Shouting at the World About Starbound

    Starbound hit its 1.0 release July 22, 2016.  I had it from Early Access for a decent amount of time before its full release.  I want to talk about it.

    Just so you know where I'm coming from, I'm going to warn you ahead of time of a few things:

1. I like mining, building, exploring types of games.  They aren't best-of-all-time for me, but I do like the genre.
2. As mentioned 5 sentences ago, I had the game in Early Access, so my thoughts on the Early Access version will affect my thoughts on the full version.
3. I play on Linux.  I may have experienced bugs or performance issues not present on other platforms.

    With that out of the way, lets get started.

It's so Pretty!

    Graphically, the game is very nice.  The pixel art style is one I'm getting annoyed with because of how often its used, but it is done beautifully here.  Most, if not all, sprites and effects are very nice, and the backgrounds are also great.

The game is definitely nice-looking.

    Musically, I can take it or leave it.  The music quality is okay, and it fits the basic idea of a space exploration game, but not the tone Starbound specifically sometimes sets.  When you have the few friendly NPCs spouting lighthearted dialogue or you see the penguins in the central space station hub of the game, it's a little weird, in my opinion.

    Sound effects are good, generally.  They aren't exceptional, but I don't remember any off the top of my head that are specifically bad.  I do get annoyed with the effects that play when you run out of energy or fully recharge it from empty, but that's because I hear them very often.

    Performance is generally good, with exceptions.  It's not common, but I have gone down below 60 FPS enough times for it to be of note, and the biggest issue seems to be when collecting a liquid or when I hover my mouse over the giant gate behind Esther, the main questgiver.  The gate thing is particularly bad, dropping me from ~60 to the low teens.

Check the top right to see that cinematic 11 FPS.

    At first, I was going to complain about the UI, but in reality, I think the issue is more about the use of the UI, rather than the UI design itself.  Your inventory has 5 tabs, each with 40 slots, each tab dedicated to a category of item.  Towards endgame, I almost always have the crafting materials, blocks, and food tabs full, since there are so many materials and types of blocks, and food doesn't stack.  The hotbar is two sets of 6 pairs of item slots.  Each pair acts as a left and right hand set, and you can switch sets with the X button or an icon in the top left of the hotbar.  I have two main gripes with the hotbar.  The first is that the pairs aren't all that useful, thanks to two-handed items taking both slots.  Every object that is placed in the world, such as torches, take both hands, even if they don't make use of the right click for anything.  The way the pairs work means that it's possible to only be making use of half the hotbar, which is a common occurance thanks to two-handed weaponry, blocks to place, torches, etc.  The other complaint is the switching of sets.  You are never told that you can do it, and it adds a step to accessing things you may need to access quickly.  I've had a lot of times where I go from my general use set to my combat set, but need to place blocks, and it takes me a lot longer to do so than if I were using a more standard hotbar.

The current hotbar.  That icon in the top left is the "switch item set" button.

    And finally, the worst part about the presentation: The story.  It is painfully bad, both in its writing and objectives.  I actually like the missions parts, since they take you to somewhat unique locations, but everything else is very, very bad.  In order to progress the story, you will be required to find settlements of each species and scan items at each one.  While the primary selling point of the game is exploration, mandating it with a scavenger hunt that is hosted by RNGesus immediately shoots the fun of exploration in the foot.  No longer are you exploring to find anything that may or may not exist.  You're filling a checklist, and a boring one at that.  And your reward at the end of the story?  The absolute most pitiful excuse for an ending ever.  I genuinely feel like my intelligence has been insulted by it.

    It should say something that my favorite part of a story in a game about exploring a procedurally-generated universe is the stuff done on premade maps that are fairly heavily scripted.

Wow, okay, harsh.  How does it play?

    Not very well.  Movement is average, largely because it's hard to screw up movement and the tech abilities aren't good.  The most creative tech ability is the morph ball distortion sphere, which puts your character in a small ball that can fit in tight spaces.  Otherwise, you have a few lateral movement abilities (dash, sprint, short range teleport) and some vertical ones (double jump, delayed high-movement double jump, and a quadruple jump with almost no vertical height).  Each category can only have one at a time, so no, you can't dash into a sprint or do a normal double jump into a series of smaller jumps, ending with a rocket jump.

