They ruined it. They gave up a interesting, open ended universe for a haphazardly thrown together sci-fi story and an endlessly repeating scan-walk-scan gameplay loop. It's only decent with mods and even then Terraria is a better investment of your time

I wish I could review this neutrally. I like the game, personally I enjoy the building and exploration and the story was fun the first time through if a little repetitive. The modding community is also unreal for this game they create brilliant mods that make Starbound feel like a whole new game. I enjoy using it for creative products and its a very chilled out, go to game for me even if it has so many issues.

This game has so many performance issues that not even modding can fix- every month I discover a new very commonly acknowledged bug that just remains unfixed by the devs. It is common knowledge this game was released unfinished and
with community-made unpaid content included. The devs were really ♥♥♥♥♥♥ about the whole thing and do not deserve support. If you don't know please look it up for details on this.

Many bugs straight-up corrupt files and the only way to stop this is to regularly, manually back up and replace said corrupted files from backups otherwise there's a high chance you loose your entire Universe. The game is also just built poorly- it runs laggy as hell even when PC specs are well above recommendation and crashes often loading time also takes ages. There are Mods that can help performance but not fix it entirely.

If this game worked and all the features promised were out and it was properly balanced I'd recommend it but that's unlikely to happen so I won't. For a new player, it's not worth picking up and there are better options that are far less frustrating.

I do recognise the irony of this review with my hours, all I can say is leave me and my comfort pile of ♥♥♥♥ alone. The game is bad but I have a problem.

I came for the artstyle and aesthetic, was kept busy by the hours of content, and ended up staying for the great modding community.
The only unfortunate thing is the lack of updates and new content. It seems that this game has reached the end of its development, and is currently in its final state.

Oh well! Not every game can live up to minecraft or terraria, and that's fine.