(I want to mention before review that I had a lot more hours of gameplay because I used to run SB outside Steam)

Oh boy. It's 2016. This game is finally out. I don't even know how to begin, but I will give it a try since I am terrible at writing reviews. Get yourself some coffee, food and all necessary supplies for survival because this review is gonna be long. Ready kids? Let's begin!

Starbound is one of the games I was interested in because of two things: sci-fi and space travel. I really enjoyed playing earlier builds and it had decent content despite game being in Early Access, but there were serious technical issues (especially if you play multiplayer). Because of that, I'm gonna list all pros and cons this game has:


Artwork

I will try to split this into details:

• Planets are beautiful! From hot dry deserts to depths of the oceans, there's lots to be seen during exploration. This encouraged me to explore more.
  
• Race design is also well made, especially Floran and Hylotl.
  
• Ship design is well made too! If you want to have a giant castle floating in space, you're gonna like Glitch!

Soundtrack

The first thing I like to notice when I'm starting a game is soundtrack! Starbound has one of THE best ambient soundtracks I ever heard. Even to this day, Starbound soundtrack is still on my playlist. If you ever want to relax yourself with good ambient music, you're gonna like it!

Multiplayer and co-op

You know how they say, games are always fun to play with someone. This game enables multiplayer and co-op which allows you to explore worlds together. However, there are lots of issues with multiplayer (these will be listed in Cons).

Mods

I can't even describe how easy is to mod this game. With right tools, you can easily recolor weapon and change particles using JSON format. If you want to do more advanced modding (like adding new race, vehicles and worlds), LUA is here to make your life easier. Thanks to huge playerbase, there are lots of mods to be found in Steam Workshop.

Sandbox

If you want to be creative and build villages or skyscrapers, you're gonna enjoy huge set of different blocks that allows you to use during building. If you're a builder, this thing is definitely for you (because I am a terrible builder, qq).


Performance

This game has some serious issues with performance. I tested this game on my dual-core setup and it causes freezing during gameplay. This game also has problems with memory allocation which forces you to restart Starbound few times in order to free up RAM memory. Rendering is poorly optimized and makes GPU so hot that you can cook eggs on it. If you need a game where PC asks you to end it's suffering, this game is for you!

Scrapped content

During Early Access, there were lots of items and armor sets. Unfortunately, most of them are scrapped.

Multiplayer issues

Well, here we go. This is the main reason why I set this review to "Not Recommended". Multiplayer is decent in co-op, but if you're going to join servers where there are 30-40 people online, you're going to have some "fun" with issues. Here's the list of problems:

• Dedicated server. It is poorly optimized and it crashes often due to huge usage of RAM and CPU.
  
• Exploits. Server allows client to execute LUA code without any kind of authentication which opens doors to vunerabilities and exploits that crashes the server instantly. Lots of players who joined multiplayer servers got their characters corrupted and unrecoverable due to huge abuse of LUA.
  
• "Allow Asset Mismatch". This is probably the stupidest option ever added to the game. If you're going to join your friend or your server with mods your friend doesn't have, there's huge possibility that you can crash the server or your friend. If you want to play multiplayer or co-op. I suggest you to disable mods during gameplay.

You're still alive? That was my list of my thoughts about the game. I really want Chucklefish to work on optimization and fixing technical issues because this game is a game I would gladly enjoy while playing multiplayer. If Chucklefish fixes critical issues, I will be happy to to review it again. Until then, I will not recommend it. Sorry Chucklefish.

P.S. Sorry if I made some grammar mistakes. My English is still potato.

It literally felt like the "story" missions were put together in a single week if not a few days.

Comes across as they "finished" and did their 1.0 so they wouldn't get harassed by their community anymore.

5 years for 5 missions of "scan this race's furniture" ...extremely uninspired...

other content is decent, weapons give you a nice mix of stuff to try out and upgrade, unfortunately later there isn't much use for them.

