Starbound: Space, the Same-Looking Frontier

The opening of the story sees you fleeing Earth to the stars away from some deep-space horror, unfortunately there aren't many cinematics, they are very nice to look at.

When it was first released, Starbound, like many sandbox exploration games of the time, was compared to Minecraft, but was even more closely compared to Terraria ('Terraria in space'), often being called a ripoff of it. It was a fair comparison to make, especially as both were side-scrolling exploration sandboxes with a vaguely similar art style that had some shared elements. However, like the comparisons between Terraria and Minecraft before it, both grew increasingly differentiated from each other as the 2010's progressed, and now the two are pretty dissimilar from each other in nearly every way. I've played a decent amount of Starbound over the years, and while it's undeniable that I've had some fun moments traversing the stars, the experience has always felt off somehow in a way that I could never describe. After a bit of hemming and hawing, I decided that I should give another playthrough a go (now that the Bounty-Hunting update is out), but this time I figured that I should try some mods as well, the appropriately-named "Frackin' Universe" mods. However, while I did have a more varied and dare I say it more fulfilling time shaping the universe by my lonesome, Starbound remains to me a game that feels somewhat empty and hollow, even after multiple updates.

Fighting groups of humanoids can be a real pain in the ass, but your trusty mech can easily turn the tide with its raw damage and armor, pity that doesn't help against space-faring enemies for whatever reason.

There's a story to Starbound, and it's pretty generic, saving the universe from an alien threat, that sort of thing. Along the way you meet a quirky cast of characters that don't really do much, but at least they aren't forced upon you. Frustratingly though, the story acts as a gatekeeper to content in the early game, and you'll have to play ball for an hour or three if you'd like to experience the rest of the game for yourself. Even more frustratingly, exploration and random discovery is tied to story progress/access. How that works is that in order to find the coordinates for each relic to open the vault your character must find certain items of relevance to the particular race and scan it in order to get clues to where a culturally important location of theirs would be. The upside to this is that it makes sense from a narrative angle, and has the bonus of indirectly encouraging you to progress through the game. The downside of this is that whether or not you will find a settlement of the desired race in a planet or star system is basically left up to chance, though there are planets where they will be more likely to appear on. Where the setting of the game truly shines however is in the characterization of the races, of which you can choose between six to play as. These cover the gamut, you have the generic spacer Humans, the 1984-style erudite Apex, carnivorous Florans, futuristic Aztec Avians, Japanese Hyotyl, delusional medieval-style robots known as the Glitch, and my personal favorite, cowboy star-people called Novakids. Each offers not only a unique commentary on the world (when you scan objects), they each have a different culture and their own mission based around them in addition to a unique spaceship that grows differently as you upgrade it. The only exception to this are the Novakid, who have their own spaceship, but not their own mission because that was concluded before they were added. As with a lot of these kinds of games, the story isn't the focus, and the onus is more on the player to make their own story outside of their involvement in the main plot, of which they don't get any say in.

The mining laser from Fracking Universe is a beast, and quickly phases out the matter manipulator in ability, though it needs to be upgraded.

