More than just a Terraria Clone

Starbound is a platform adventure game currently in beta and being developed by Chucklefish Games, a UK indie games studio. I love this game! I am eight hours in and I’ve barely even scratched the surface of all that is available in this game. Indeed I’ve only just completed the tutorial, a fun yet disheartening experience that will be shared later in this review. This game is special, and not just because fellow games Editor Max bought it for me at Christmas or because it’s an indie game. Read on to find out why you should spend your time playing this game.

At first impressions Starbound can be described as a sort of 2D version of Minecraft, a lot like Terraria, except it is set in space. When you start out you get to choose between 6 races which are all different. At the moment, the races are sort of similar, apart from appearance, but each race does get its own armour, weapons and recipes. I picked the Avian race, bird looking creatures who can’t fly but are fierce warriors. You start the game aboard your spacecraft, however you have no fuel! Stranded in space you must beam yourself down to the nearest planet and survive while gathering materials. For new players the game provides a handy tutorial, and you are rewarded money for completing it. It was simple to start with, and my Avian character was doing well. I built a campfire, a workbench and a hunting bow to hunt the variety of alien creatures the planet has. The alien enemy creatures remind me a lot of Pokémon and the game tells you the attacks they are making. One in particular reminded me of Psyduck as it picked me up and dropped me using gravity slam. After my relaxing time hunting to get meat, and mining, I was presented with the final quest in the tutorial. I had to build a distress beacon to attract attention from passing spaceships.

The recipe for the distress beacon needed a lot more materials than anything I had built before so off I went mining into the deeps, and I mean deep! You can dig down far, and find dungeons with treasure chests, abandoned research centres filled with money and different enemies. I spent nearly two hours mining and the varied landscape helped keep the game fresh. Down in the deeps I discovered more problems than just enemies. It is cold when you go down far, and if you are away from a torch or campfire you freeze to death, but it is not the cold that killed me. In the underbelly of the planet my Avian creature died of hunger as I failed to find monsters to hunt for meat. Dying in this way, although frustrating, was a lot more interesting than just being killed by monsters. Back on the surface after re-hatching from an egg I had the materials for a distress beacon. Ignoring the messages to properly prepare I used the distress beacon and all my materials with it and got destroyed by a UFO that came down. I was in shock, 2 hours were completely wasted as I needed to build a new distress beacon to call the UFO back and this time be prepared to destroy it. My need for revenge drove me through the 3 hour mining session I needed to get enough materials to build a full set of armour. I even went to an Avian town and murdered and stole enough money to build the beacon. My small wingless Avian had been though a lot, but this time, with a lot of running, I was able to destroy the UFO and the penguins it beamed down to the surface to obtain the molten core: a required material for the Metalwork station.

If it hasn’t come across in my epic adventure, this game is addictive. Not many games would hold my attention after having been destroyed by a UFO following a big mining session. Starbound manages to keep you entertained as the landscape is unexpected and changing. At one point I jumped out of my seat as meteors came down and destroyed everything near my house. Starbound has lots to do already and it’s just in beta. It differs from Minecraft by offering quests which keep you entertained when you don’t know what to do as well as offering the sandbox experience that many enjoy. When you get good enough to leave your first planet you can find new worlds with harder enemies, but increased ore, and get money to buy more powerful weapons. The game looks beautiful and has calming music to accompany your journey through space. I urge you all to buy Starbound now and enjoy this great game while seeing how the game evolves through the beta.