This is the biggest scam on steam at the moment. The lead dev actually just permanently banned me for simply speaking out against this case of suspicious activity. I was told I was being a "troll", even though my statements made perfect sense and weren't full of profanity. Here it is in exact words:

"You have been permanently banned from all StarForge discussions.
You were banned by a StarForge developer.
Reason: Troll"

Let me tell you why this game is garbage:

The optimization is absolutely HORRENDOUS. I'm talking running a high end pc and getting MAYBE 25 FPS on "Fast". The community is filled with angry posts and threads pertaining to how bad the game runs on their PC's regardless of hardware. I have had people tell me my PC is not good enough, but that is an absolute lie, considering this is the ONLY game I have problems running, and I know my specs and my PC's capabilities. This would be acceptable in the early stages of ALPHA, but this is ridiculous. The devs have not delivered on half the things that they said would be delivered, and the game is absolutely nothing like they describe/show you in the trailer. You spend 4 hours building a base and log off? Chances are, a bug will cause everything you worked for, to completely disappear. Let's not forget the MADNESS of the terrain. You can be in the middle of an arctic forest, and all of a sudden you come across a desert...Completely connected. This game is an unplayable mess, and needs a ton of work, to which the devs have basically stated, "Future updates on this game depend on future sales". They need to take down the trailer and change the description fo the game. Also, the "quotes" from magazine publishers and such are all from the earliest days. These guys are using old hype for a game that doesn't exist and selling it. This game is NOT a finished product and it never will be.

Is it worth $5-$10? Yes - Dependent on whether or not they fix the game breaking bugs.

$25 even with NO bugs? Absolutely not.

This game has tainted early access for me, and I truly hope that you all take this as a serious warning. I even bought a copy for a friend of mine....What a waste of money.

I've been with StarForge since the very beginning, since pre-alpha release 0.0.1. Back then the game showed HUGE promise. It was just a tech demo, but it gained popularity quite quickly for its unique ideas and friendly devs.

All of that is gone now.

Now, the game is now the extremely cookie-cutter basics of a survival game. Building, check, combat, check, enemies, check, but nothing, and I mean NOTHING, makes this game stand out from games like RUST, Minecraft, and plenty of other survival games.

Before I go into all the broken promises and lies that Codehatch has fed to us, let me answer a question 90% of you are asking. Is the game worth paying $20 for?

Lemme put it to you this way, if you have a group of friends willing to play this game, it IS fun...for a while. Finding blueprints on dead enemies can be a great experience, especially if you find a rare one. Building a fort, combating other players, all of these are the game's strong points. However, if you are playing alone or in single player, the game is extremely boring. You will find yourself playing for 10-20 minutes at a time before quitting. The game is also ridded with bugs and mutiplayer lag. Public mutiplayer is a joke, last time I checked there were 3 people playing on different servers. For some reason the devs thought it would be a good idea to make it impossible to delete blocks after a time. Meaning you have to mine them using a drill...which takes a loooooong time. This makes upgrading your fort nearly impossible once you have started on it. Want to delete that tower and move it closer? Too bad, you gotta mine it for 2 hours. Vehicles are another joke. They offer no offensive capability whatsoever. There only use seems to be faster transportation and they even suck at that role, since the terrain is so bumpy. Speaking of terrain, it actually doesn't LOOK bad, but the biome organization is sooo random. You have deserts going into tundras, going back into deserts going up a mountain. It doesn't look realistic or good. Enemy designs are decent; however I know that a few of the models are from the Unity Engine Dev Kit, not original models. Again, lazy design.

Okay, that is the basic review of the game, overall, without the upcoming rant, I would still not recommend this game. This next portion seals the deal though.

