Originally posted by Me:

Since people are asking despite the fact that I havent touched this game for years, I have reluctantly revisted this review to update purely so I can stop receiving DMs about it.

Additionally, for those STILL asking. I was able to refund the game after 500 hours played because I told steam that the trailer for this game constituted deceptive advertising under Australian law (the trailer had sounds and such not present in the actual game) and Steam agreed. Stop messaging me to ask how I did this. Steam can still refund you even after 2 hours played.

To reiterate, I will not be updating this review anymore so it can be considered "current" as of the 31st of January 2023. If some other drama/event/announcement happened that wasnt something like Schine's Developer Slack getting leaked after that time, assume I don't care about it.

Given the following, I do not anticipate needing to revisit this review again.

• The last meaningful content update to this game was over 3 years ago as of now.
  
• Schine devs are on record saying they will not be able to release any new content updates as they don't have the funding needed.
  
• Schine have all but cancelled development of StarMade (aside from the occasional token bugfix update) without saying they are actually cancelling.

As I said in the bottom of my review, Avorion is a better version of StarMade, go play that.

StarMade was yet another generic early 2010s attempt at "Minecraft but in space" which was sold to consumers like myself as being a game with limitless possibilities for playing and the potential to grow into something that revolutionises the genre if we only gave Schema and Schine a chance. A chance was given and as we approach 10 years after its release on Steam and 15 years since development started, StarMade today has zero content, zero gameplay, remains an unoptimised, buggy and laggy mess while its developers are out of touch with the community have completely abandoned development of it.

Almost 15 years is a lot, a lot of beloved games both indie and AAA of this and past generations been made in much less time. So what has 15 years of development given us? Nothing, absolutely nothing. Schine spent all these years adding half-complete "features" and unoptimised laggy code before moving on to more poorly made features and code. StarMade remains in an early alpha, feature barren state and is plagued with game breaking bugs, exploits, easily methods of cheating and very poor optimisation in addition to a complete lack of gameplay. We waited 15 years for a "game" that could barely even be considered a tech-demo with how little there is to do in it. Filled with features that look and feel like were made on a whim, with less than 24 hours spent coding them only to be thrown in haphazardly and never touched again.

Some examples the many bugs this game has include chunk errors capable of destroying hundreds of hours of work building ships, server wide crashes simply by landing on planets or attempting to mine them, poorly optimised weapon mechanics (missiles will often go out of their way to avoid their target), balance issues that affect every aspect of gameplay and the games extreme vulnerability to cheating with something as simple as clientside hacks with cheat engine!

For content, there is nothing. You have your character, some basic, surface level resource gathering, very basic voxel spaceship building tools and an empty, barren, content-less universe that relies of being "infinite" to draw you in. There are so few things you can find in this universe that you can count all the different, unique things in this "endless" universe with your fingers AND they are all effectively backdrops with little to no gameplay associated with them.

Not only is the game barren and boring, but the devs are just downright terrible. A particular instance that caused me and a vast majority of what was left of the tiny (less than 50 player) community that remained was an incident that occurred after the release of the "Power 2.0" update, an update that nobody wanted, that wiped away years of player creations and effectively required all players to re-learn the mechanics of the tutorial-less shipbuilding system from scratch.

In the community discourse around this update, several veteran players, myself included, fell victim to a series of censorship campaigns and biased moderation conducted by StarMade's official forum and its moderators, including DukeofRealms, one of the games developers and effectively 2nd in command at Schine. It first became obvious when double standards of moderation were observed for players who were opposed and in flavor of the update and eventually the moderation staff adopted gestapo-like tactics to censor criticism including banning any user who expressed any criticism of the game and its devs.

I personally have been banned from the official forums, StarMade's steam forums and the official Reddit for the horrible crime of criticising StarMade and hurting the fragile ego of its developers.

This anti-criticism campaign was confirmed by (now former) Forum Adminstrator Crusade and Forum Moderator Thingie, who became fed up with how DukeOfRealms was ordering his staff to handle criticism that they walked out from their position in protest. Thingie made a quickly deleted expose which publicly testified that moderators were acting out of bias against veteran players alongside revealing other unethical behaviour that was going on behind the scenes, an archived version of the post in question prior to its hasty deletion by the remaining forum staff can be found here.[archive.fo]

Comr4de, one of these veterans and a former member of StarMade's Council of Intergalactic Representatives (a now defunct group of elected community representatives who had direct communication with Schine) had written up an excellent post that summarised how most of those who were censored was feeling about the game at the time, you can find said post here.[starmadedock.net]

In the years following the exodus of player after these events transpired, development has basically stopped and Schine has since gone on record in their discord server admitting that they do not have the funds to continue content development.[i.imgur.com] The last meaningful content update released for StarMade was more than 3 years ago now and nothing has happened since. So if you are someone who buys crappy early access games in the hope that they eventually become good, stay away. StarMade is not a "No Mans Sky" comeback story, its bad, it will stay bad and it will never get better.

The sad thing about this game it had a lot of potential to be great, the concepts and ideas presented would have been revolutionary but ultimately this game has succumbed to scope creep and developer incompetence.

We are no longer in the early 2010s and other games like StarMade that have more competant developers, larger communities and more content are out there and exist. I suggest you look into Avorion instead. Its a better version of StarMade. Buy it, not this junk game.

In short, I do not recommend this game to anyone, even for free.