Bosses are kind of fun when your fighting them, but they go quick and there isn't much to rave about until they add some more enemies.

There is no point mining apparently, to get all my ores I just planet jumped a couple times each tier, in the cities you can loot every box and chest and get the ores from that, the people don't mind, only if you break their pots...? lol

the NPC cities make it a pointless risk to mine if you are playing the mode where you drop stuff on death.
They should be less frequent in my opinion, and the world and digging should be more interesting somehow.

The block set is very nice, there is many blocks, furniture, and colors to use if you treat it as a casual building game or are interested in it in that regard.

Overall a decent builder, other aspect leave a bit to be desired. I can't help but be dissapointed since I've been waiting since the game was announced and wanted so much more from it.

A friend of mine brought up a good point about the '1.0' release of Starbound. Much like Skyrim, it requires extensive modding to patch up all the inherent problems with the final product.

Business practices like this should be inexcusable.

But I digress. On with the review.
So, Starbound is finally out of beta, or so the devs would have you believe. Being a pixelated sandbox game, it's going to receive many post-launch updates, so the game's not complete until the developers start ignoring it.
Kind of like the near two-year hiatus early in the beta process.

But this is a review of the game, not Chucklefish's poor business practices. The game has changed little from the "big" beta update that removed sectors. The game's storyline is rather weak, having you run all across the universe scanning furniture and posters for clues so an elderly woman can open a door to fight a tentacle monster that some super-ancient deity being sealed away in ancient times. Everything about the storyline is shallow, meaningless, and overall disappointing. It doesn't feel like I saved the universe, I just dug down and got lucky by hitting a gel pool to help break the fall from the giant lag spike that the final boss suffers from.

But I digress.

The space travel is rather uninteresting, being a system where you click a planet and sit through about thirty seconds of hyperspace to end up in orbit. The lack of any other space mechanics makes the game feel soulless and empty.

The combat system took a turn for the worst by throwing itself in the garbage with 1.0, bringing back the old boring combat system of contact damage, which makes creature capture pods lack any redeeming qualities. All the monsters you capture just slam into each other repeatedly until they die (And your captured creatures always do) and you have to revive them at a Healing Station. At least try to make your lifted Pokemon mechanic interesting! Weaponry touts itself as having unique special attacks, but the only good weapons are legendary weapons, and those are almost exclusively reserved to two-handed swords.

Crafting also got hit by the recent changes with the removal of racial weapons and weapon variety for each tier, changing it to two uninteresting, weak weapons to choose from. Tungsten-tier materials stiff you with terrible axes and hammers, so you have to hunt down an Energy Whirl spear to actually be capable of killing things. The Borderlands-style variety is completely tossed out the window, as an Energy Whirl spear is the only weapon you actually need throughout the entirety of the game. All other unique weapons are absolute garbage and not worth your time. Hell, even some of the unique weapons are useless. Example, one sword has the unique ability to freeze an enemy solid, stopping their time. However, in stopped time, you can't even hit the enemy. What's the point of that? The combat and weaponry got hit hard by the recent update, and it shows.

Farming is a bit of a chore, and it requires mods to fix. Which it shouldn't. The game's hunger system is a minor annoyance due to the overabundance of food, making it so you have to constantly shoot food into space using the Terramart Shipments in order to find a purpose in farming, but even that is pointless since a massive crop yield only gives about 300 pixels. Selling crops, weapons and materials isn't worth it, as the prices listed on items are 5x what any vendor will give for them. The only efficient way to make money is to scour planets on Fiery worlds, which requires the pointless padding item-gate of an EPP, one of the worst design choices I've ever seen in a videogame. Nanosuit techs were way better.

For a game that's trying to build an interesting universe, it utterly fails in doing so when you find the same exact village layout for the twelfth time, where they send you to save their friend from the dungeon halfway across the planet that's the exact same as the last three dungeons you raided. The removal of nearly all race-specific mechanics that were present in the beta process heavily affects the game as a whole, making it feel less interesting and more like a boring, game-y space game that lacks any real substance to make it unique and keep you coming back.