When the game first launched on IndieGoGo. They promised stuff like procedural (random) weapons, weapon customization, RPG elements like leveling up your character, gaining skills, structural stress. All of this is not present in 1.0. You will notice that procedural weapons ARE in creative, this is, again, the dev's lazy excuse to say "HEY LOOK!! WE HAVE RANDOM WEAPONS IN OUR GAME HERP-DE-DERP". Plenty of other planned content, the APC, the Space Ships, the Sniper Rifle, the list goes on and on of all the content they PLANNED and PROMISED they would release is not in the game's release. They even showed us in-engine models of the APC. There are features they added in the alpha, but removed to "work on it a little more before releasing it" and never re-added it. RPG elements, for example. They were added in late alpha, but taken out for more work, never to be added again. Can’t find evidence of this? I’m not surprised, Codehatch has done a very good job of hiding and concealing evidence of anything they did not deliver on.

If my point hasn't gotten across. Even if you think you can deal with the flaws of the game itself, DO NOT BUY THIS GAME. All you are doing is supporting devs that CLEARLY do not care about the game, community, or their company. StarForge is, I hate to say, a stain on Early Access. There are plenty of other games on Early Access that will give you much more bang for your buck. I personally recommend Space Engineers, RUST, or 7 Days To Die. All of those games actually DELIVER ON THERE PROMISES.

*** EDIT: ALTHOUGH THIS REVIEW WAS LISTED AS EARLY ACCESS IT WAS DONE ON THE RELEASE VERSION *** (The tag hadn't been removed yet)

What a massive let down this turned out to be.

Wasn't too sure of where it was heading back in the early alpha days, decided to shelve it at that point. Came back with the news of the release. And wow. If this was it's entry into Early Access it would be exciting, but the fact that this is the 'finished' product is apalling.

The game at this point is an amalgation of game mechanics with abo♥♥♥♥ely no cohesion whatsoever.

Crafting?

Yes, there is crafting. But check this out. You need schematics to craft items or create bars of ores. And guess what? You find them at random in the game world. You will surely see a spaceship in the horizon of your spawn point, and that's the source of all the schematics you'll ever need. Why? Because they respawn after a very short period of time. Even funnier, if the spaceship spawns in a slope (where it always seems to be) you will see groups of 8-12 crates come flying down the mountain. Each of them might have a blueprint... Wow. Sit and wait and let the game spoon feed you schematics. It's so unappealing.

Build defenses?

Sure but why? There is no waves of enemies coming, just the evenly spaced mob that spawns at night. More annoying than interesting.

Combat?

Ugh, the controls and physics are awkward, and this shows in how the AI attempts to navigate the world. Enemies will flip head over heels when chasing enemies up small steps in the terrain. Literally, they go flying and fall on their backs. I guess they are top heavy and have to much horsepower in their legs?

Oh, and let's not forget the game was supposed to sport this modular/procedural weapon system. Mid development videos showed the devs fighting with 4-5 bladded chainsaws. This was quite exciting, and was stripped to be given a very unispired selection of weapons. Each type of weapon has 2 variants, 'rusty/crap' and normal version.

Zip gun / Pistol
Rusty Assault Rifle / Assault Rifle
Rusty Chaingun / Chaingun
Shotguns have a 3rd variant, 'double barrel'.

About as inspired in weapon selection than Wolf Einstein 3D. Perhaps even Wolf3D has the edge since it has a knife. Lackluster.

Bugs?

You like bugs? No, not the in-game enemies. I'm talking about horrible bugs that blow your mind as to why any developer would think that it's 'ready for release'. Video card frying unoptimize code will give you horrible framerates even with gaming configurations. It seems that unless you want to make a shed that is 3X3 in size, with a whopping 1X1 living space, the game will slow down to unnacceptable frame rates. Even with the videos settings dropped down to bare minimum, the performance is horrible. I run a i7-2600k@4.5Ghz with a GTX 670 (ok not the latest in greatest, but still). Frame rates will go sub 30 if you are looking towards a base of any decent size.

