing to support the developers.
- Several reviewers suggest purchasing the game on sale, indicating that it may not be worth the full price. They recommend waiting for a discount before buying the game.
- Several reviewers suggest that the game is best enjoyed with friends in multiplayer mode. Playing cooperatively enhances the fun and allows players to experience the game's content together. Some reviewers also suggest using admin privileges or invincibility to reduce frustration.
- The Frackin' Universe mod is frequently mentioned as a way to significantly expand the game's content and enhance the overall experience. Some recommend installing it immediately, while others suggest playing the vanilla game first. However, some reviewers caution that it can be overwhelming for new players.
Miscellaneous:
- The game's development was troubled, and official updates have ceased, leading some to consider it abandoned. Despite this, the game is still considered beautiful by some reviewers.
- The game features a charming pixel art style reminiscent of early 90s games, combined with colorful designs and diverse biomes. This creates a lively and nostalgic atmosphere for players.
- The game provides enjoyable locations to explore, each offering a variety of activities. Reviewers appreciate the game's theme and the amount of content available.
- The game features six distinct races, each with its own unique lore. This contributes to the game's overall weird Sci-Fi feel.
- The game's cloud save feature is unreliable, so manual backups are recommended. Players should take precautions to avoid losing their progress.
