Recent reviews by Azazial Verdantia

Hesitantly reccommended with a bunch of asterisks.

It's fun for a bit. I'm hesitant to even call it "good" because it's absolutely not a sequel as the devs claim. It's really not a new game at all. It's just Cryptark in 3D. However, it's definitely not bad so it just barely manages to squeak past my mild urge to give it a negative rating. They didn't even try to update the enemy designs, add new types of ship systems, or really do anything different at all. That's disappointing. It could have been so much better.

The music is good. The movement feels good. The art is average. Weapon design is okay. Boss design is uninspired but adequate. Bonus challenges are serviceable. Almost total lack of a story is only disappointing if you're aware of Cryptark having one.

I've run into occasional bugs. Sometimes my weapons don't switch unless I click them with the mouse instead of just pushing enter to confirm. Once I was unable to shoot until leaving a room which I think may have been related to triggering an alarm. No crashes. Only one serious bug in 15 hours is passable, I suppose.

Is it worth $10? Yes.
Is it worth $20 if you've already played Cryptark? No.
Is it worth $20 if you not played Cryptark? Maybe, but still probably not.
Is the replayability of a rogue-like really there if you don't feel weirdly attached to Cryptark or just want all of the achievements? No.

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So almost immediately after writing this review I had an impossible sub-objective (It wanted me to keep 4 systems out of 7, but I was forced to kill 3 shields + brain) and then when fighting the next boss I was knocked through the floor into a small bit of space the player was clearly never intended to be in thus soft locking my run.

I have changed my review to negative. If the devs ever actually add some original content to the game perhaps I'll change it back.

Demowcracy!

Pretty good game. Might be worth a few hours.

It's a pretty okay concept with a reasonable price but the game really doesn't respect your time at all. The one star difficulty "beginner" map takes almost 4 hours to play all of the waves. The difficulty is extremely spikey. After easily doing the first 30-something waves I was crushed by the final wave throwing twice as much stuff at me as the previous wave. This is despite having all of the upgrades and having nearly mined out the entire map. Your personal weapons are basically useless in the later stages of the game where you need to deal with swarms of hundreds. A very unsatisfying experience for a game with such a long build up time and no save.

For now I can't recommend it. Wish list it and come back in a year.

For Karl!

I bought Starbound when it very first hit Steam at the end of 2013. I had enjoyed Terraria greatly and got swept up on the hype bandwagon by some friends who convinced me to get it. I played about 60 hours of it back then some how. At the time the game was resoundly in an early Alpha state, though the devs hid this by marketing it as "Beta Phase 1". There was quite a lot of variety in envionments, places to explore, and most of the races in place. Combat, armor, and weapons were entirely unbalanced and they hadn't even settled on combat mechanics. Music instruments were useable, NPC towns existed, and the barest beginnings of the quest system had started to be put in place. It was not a terrible experience.

I was still rather bitter about being decieved by the initial Steam release (and it was one of the first Early Access games I was ever burned on so I was extra salty about it) so I hadn't planned to play 1.0 any time soon, but was once again cajoled into giving it a try. After another 25-ish hours of game play I have only a resounding "meh" to give to Starbound.

It's not a bad game. The races are interesting and varied. The envionments are still pretty. The biomes are numerous. Digging down you can find all manner of strange places like forgotten warehouses, tiny gnome towns, grotesque bone and flesh caverns, slimy tunnels, and more. The problem is that all of these things existed in 2013 as well. I instantly recognized the gnome towns as totally unchanged. Most of the weapons seemed to behave roughly the same. The new main story line offers some sense of direction to the universe, but is just flat out uninteresting.

Starbound suffers from a lack of drive beyond the art department to which I must give credit where credit is due. The game looks amazing. If $15 is trivial for you it's probably worth the buy on that alone. If you're buying Starbound looking for gameplay... you can do better. The ambition from the designer is there, but everything else is just half-hearted and phoned in. Even if you love this game type, which I do, it's absolutely crippled by a few key things, one of which is the atrocious inventory management. This type of game encourages you to gather all of the cool things, bring them back to your planet and make a fantastic sprawling city, but I quickly reached a point where I just couldn't find anything. At one point I got an upgrade for my EPP and set it aside because I had no idea how rare or valueable it was. I wanted to find it later and after checking some 30-odd crates and boxes I just gave up.

The 'techs' which effect your movement abilities are bland with your typical air dash, double jump, and morphball. Fall damage occurs from a height barely higher than your double jump and is crazy high for a game that's all about exploration. The interface is mediocre at best and outright clunky in some places such as building (ex. an item in my hands which is not on my hotbar is instantly thrown back into my inventory if I close it to get a better view of what I'm building).

Starbound has been polished some since I last saw it in 2013, but not nearly enough for three years of dev time. I have to wonder if they wanted to push out 1.0 ahead of No Man's Sky to try and snag as many additional sales as they can manage before it's too late. For a game that could be so good, the end result is so resoundingly mediocre and uninspired. Maybe they just need another three years of dev time.