And yet, there's one redeeming factor. Building things and running colonies is one of the few joys this game will bring you. Sure, it may take years to scour the universe to find every unique chair and bed, but some might actually enjoy it and adding furnishings to their huge collection. The game has more constructive freedom than Terraria, making it the best in player construction and furnishing out of the three major pixel-based sandbox games (Minecraft, Terraria and Starbound). The major reason towards this is a superior wiring system to Terraria, better block construction (You can place walls using normal blocks and don't have to craft separate wall parts, allowing the player to make any backdrop using any block), more unique furniture, increased interactivity with materials, and no need to build thirty houses to keep some brain-dead NPCs interested long enough to be vendors for you. You can build your own giant mansion and choose to have someone move in using a Colony Deed. It's also a good feature that colonists go for unique furniture types, which adds variety to colonies and encourages thematic construction, which is very easy due to the constructive freedom and no real "rare" block types.

A few minor points- The fossil minigame adds to the collectathon, but does so in an engaging way with a simple minigame reminiscent of a similar minigame from the Gen 4 Pokemon games. Farming may be a boring chore, but there's a huge variety of foods that can be cooked and enjoyed, which often grant the player buffs ranging from max HP increases to low gravity to bonus damage. The mission environments are rather well-constructed and convey their thematic atmospheres rather well, even though they're quite linear. Some of the boss fights are also rather well-constructed, and some of them are quite difficult, such as the Big Ape boss fight. The final boss is horribly designed, and feels like it was rushed, however. Every race has unique furniture, which makes ship upgrading and decoration a mildly enjoyable experience... Unless you play a Novakid. Novakid don't have any furniture, which sucks. The sheer amount of vanity/costume items makes collecting an interesting experience. Some may say this is meaningless padding or a waste of time, there's quite a few nice outfits to find. The racial armors often look quite nice as well. The game's music and playable instruments are the last of the minor comforts I can find in this game, and the music system allows for players to implement their own songs. Despite the game near-requiring modding to make it playable, the game's flexibility for mods makes it a great tool for the code-savvy creators out there. The game's achievement system adds a bit of a completionist edge to it, as well.

Overall, I want to like Starbound. I really do. But no game should require mods to make it have replay value. The game's faults heavily outweigh it's strong points, and this game will require a hell of a lot more work from the developers to make it truly enjoyable and replayable.

Keep at it Chucklefish, and don't take a huge hiatus now that the game's been "released."

I poured ~50 hours each in my past two playthroughs. Both were fairly different content wise, but were still fun.

Then the 1.0 update cuts attacked.

Now everyone is subjugated under the bland quest-giving and enslaved by poor movement responsiveness. Gone are the days of skill-based combat and dungeon clearing to get better gear. Trapped beneath the surface of the starting planet, my only salvation is death at the hands of the pregenerated and bland monsters that lie in wait on top of my items from previous slaughters. The monsters brood at me, walking back and forth as if claiming my stuff as their own. It seems the world has been ravaged so badly by the update that even the beasts have no possessions. After murdering them and recovering my gear, I scramble back to my masters: the quest givers. Looks like they want 10 more core fragments.

Should my message make it to anyone in a universe generated pre-1.0-update, I ask that you do not let it in. Keep your world close to your chest and let it feel your warmth, as those that did update no longer have temperature. Let it stroke your thigh and know the randomness of your sexuality, as the update nuetered common objects and euthenised the random ones. And finally, call it by name when you look it in the eyes, since post-1.0-update Starbound has obviously become Terraria.

