It's better than Starfield.

This is a hard one to review...
Starbound is a fantastic-looking sandbox game with interesting game mechanics not seen in Terraria, a game I have put well over 1000 hours into.

However, I cannot, in good conscience, recommend the game.
If Joe Public buys the game, it's most likely that he will be playing on a windows PC and will play vanilla - that is, without any mods.

This is something I noticed with several commenters in the review section and the forums, but the game is poorly optimized for Windows computers. I don't know how and I don't know why specifically Windows, I heard that it runs smoothly on MacOs and Linux. Even on my old Windows PC that can still run 2D games just fine, this one lags heavily when I enter a new area.
I have never seen this before with any game that isn't 3D. Even Minecraft doesn't lag (well until version 1.10 arrived, only then it began lagging) and it's a 3D game.
The said lag has incidentally managed to cause breaking bugs. For example, there is a NPC with a quest that is completely glitched because of the excessive lag, so not only is it annoying, but it is actually very bothersome. You might get away with it if you have a very beefy PC, but for most people Windows won't do.

As for the game itself, the base, unmodded experience, gets boring rather quickly. If you have no intention of installing mods, then you shouldn't play Starbound. Every planet is identical, with the only difference being the structures that spawn on them. On some they may spawn, but on others they won't, except for the "grassland" planet which acts as your starting location. Every single one of them have a teleporter and mines.

All in all, I enjoyed my experience with Starbound (when it didn't lag that is), but due to the amount of prerequisites for the game to be enjoyable to the average joe, I simply cannot recommend it. As far as I know, it hasn't gotten any good updates in a long time, so I doubt it gets any better.

devs pls come back