The bug that just made me throw in the towel? Vehicles. The physics are already wonky, but the vehicles are the poor victims. The hover ships? Good luck parking them without having them clip in teh ground, start shaking, or bump around like crazy. But that's fine, if they are wonky to drive and use. Sure. But the fact taht in multiplayer they have a tendency to disapear? That, that's not fun. You mine to ger your hover ship, go exploring to get some more ores. And the second you get out of it far from your base, pouf gone. Same thing happened with a buggy. I guess the buggy is properly named.

Seriously, this game is about to commit opportunity suicide if it dares leave early access in this state. With the wider selection of survival games, this is one you can skip. Minecraft with mods will keep you entertained for countless hours, albeit the lackluster combat. But at least there is crafting progression. If you want a bit more intense combat, 7 days to die is a better selection. And the irony is 7 days to die managed to implement some form of structural integrity. Something Starforge was suposed to have.

Shame on the devs.

PS: People, update your reviews if you gave it a postive review back in the day. Now you can see that it's total crap, and you shouldn't leave a review out there that sounds promissing. That's the whole trap of this game, it sounds promissing, but delivers poorly.

I feel bad because someone bought this for me in alpha, to find out some devs had left. Tried it a year later, recently, and its the same garbage. Little more polished, but same. Sandbox game? Maybe for the devteam's code, not for players though.

They say it's finished, it is NOT, this is just the base to start building a game, games need objectives this has NONE, they just stamped the term "sandbox" on a bunch of game mechanics, there is no introduction or anything when you start, you just start naked in an unknown planet without any kind of guidance besides the completely elemental "tutorial" that teaches you things like "you move with wasd" there is nothing else, this seems like a demo for what could be a good game, the game never happened.

Welcome to Starforge. This is what I would like to say for this game, had I not been so gravely disappointed. It has been a (not) fun ride from the original release of this game into Steam's Early Access. A Ride full of a lot of Drama, Lies, Misinformation, and utter disappointment.

There are many grave issues with this game that I find, including game breaking bugs, and of course the fact that this game is almost nothing like it was originally pitched to be. People used to call this game a scam, and while I defended this game in the past when, at the time, there was still hope for this game, the idea that this game pulled the wool over our Eyes is only ever stronger, rather than diminished.

The Game Breaking Bugs

First I shall start with the most common bugs I encounter in this game, among the many other people who do as well. Objectively these are the worst offenders of the issues I will be listing here today, and the ones that matter most to people interested in purchasing this game.

1.) Player blocks placed by Players are not guaranteed to be saved, and rather, have a high chance to be completely deleted, upon logging out of the game. This bug is encountered by many people, very often, in both Singleplayer and Multiplayer. I personally find this bug to be the sole reason why this game is currently valueless to me, as I believe having a sandbox game that features the gameplay mechanics of placing blocks, this is not only detrimental to the gameplay, but critically destructive to the value I find in this game. The little fun I do manage to find in this game comes from it's Base Building aspects, and this bug makes it nearly pointless to partake in base building, which is a core gameplay feature and one of the few features this game actually has.

2.) The game is extremely unstable. Even on more powerful machines, the game is prone to crashing easily over extended play sessions. While I am very tolerant of game crashes, this game reliably crashes for me within an hour of gameplay, everytime. Other users experience similar play sessions, sometimes even less on lesser hardware. From what all I can see from the error reports, I cannot figure out the actual cause, and it certainly is not an issue of running out of memory on my PC. I have yet to get Starforge to effectively use all of my Memory, before crashing. Not only is it a common problem most/all users have to deal with, but it effectively feeds into the first problem I listed, where all of your player-made blocks and items will be erased. Crashing of course forces you to relog your game, which means you have a good chance of running into all of your blocks being erased.

3.) Digging. The game promises you the ability to dig underground with Drill tools. Unfortunately however, digging underground causes many framerate, and eventually crashing, issues. Simply digging underground too much can harm your gameplay experience, and building underground seems to be a guaranteed way to lose your placed blocks there (even more so than in the other bug, when building on the surface) as well as just making the game eventually unplayable or forcing it to crash, and effectively ruining your save file.