The 1.0 release stripped almost all of the content that made the game fun. Planets and monsters are no longer random. Difficulty and progression are locked to your current tier - no more planet hopping to find cool items. Wait for another release when they can put the last 3 years worth of work back into the game

I would have recommended this game when it first launched it's beta however after 4 years of development its now clear that a lot of the content got cut out of the game and seems to have landed itself back where it was 4 years ago. The only outstanding factor which I will praise the team for is that the game seems to be a lot more polished than it previously was. I only played for a few days after the recent release and have completed the game, it is incredibly short and the bosses were severely easy to beat. Its genuinely a shame that the game is a shell of its former self and could have been great.

Ugh, what a mess.

A mess is a pretty good way to describe this game.

To start, I'm mixed about this game. While I'm infuriated by the amount of padding and poor design choices in this game, something kept me playing the game the whole way through.

To be fair, I'll start with the things I enjoyed with Starbound. The game aesthetically is pretty ♥♥♥♥ing good looking. It's the kind of visuals that other garbage Indie titles with pixel graphics should try to do. This game's also decently fun when it tries to be. Specifically the third and fourth quest areas are pretty ♥♥♥♥ing fun. Some of the randomly generated buildings are pretty cool as well, at least until you see the same building for the fourth or fifth time. It's pretty fun to build things in this game and it's pretty simple to get furniture that you like when exploring settlements.

Oh but is there so much wrong with this game.

Firstly, this game should be called Space Grandma Scavenger Hunt. The whole game consists of some ♥♥♥♥ing Space Grandma sending you to go take a bunch of pictures of things so she can progress the plot. This is the least bad thing though since it's only really annoying if you get bad RNG and can't find whatever race she tells you to.

This game also took the stupid idea to have that awful Borderlands weapon system in which every weapon is boring and has no uniqueness at all except the ultra rare ones. Thanks for that Borderlands.

This game also has the same garbage that Stardew Valley had with the mining, in that it doesn't need to ♥♥♥♥ing be there. I'm sure there are people who enjoy mining and stuff, but this is a space exploration game. I mainly have a problem with it because I never actually had to do it. There are enough materials in boxes in the fun sections that you don't ever need to. I don't get why they didn't just cut out the horrid random underground and made more unique buildings and dungeons that actually have some level of creativity. And it pisses me off the most because I know that this had to be a feature that was put in because similar games had mining and not because they wanted to do something new with it.

Oddly enough, this game came from the same publisher as Stardew, so maybe it's their fault.

Speaking of which, they just imported the entirety of Stardew farming into this ♥♥♥♥ing game. And again it was just put in for no reason and has absolutely no depth whatsoever. It's just there because "Oh people liked fermin' in Stardew let's slap that ♥♥♥♥ in here."

This game also has boring space travel for a space game. It's obviously paying some level of "homage" to FTL but doesn't put in any space combat or space exploration, just clicking on a planet an taking a one minute loading screen to get to it.

I think the thing I hate the most is that it has those awful blocky worlds and buildings and no other geometric shapes. There are tons of cool platforming puzzles they could have done if the world had more shapes, especially with the morphball and jump tyoes. It's a problem caused by the fact that they wanted to have these super "diverse" random terrain generation that just makes all terrains to look the same in a biome.

Overall, I still had fun playing this for sure. The modding for it makes it fun in that way the Skyrim is in which the game is garbage but there's always mods to have fun with. But overall this game is not complete, and I don't see it getting completed by the devs anytime soon. Definitely don't get it until you've looked into it and decided you'd enjoy the game.

Pros:
-Cool art stlye
-Penguin boss fight
-Can skip introduction (YES!)
-Hunger system (glad they reintroduced this)
-Lama NPCS
-Can smash pots for money
...You get the idea