I'm of two minds on Starbound's gameplay, because while I do enjoy its progression, it feels like an experiment for how many shallow features could be packed into a game for modders to fill in. When you start the game, you're in orbit over a threat I planet, where you can find iron, copper, silver, and gold. To get more exotic/stronger metals for better armor/weapons/crafting station upgrades you have to go to other kinds of star systems. "Fracking Universe" adds a whole heap of new metals/materials to make stuff out of on top of a legion of different planet types and a few new star systems. However, in order to safely access these new star systems, your character will need protection directly corresponding to the system. These are pretty easy to craft, and are pretty easy to understand the appropriate pack ahead of time, like in radioactive stars you need a radiation pack. However, "Fracking Universe" adds varying degrees of danger, and for those you'll need higher tiers of the pack, and so on. It's all based off of exploration, and some of the more mid to late-game planets are pretty damn cool in terms of what you can see and grab. On top of building more specialized and better gear, you'll also be finding different 'currencies' throughout your playthrough, which in the base game are used to upgrade and unlock a variety of features. You have manipulator modules to upgrade your matter manipulator, upgrade modules for improving your ship (making it larger), and tech cards for unlocking special abilities that are slotted into your character. There's also an insane amount of crafting stations, expanded even more with "FU", and you'll need a lot of space just to fit them in, and the new systems can be a little overwhelming (bring pen and paper for notes). It feels like an achievement to get to the next tier or to build the next tool in "FU", but at the same time, the amount of prep work and planning that you have to do in order to do anything significant really makes me want to commit scooter ankle sometimes. On top of this, despite appearing like Terraria and Minecraft, your priorities until the end-game are very different. Building a base is very inefficient and probably shouldn't be attempted until after you have access to all the planets, but at the same time the game encourages you to build when in reality you're better off cramming your stuff on-board your ship. There's also a slew of other features like archaeology, bounty-hunting, mechsuits (my favorite), hover bikes, questing to recruit ship crew (required to have a bigger ship though you can pay to avoid this), farming and livestock. The problem with this is that these feel just included in the game, and really have no depth or focus to them beyond the initial setup. You can travel to roughly five star systems and have seen essentially everything the game has to offer in terms of content (this doesn't include the FU ones). Movement and platforming is pretty floaty, so you'll be taking a lot of fall damage as you play. There is however a lot of freedom in how you play your character, which is further helped by mods, so you can easily play the character you want, be it a whip-cracking space cowboy, a wizard, or a sword-and-board fighter. The catch of this is that generally the weapons you find are better than the ones you can craft, which really calls the whole crafting experience outside of armor and protection packs into question in terms of value. There's a ton of content to the gameplay of Starbound, and in parts my experience was fulfilling, but most of them only felt that way with mods, which is probably the takeaway here.

The Novakid spaceship is a literal train, with upgrades adding more cars, it's as cool as it sounds!

In terms of atmosphere, I enjoy Starbound whenever I play it. There's a certain lonely atmosphere to the single-player aspect of the game that I enjoyed. The music in the quiet moments is this somber orchestral space soundtrack that really heightens this feeling, especially when you're digging deep underground or running across the planet at night. It sounds pretty similar to Tangerine Dream's work, so if you're into that it's an added bonus. You have a lot of ways to express yourself in this game, whether it be clothes (that you can either find or craft) for your character or decorations for your home. Like No Man's Sky, Starbound was sold on the premise of entirely random and unique worlds and creatures, but unlike No Man's Sky, this is only half true. The planets themselves are by and large the same with reskinned trees and a different color dirt, and after your second you'll never want to visit a forest planet again. The exception to this are the more exotic and dangerous planets (a lot of "FU" planets fall into this category). You can explore wasteland worlds filled with the ruins of old cities, planets of darkness, rainbow worlds, primeval worlds, and even machine or gas worlds. All these special planets even have their own equally exotic weathers, like gravity rain, which can make you more light or heavy, or molten rain, which turns all metallic surfaces into deadly molten ones, and so on and so forth. Creatures are the worst offenders in terms of the illusion of randomness, with a whole slew of universal creatures that you'll find on basically every planet. The randomly-generated ones fall into four categories, bastard birds, literally a guy in a suit, dinosaurs, and rejected Pokemon, all equally ridiculous but at least they're unique-ish. The sprite-work is pretty charming, and it's all aesthetically pleasing to look at, but that's really all that can be said about it visually. I like the atmosphere of Starbound, and it's probably the thing that keeps me coming back to the game, but I absolutely detest the early game for just how repetitive it is artistically.

A burger joint in the depths of space by a fiery star. Doesn't seem like the best place, but what do I know about the future service industry?

Starbound is a game of highs and lows for me. I do genuinely enjoy playing it. Sometimes. The times when I don't are because of just how empty and inconsequential the whole experience feels. My honest opinion of the game is that I would not strongly recommend checking out unless you'd like to try a more complex/cheaper No Man's Sky (but I've never played it so don't take my word for it). There's some lasting fun to be had here for sure, a first playthrough is undeniably fun, and multiplayer definitely helps add to the enjoyment, but at the same time the highs do not justify the lows of the game. It's a shame that among the sandbox/exploration games of the 2010's, Starbound was unable to capitalize on theniche that it found.