Other Issues worth Mentioning

This game promises to be a Procedurally, infinite world, that allows you to build into space, and dig to the planet's core.

However this game is not fully Procedural. No matter what Seed you punch in on the map generator screen, you will always get the same "Pizza-shaped" terrain of Biomes and Resource Nodes as every other player, within a certain diameter from the center of your map. All of your Biomes are in the same locations, all of the resource nodes for ores. Only the map outside of this Pizza's diameter will actually be fully procedural, and it will typically only contain the same old forest/plains biome that Early Access users experienced in earlier version, completely void of any actual resources or landmarks of real value.

On top of this, the game has relegated Infinite Terrain to an option, that is best left "Not Recommended" to use. Infinite Terrain serves absolutely no purpose, as no Ores or Important Locations will spawn in the Procedural areas of the game. The only purpose Infinite Terrain allows is for player to explore the empty forest/plains it generates. There is no gameplay value here to be found, outside of seeing procedural terrain with no other gameplay elements connected to it. You will be forced to always return to your original Pizza Origin placement of the map to get all of your resources and items. I should also mention that this game is extremely unstable with Infinite Terrain turned off, turning it on makes this worse.

Digging. Again. Another aspect I would like to mention about Digging in this section is that there is absolutely no point in terms of Game Mechanics to dig in this game. It is enjoyable to morph the terrain, and I would enjoy building underground bases, but not only does Digging wreck your framerate and induce more crashing, while not being a sound place to place your blocks, but it serves no purpose mechanically. No Ores will be found by digging randomly. The only locations you find Ores are within giant Mounds of resources found on the surface, and they will store pockets of resources underneath of those specific locations. Digging at random yields you nothing but more dirt, and serves no purpose other than to dig. There is nothing underground.

The Broken Promises

Finally I would like to remind people of what this game was pitched to be, and what is currently is not. For reference, here is their original trailer put onto Steam and their Indiegogo Campaign, when I first bought the game: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YxBSYit49c8

The game was meant to have Infinite Space. While I don't know whether or not Space is actually still infinite at this point, I wouldn't care to find out. There is nothing in Space by Asteroids which serve no purpose, except to exist and perhaps look pretty. You can build blocks up into Space, but there are no Space Physics, there are no other Planets to visit, there is no actual space flight, and It is literally just playing very high up on the map. It has no specific elements that are any different from playing or building on Terra firma. Other trailers (since deleted from their official Youtube channel) used to showcase spaceships flying around, and Players moving about in what looked like a troop carrier of some kind, leading Customers to believe that their might have been/would be space gameplay involve spacecraft. The only element of "Spacecraft" we have, is a terribly controlled "Space Helicopter", that is extremely slow, buggy, and often can increase your risk of game crashes. It is basically a painfully slow Elevator device.

Promised Game modes since removed. The game originally pitched that it would have 3 seperate game modes, all singleplayer or multiplayer, featuring different objectives to accomplish. We were to have a Survival mode, Wave survival/base defense mode, and a competitive RTS styled mode involving collector drones similar to peasants or workers in Warcraft/Starcraft games. Of these, only Survival is in the game.

On the original Steam page and other trailers since deleted, they also promised Structural Integrity to the blocks, where blocks would require proper Structual Support, or else they would collapse (similar to 7 Days to Die). This is not in the game.

The game also promised to have Parkour Physics of some kind, which originally existed in the game. These have since been removed.

It should probably also be mentioned that almost all content in this game is from Unity Store Assets. Especially the Creatures you will find: https://www.assetstore.unity3d.com/en/#!/content/10781 ; https://www.assetstore.unity3d.com/en/#!/content/2591

Do not buy this game.

Had the official 1.0 release of the game been the launch of the beta, I would have no problems with this game. As a "finished" game, I have nothing but problems.

First off there's a huge lack of content, a friend and I were able to go through ALL the game's content in about 8 hours of playing. There's only 4 enemy types, and no elite enemies or bosses. Crafting is also very basic with few options for base and equipment building.