The Cons are worth mentioning:
-Trash story line where you have to complete quests for an old woman called Esther who sits on a floaty chair to highlight her laziness.
-Ugly and childish armour set designs eg. some glitch helmets have six eyes.
-Colonising and visiting random planets once you've got the best gear is pointless.
-Many techs were removed.
-Unable to get techs where you can fly so you are forced to build dirt pillars in order to reach high places.
-There used to be mech suits, the game just got worse.
-Cows look like elves designed by a weeaboo fan boy at Chucklefish.
-No way of moving farm animals, my basement is full of bison!
-Farming is not profitable and time consuming.
-Watering cans can go burn in a fire.
-NPC crew on your ship have extremely bad path finding and are usually clustered next to the teleporter on your ship.
-Crew have mind numbingly dumb AI from standing in poisoness puddles until they die to their incompetence of shooting moving targets!
-Crew get in the way when interacting with objects.
-Crew are very easy to interact with (which is annoying) because they stop following you.
-Moon planets contain the only source of fuel which you only have to visit once to get enough fuel required to finish the game.
-Asteroid planets have no life and are pointless to visit.
-Poisoness ocean and lava ocean planets are equally poinltess as you cannot explore them due to their unavoidable hazardous environments where you die in seconds... You have to question why they were added in the first place.
-Ship pets don't even look cute and constantly demand food. They act nothing more than a cosmetic and have no real purpose whatsoever.
-You cannot give your crew mates better weapons, armour or different clothing directly. Is this really too hard to implement?
-Capturing pets is pointless due to they're incompetence to attack hostile targets usually getting killed by one hit from a monster.
-Killed pets must be "revived" at a capture station on your ship, another tedious task...
-Many quest rewards awarded give lower tier gear or ugly comsetic items.
-Tenants do not usually pay rent in pixels but give lame healing items and sometimes if you're lucky, a cruddy machine pistol from a tier 1 planet...
-Visitors at the outpost no longer give quests (they're only purpose is to kill frame rate it seems)
-How can a 2D platformer have lag? Even on a very capable machine I seem to suffer frame death as starbound eats CPU for breakfast.
-Penguin crew always carry oversized pistols and wear no clothing or armour. Dreadwing's penguins on the other hand have tanks, cool unqiue armour sets, flying saucers, rocket launchers and assualt rifles! It's a shame because this feautre could have so much potential.
-NPC's cannot repair damaged structures.
-Most NPC's are peaceful and you are unable to attack them unlike how it used to be where pillaging villages was infinitely more fun and challenging.
-The only way to make peaceful NPC's hostile is to steal some of their stuff which is stupid.
-The main story line where you have to complete primary quests destroyed much of the lore as the killing of the "tentacle monster" reveals everything. The stories used to be scattered around in books found in NPC structures and I prefered it that way because it kept everything a mystery. Starbound used to feel limitless but now all it has is an awfully bland, poorly thought out adventure story line which just isn't INTERESTING.
-Sprinklers require gold to craft -_-
-Robot hens are useless unless you want stacks of AA batteries which are equally useless.
-Crew on ship wear different coloured clothing to present their different roles but in the end it just looks amateurish.
-Fighting bosses is overpowered with friends.
-Shield system is very nooby, it used to be that you had to put up your shield between attacks and get the timing right to block damage. Now you can leave your shield up constantly while spamming a high DPS dagger which requies no skill.
-Hover bikes are impractical as they crash on hilly landscapes and are prone to rapidly loosing HP when being attacked by hostile monsters. Together with a high price tag hover bikes are just another useless feature.
-No tanks (millitary tank that is)
-Bulding a base on a planet is pointless due to inconvenience (ship has more than enough space)
-Anti-climatic ending when fighting the last boss which ironically is the easiest (and worst) one out of them all, just showing how little effort the devs put in.
-Half of the quests for the main story line is pointing at objects to scan them in order to trigger some repeated dialogue from Esther - great fun you would imagine.
-Lack of end game content and abrupt ending to the story line really puts an end to the "sandbox" feel...
-Space magic? A bad move my Chuckefish.
-Flesh biomes are disgusting and do not fit in with the rest of the biomes
-Humans and Nova kids are 2 of the seven races in starbound which give no quests in the main story line, nice to see chucklefish missed out 2 races due to pure laziness.
-Most NPC structures are copied and pasted from the old starbound I played back in 2012. YES, that was 4 years ago... You have to wonder what the Devs acutally DID during this time because the lack of new conent is underwhelming.
-No more 3d printing. in my opinion this used to be one of the coolest features as you could replicate funiture stolen from structures to add to your base.
-Ship AI now does less stuff, yay!
-Temperature system removed. Clothing and campfires used to have more purpose by increasing your body temperature to survive on other planets eg. Snow infantry clothing on snow planets.
-NPC villagers are defenceless. Surely they should have a pitch fork or hoe to inflict some damage to hostile enemies when cornered against a wall.
-Who cares about fossils.
-Big Ape looks like a furry snake demon on steroids.
-Background music is both inappropriate and depressing as starbound claims to be "fun" and "adventerous" the music sounds like it was stolen from a funeral tape.
-There is never an explanation about the cultists?
-Dying underground and trying to find the ores you lost is beyond frustrating.
-No Nova kid NPC's, structures or lore and starbound claims to be a finished game.
-Avian suicide towers removed.
-Dark cultist torture chambers removed.
-Monsters for each planet used to be varied as monster bodies, heads and legs where randomly generated and strung together. Now each planet has a fixed set of monsters which never change decreasing the variation of monster types massively.
-Not to mention the monsters also have very childish designs and look like they were copied and pasted from pokemon which I HATE.
-Each planet type has a set difficulty setting eg. forest planets are always easy and lava planets are the hardest. It used to be that forest planets could be just as hard as lava planets but this idea was scrapped so now it's pointless to visit lower tier planets.
-The cultist overlord looks like Kylo Ren from Star wars episode 7 I mean what the hell.
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I could go on but these are the main reasons why I find starbound extremely dissapointing. It just lacks the adventure feel Terraria seems to captivate so well and I do not reccomend Starbound until some of these issues are addressed. To conclude, I give starbound a 4/10 as there should be no excuses as the devs had ~5 years and managed to mess it up so badly. Bravo Chucklefish. Unless there is a way of going back to previous versions or just modding the hell out of Starbound you should not buy it in its current state.

