Starbound Impressions From An Outsider

By Teepu

Players: 1-4
Platforms: Xbox One, Windows, macOS, Linux

Starbound is an interesting experience. I came into this expecting to play through a good chunk of the game and review it, but my adventure got cut short due to immense frustration and hours of hitting brick walls, both figuratively and literally. For a person who spends a lot of time playing a large variety of genres of video games, Starbound humbled me into realizing that not every experience is for everyone, no matter how high the quality. So instead, I come here to tell you my thoughts about the 3-4 hours of the game I played. Take this how you will, as it is a look into the mind of a player who does not enjoy the genre that Starbound represents.

To begin with, I want to be clear that the game is not necessarily bad. I do have some genuine concerns about the game on the Xbox, which is where I played it, but the core experience offers something very solid for fans of the genre. Starbound is a game where you create your own unique alien and take them on a 2D sandbox adventure through various planets. Think of it as an intriguing cross between Minecraft, Terrarria, a Metroidvania, and hints of Stardew Valley.

You begin the game on a ship, about to attend your graduation ceremony. After you get acclimated to the controls, the ship falls under attack, you have to flee, and then it turns into a game of survival as you try and gather parts to escape from the planet that you inadvertently had to land on. I am not entirely sure how strong the story is overall, as I never left the starting planet (more on that later), but it was a good enough motivator for me. I also found the character customization a bit lacking, but it was not terrible.

Anyway, I spent a few hours exploring the first planet, constantly dying and not being able to get enough materials to craft anything worthwhile. Mind you, I was playing on the easiest difficulty, and still the game kicked my butt. For the sake of transparency, I am no slouch to difficulty. I’ve 100% beaten Demon’s Souls and Bloodborne; I have played a hefty amount of Minecraft simply fine; I have bested Super Meat Boy. I could go on; the point is that challenge does not sway me yet having to turn this game down to the easiest and still being destroyed was very demoralizing. To make matters worse, the controls are quite clunky. This game clearly was meant for keyboard and mouse first. There are a lot of menus to navigate and a lot of things you are able to do. Between equipping a bunch of different weapons/items you can use on a radial wheel and the mining equipment, I constantly struggled to figure out how to switch to various things fast enough to survive when I got charged by beasts that moved faster than Sonic the Hedgehog and killed me in 2-3 hits. Trying to target blocks to mine was also an absolute pain, and constantly required me to hold my controller in very awkward positions to press all the buttons needed to succeed. Frankly speaking, these are some of the worst controls I have had in a video game, and that is saying a lot. Again, I am sure the game controls fine on PC, and they did the best they could with the Xbox controller, but it still is very lacking on Xbox. I do hope they eventually bring it to PlayStation, as the touch pad will offer some extra precision control that could help immensely. I feel confident in saying that I would have gotten further in the game had the controls not prevented me from succeeding.

Alright, so I died a ton of times. Considering the game is old at this point, I decided to get help from the internet to see if I was doing something wrong. I was not. It seems like I just got unlucky with my initial world spawn and the mine and temple I needed to access were unreasonably far from my spawn point. Well, eventually I did get to the mine I needed to find (I never found the temple) and got to a gauntlet of enemies I needed to fight through to proceed, and discovered I could either stand on a ledge and fire a weak gun for 15-20 minutes to kill them all, or jump down and whack them with my sword but then get overwhelmed and die. Die I did, over, and over, and over. At this point I realized not only was I not having fun, but I was getting extremely frustrated, upset, and angry. It was at this point I decided to delete the game and decided to do this write-up instead of a formal review.

There seems to be a lot of love for the game which has been developed and improved over many years before being released on the Xbox. If you like Terrarria and are very patient, you may find enjoyment in Starbound. As it stands, it left a very sour taste in my mouth, and I want nothing to do with it ever again. As mentioned, take my opinion with a grain of salt, it is not a genre of game I play normally, but if you are like me, an outsider looking in, wanting to see what all the fuss is about? I have a simple answer for you: DON’T.

Check Out Starbound on XBox:
https://www.xbox.com/en-US/games/store/starbound/9mtsbwpwpqvq

A copy of this game was provided to us free-of-charge by the publisher for the purpose of this review. This did not affect our review in any way.