Not only that, but the content that's there is buggy. The bugs range from funny (treasure boxes spawning outside and rolling down a hill, foliage despawning when you use the options menu) to infuriating (difficult to build vehicles despawning when you exit them, dying then running back to your body to get your gear and it disappearing when you get close). Bugs permeate the entire experience, and the whole thing screams "not finished".

Even things as basic as "grenade throwing animation" and "sitting down in a vehicle" are missing.

I bought this game ages ago as part of their "Founder's club", and the only thing that I got for paying 30 extra dollars is a generic looking tile set, and a recipe for a drill, a ground pounder, and a hat.

This game had a lot of potential, now it's just dissapointment.

I am legitimately shocked to see that this was actually released out of Early Access. This game is not finished. At all. All 3 hours I've put into this game was good enough to get everything I could get in survival, and the creative mode just isn't fun.

This plus Spacebase DF-9 leaving Early Access show what a failed concept it really is, and why I won't be buying another Early Access game again.

tried to play this game several times. its not at all as advertised. it feels like rumaging through garbage more than playing a game.

Don't buy this uncompleted scam, the developers have given up.

Woops, there goes $20.

So I have a hundred+ hours on here, so this is my opinion; It's an incomplete dream, the idea was interesting but the delivery was lacking. Once you've run along the surface for 20 minutes, that's it, you've basically seen everything. Bases are largely pointless or OP depending on how many players you have working together as the defences are derpy and out-wit-able but en masse they are insane. Seeing as there is no physics for the buildings, flying spires are the norm as they are the most effective. Small outposts don't happen and I've never managed to get far enough to get up to the "asteriods". Truely the biggest setback is the bugs, I have built about fifty cars, and ALL of them were eaten by the floor, even the hoverships. The other nail in the coffen is the lack of interest in the map, there's nothing for you to do there, to see, to explore! The landscape is often so jaged and hilly that there's nowhere to go, and there's really nothing to see, no interesting locations, bots or anything. Speaking of bots there's like 8 NPC's in total no bosses and lame spawning (IE within 100 feet of you). All in all, I was really hopeful, but it's been quite awhile and the devs look like they're just out of steam for this project, not that it COULDN'T be fixed just that it won't be.

Steam early access scam , they totally skipped over beta , run the game at your own risk . Terrible optimization and bland content DO not BUY

I purchased this when it was first released, paying over £50 for what looked like a promising game. As far a sI'm concenred the developers have not delivered on their promises. Very disappointing.

Does not contain many of the features promised. Good way to kill a few hours but even the game page is a lie.

Tons of guns?
- Assault rifle
- Rusty assault rifle
- Chaingun
- Rusty Chaingun
- Zip Gun
- Pistol
- Shotgun
- Double barreled shotgun

8 guns is not tons of guns. There are no single shot rifles, no scopes, nothing like that. The only gun you even need to build is a basic assault rifle. The shotgun is useful but unweildly, the chaingun is just gloriously wasteful.

Tons of vehicles?

- Hovership single
- Hovership Speedy
- Space Copter
- Buggy

It could just be that I've not successfully found the blueprints for other vehicles yet, But what am I going to find? Vehicles don't have working guns on them, but that is ok since you can just shoot your assault rifle out the window instead. There are no space ships as previously promised.

There was an ingame hint that I read, that said "Raid crashed ships for the finest blueprints" That is all fine and dandy except that what they don't tell you, is crashed ships are coated in radiation or something that constantly hurts you. That again, is understandable, its a space ship right? Leaking fuel or whatever. Except that even in a full suit of the strongest armor in the game, you STILL take the same amount of radiation damage. There is no way to resist it. This turns raiding crashed ships into a test to see if you brought enough health injections with you. It can take awhile to clear the creatures out of the ship too, as well as browse contents of the containers inside. Also on crashed ships, there are... 2 total ships that appear on the map, they look slightly different and have a different layout inside, but they just alternate on the same position. There is no crashing animation, no ship coming plummeting down upon atlas, it just kinda... swaps. The only way to know it has swapped aka renewed is to go and physically look at the damn thing.

