Starbound [Review]

Starbound is a 2D pixelated side-scrolling survival sandbox game developed and published by Chucklefish. The game was originally released in 2016 and is just now getting a console release on Xbox. The style and animation is very crisp and detailed. This makes it easy to play on a console as opposed to similar games like Terraria, where the details get lost when playing on a TV. Starbound is set in a sci-fi, futuristic environment where the setting is used to its strengths, especially in the character creation. You, of course, can customize human characters but there are multiple other (6) alien races you can choose from. Each species has its distinct lore that you can read about when selecting them and through the game's dialogue. The race you choose doesn’t affect gameplay, but it is a fun way to bring people into the story of the world. Like most sandbox games, Starbound lets you discover the story at your own pace throughout gameplay. Other than the start of the game where your character is graduating in a ceremony when an attack causes you to become shipwrecked out in space. Now, with a damaged ship, you need to travel to different planets to gather materials and restore your ship and crew.

When not on your ship you’ll be on the planets below where the game becomes a classic survival and material-gathering game. You don’t have a bunch of different tools like usual, instead, you have one really useful terrain-forming gun-like tool. This tool mines up any block or material and also places blocks. I will say, it does make building a bit awkward for a sandbox game. But this is really only an issue with the console version, as using a mouse will make your building precise. You are given a base from the beginning of the game that you can beam up to at any time (as long as you’re above ground) so you don’t need to build a base on each planet The game focuses more on material collecting and combat, you take your spoils back to your ship to create better materials to go to more planets.

This game utilizes the concept of procedural generation, basically meaning the game creates a random planet each time you go to a new one. It’s standard for survival games to create a random seed for the world you spawn in, but Starbound allows you to go to multiple different planets as opposed to being stuck in one world. More often than not procedural-generated layouts can cause problems for players as they can easily create something that isn’t possible to traverse through, but Starbound doesn’t overdo it and simply uses it as a way to ensure each planet has a random assortment of materials for you to dig up. And don’t worry about organizing these materials. One of my favorite features of this game is that your inventory is automatically organized into different groups like tools, blocks, food, and materials. I know it’s a silly thing to consider one of my favorite features but I spend far too much time in games like this organizing my materials, and while I like doing that I don’t want it to be annoying. And Starbound is far from an annoying game.

The procedurally generated planets make co-op pretty interesting. You can start co-op from the very beginning of the game and you can choose whichever character you’d like to take into the multiplayer. Each player will get their own ship and therefore each player gets their own planet you can beam down to. This instantly raises the number of planets you can travel to from the beginning of the game, since your ship is broken at the start you can’t travel just yet. The co-op is easy to manage and you can even teleport to whichever player you’d like to from your ship. This makes things much easier and less detrimental, if you die next to another player you can simply teleport back to that person and grab your inventory. With the extra help, I collected the core fragments much faster. These fragments are used to allow you to teleport to an arc with plenty of NPC’s to talk to. Here is where you can start collecting missions and upgrading your supplies and ship.

I’m excited that Starbound has finally reached console. I would absolutely love for it to come to Switch as well, I think being able to play this game with a touch screen to build would get rid of some of the awkwardness with it. You can tell that the game was made for PC so there is a bit of a learning curve with some controls but overall the experience was nowhere near annoying or frustrating. I had a great time playing Starbound and can see myself continuing the game further both by myself and with friends. With that, I will be giving the game an 8/10. Starbound is currently available on PC and Xbox One.