Gave it lots of thought if I should write a review at all. I am sure this game has some depth and can be fun...eventually.
But if I am completely honest, the first hours are ridicilously frustrating and tedious. You should have fun exploring and experience at least some kind of adventure. And given this genre I expect just that, to have fun.

I ran past around 5 to 10 worlds that, yes - sometimes have a different feel, because they are inhabited by different civilizations - but I also stumbled past 3 different starting planets that are basically the same planet. Then you have a little chuckle here and there, because of the different towns and races, but thats that.

The core gameplay is just the same all over the place. Boring Sidequest and worlds that look different, but feel the same. Basically I dig for minerals (takes 5 minutes until you reach the end), then try to get up, because I can't teleport out and die in the process. In my gamemode I additionally then drop all the ressources and never get them back (because you drop healthkits and food and torches while dropping dead). Additionally the fighting in close quarters feels heavily frustrating and klunky.

Obviously it might get better with time. But the past hours just were horrible.

TL;DR

First 2-3 hours were fun exploring a new world in Terraria-Style.
Then I basically got stuck searching for something new to do on worlds that feel recycled, small and shallow.
The digging and exploring at this point feels tedious and the movement/combat system straight up is
frustrating.

Someday I might give this game a chance again, plus it might be not thaat bad. But right now, I have to ask myself "Is this game fun?"

No.

The game feels boring now and exploration is just stale. Don't get me wrong,this game has great content. But In order to progress I have to scan items? Thats super boring, I don't feel like flying planet to planet to scan a bunch of objects. Ores are alot harder to find now. And the only thing I get for finishing quest are a bunch of reward bags, I like it when you used to get tech for completing quest and exploring but I can't do that.

Dreadwing is super hard to fight. I can't even beat him. And the crafting is just trash.