    Combat is thoroughly unsatisfying.  Melee barely ever feels like I'm doing anything because of an immunity period enemies seem to get at the end of a combo, and ranged combat is absolutely unfun because it uses the energy system instead of ammo.  The energy system means that you can't make use of your ranged weapons for a few seconds if you run out of energy, since it only "unlocks" after it fully recharges, which means you spend around a third of the time of combat either switched to your melee weapon or waiting for your energy to regenerate.  Endgame is really the only point of the game where I feel ranged combat is even slightly enjoyable.

    Crafting is even a downside in this game.  To explain somewhat, I need to explain what I consider passive and active crafting.  Passive means you can set it and leave it, like Minecraft's smelters.  Active requires you to remain in the menu to craft, such as Minecraft's crafting tables or basically any Terraria crafting.  Got it?  Cool.  Literally everything you can craft in Starbound is done with active crafting, which wouldn't be bad if it weren't for the wait times.  Yes, you have to wait in the menu while you craft.  Just queued up 1000 (max stack size) glass to smelt?  From what it feels like, you will be waiting around for 500 seconds (it feels like it crafts 2/second),  You can't queue up other things to happen when it's done, and you can't just leave the menu.  You have to sit there the entire time and wait for it to be crafted.  A nearly 9 minute wait just to craft a bunch of glass is unacceptable.  Any other game would make it passive or instant, and for good reason.

    I'm putting this in its own paragraph for the emphasis: I crafted about 700 fired clay, thanks to wanting to do something after having collected a crap ton of clay blocks while mining.  It took nearly 6 minutes of real-time waiting, and I have the video evidence to prove it.

    "Surely exploring in a game where the biggest selling point is exploration would be good, right?"  Have you been reading this review?  The answer is no.  A large part of the problem is that every planet and biome feels like a reskin of another.  There are many structure designs and environments to see, but the functional difference is basically nonexistent most of the time.  And the moons suck.  Ever wanted to be chased around by an invincible monster that instantly kills you on contact?  If you answered "yes", congratulations!  You may get your wish by collecting literally any amount of fuel on a moon.

He's coming for that booty.

    You can also do miniquests for NPCs in settlements.  These are usually "Go here, kill some things or talk to someone, come back", but you may get lucky and get a "collect some stuff and bring it back mission", which is AMAZING (/s)!  Occasionally, when you finish a mini questline, the NPC will offer to work on your ship.  Get enough crew members this way, or by hiring them in the hub location, and you can upgrade your ship's size.  It does nothing except give you more space and allow you to hire more crew members, since your ship is only really useful as a mobile home base.

One step forward, and a train ride back

    As I've said, I've played this game back in Early Access.  In my opinion, the game has actually regressed in quality from its earlier versions.  Nearly every aspect of the gameplay was better in some way.  The hotbar used to be a more standard 10, plus a dedicated pair of left/right hand slots.  If you were holding something that was one-handed, you would automatically equip the right-hand object as well, meaning you could have a one-handed melee weapon in one slot, a pistol in another, and a flashlight in the right-hand slot, and always be able to see what you're doing without putting the flashlight in multiple spots.

An example of the old hotbar.

    Planet exploring used to be slightly better, too, mainly on ice planets.  There used to be a temperature mechanic, where you could explore a cold planet, but you needed to use heat sources to not die.  Even on non-frozen planets, night could get cold enough to make use of the mechanic.  It even took into account heating from the planet's core, so the deeper you went, the warmer it got, and the less you needed to worry about freezing to death.  This was removed in favor of a version of the system we have now, where you need an item to survive on a planet with extreme temperatures.

    Your ship's SAIL used to have some personality.  Yeah, it wasn't exactly what I'd call "good", even on a charitable day, but it added a somewhat unique feature to each race outside of the looks of your armor, ship, and items that can be placed.

So, to summarize

    I don't think there's a single thing this game does, outside of graphics and audio, that is done competently.  The combat is unfun, the exploration is shot in the foot by a lack of things to find, the story is outright insulting, and even the crafting is bad.  Basically everything done by Starbound is done better by other games, including earlier versions of the same game.  I cannot recommend this game under any circumstance outside of if you can get it for free, and even then, I wouldn't waste my time with it.