One final point. The blueprint system in this game is hell. Sure it was a nice idea, you have to kill creatures to get blueprints, research those blueprints in order to unlock new stuff to build. But when I've been playing for 10 straight hours, raided the crashed ship 17 times and STILL haven't got the space helicopter blueprint I was promised, that is kind of crap. I did find one eventually, during my next session. The game lacks any kind of sophisticated crafting, for example, in minecraft you can mash blocks together in a crafting table and see what happens. In this you don't even know what resources you need until you find the randomly generated blueprint. The creatures never really level up their blueprints either. Leeches were still dropping me "Service" Armor blueprints well after I had completed a full set of Gaurdian and had a monolithium base. So in other words. Relying on random generation to be able to build is ♥♥♥.

I would not recommend you spend money on this game, sure it is good fun for a few hours, hell it suckered me into playing quite a bit recently, but now that I have the space copter, laser towers etc. I don't have anything to do with them. Save your money, spend it elsewhere.

Developers ahve basically abandoned it after a short burst to get it to 1.0 release and give out kickstarter things to fulfill steam and kickstarter contracts. Still buggy and broken DO NOT BUY

"Further updates will depend on future sales of the game."

They know this ♥♥♥♥ isn't gonna sell.

The devs recently abandoned this game, unfinished and completely falling flat on what was promised. Moving from alpha straight to release, weasling themselves away from the game, assumingly with money in their pocket.

Oh, also it hardly runs.

StarForge is yet another procedurally generated open world sandbox game. While I think the soundtrack is nice and the terrain can look interesting, the game itself does not bring anything new to the genre, or at least anything that hasn't already been done before. I also want to add that this game has been in Early Access for roughly two years, and in that time span, not much has changed between the first time I played, and what I played today.

Version 1.0.3 is at least playable, compared to the older ones, and has an average survival mode. However, the survival mechanics are pretty weak, you simply need to gather meat, which is then processed into an MRI syringe, which you then consume. That's it. Meat is obtained extremely easily, and you can be set for in game weeks after a collection session that lasts no more than 10 or 15 minutes. So far, I feel there is little reason to explore, since the starting area seems to have more than enough for you to survive and thrive.

Movement and combat are also incredibly awkward. Getting hit by an enemy can result in you flying about 200 feet backwards while spiraling out of control mid-air. Weapons consist of your average firearms, utilities, or tools such as a chainsaw. Enemies are also pretty stale, have really weak A.I, and in my 5 hours of playing, I only saw three different species.

Graphically, it is not the most stellar. Lighting is really strange and flickering textures are commonplace. Everything looks sort of paper mache-ish as well, even on the higher settings.

This game is also very buggy. I understand it's in Early Access but it has been in this state for two years. I frequently find myself clipping in and outside of walls, rocketing up steep cliffs, and getting caught inside enemies.

Overall, StarForge is yet another entry into the ever so popular procedurally generated open world genre. The survival mechanics are weak, the combat is stale, the graphics aren't impressive, the game is buggy, and there is a lack of goals or anything to do. However, the soundtrack is nice, and there is something strangely serene about being a lone half-naked man standing atop a high mountain, wielding a manual drill with a calming synth song playing in the background.

The very flagship of terrible early access games. One day this game was being worked upon and classified as an early alpha release. The very next day it just suddenly hit gold with a full skip on beta without the many promised features and the small amount of content it has are all plagued by glitches and bugs alike. And that is not all - many PCs have trouble running the game even at its current stage due to terrible optimization for top of the line gaming rigs.

For more details, I refer you here: http://www.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments/2dhpvd/starforge_developer_misconduct_a_look_back_from/

By calling this a finished product means they gave up on it. Poor performance. There is really nothing to do in this game. Buggy. It's not even worth downloading if it were free. Such dissapointment.