Recent reviews by Grondus

A sadly quite dead game, that had vast potential. With enough polish, this could have been wildly popular among strategy gamers.

Old, but gold. I'm only a little ways in and I can already tell you that as confusing, dated, clunky and even buggy as this game is, modern devs have more than a few things to learn from it.

Edit: Get "Stalker Complete" mod with this. It brings the game into the current decade with bug fixes and texture upgrades, without really changing the base game. It is well worth the restart, as the game flows much more quickly, and there is less worry about saving often to avoid accidentally triggering a ctd. It really lets this game shine like it did when it was released.

Not gonna lie. This game is fun. I got a lot of hours out of it, but I've completely burned out. Thats what this game is, its fun until that little switch in your head clicks and you realize that you're doing the same thing over and over again.
Its more than worth playing, but the second it stops being fun, my advice is: delete it and don't come back.

Whoa. Thats my impression here. Just... Whoa. Buy it on sale, you won't regret it. But be prepared for a challenge. You *will* die. Repeatedly.

Somehow, amazingly, after years and years of being that game I regretted buying way back in high school, this game is actually playable now. 7/10 do recommend, especially with friends.

Before reading this, I want you to keep in mind one thing, one core fact that drives this review: I LOVED Starbound to pieces, for the longest time.

The first time I picked up this game (on the recommendation of a friend, I might add), I was exploring planets left and right, finding creatures that spit shadow, dragons that could one shot me, fish that looked like submarines, and dogs that vomit rainbows, on the surface of worlds made of purple eyeballs. It was the best thing I had ever seen. Then the updates came. I figured "oh, they'll probably make it easier to find civilization" (at the time I had only found 3 settlements, by my 30th hour of gameplay. I was still happy.) The game started to lag for me. I was used to it, I had a bad computer at the time.

Shortly after, there was a wipe. I lost my character and my favorite server went down. I couldn't play with my friends anymore, the custom ship I was building (thanks to a lovely little mod bundle a friend and I assembled), the planet we were terraforming and the MASSIVE ice-world castle I was building...all gone. I saw what they did with the game and I said "ok, I guess that's a reasonable update." and began my base and ship anew.
Then there was another...and another...Then yet another update came and I couldn't play anymore. I was looking at enough lag that creatures wouldn't move on my screen and I could walk right through hostile dungeons without firing a shot.

For six months or more, I abandoned this game.

A few weeks ago, I got a new computer. I immediately thought back to starbound, one of my favorite games of all time. I boot it up, all excited! Then I remember...oh, the server is gone now. Oh, my base is gone, my ship is gone, my loot is gone, my character is gone. I accept it and move on, perfectly content to start a new character and terraform everything from scratch.
That's how amazing this game was.

My first planet, I'm happy as a clam. I had a new bazooka that fired guided missiles and a nice sword that that spins around and massacres everything. Then I found a house! YAY! A neighbor! Then another one.....YAY! TWO NEIGHBORS!

*next planet* oh hey, a village!
*next planet* oh hey, 4 villages!
*planet after that* Its the garden of Eden, holy crap!
*fifty planets later* Jesus, another village? This whole place is filled with lava though...

At this point, I've noticed that nearly every planet has a village on it. Most have several and most of the ones that have several, are completely covered in tiny little wooden villages. I didn't like that fact much, as it took away from the previous, unique feeling of awe and accomplishment that once accompanied the discovery of a settlement. Quickly becoming bored with that, I did something I had never done before. After just a few hours, I decided to run up a few levels on the main campaign (time was, I never needed to go beyond durasteel, I just explored and built). Even with all my goofing around and time wasting, I got the max tier of armor and weaponry, killed every boss using just my chakram (first weapon I ever found. It scales, but really badly...still the best weapon I have somehow) and I hit a wall..."what do I do now?"...

"OHH! I KNOW! I'll capture a bunch of pets and start an illegal animal fighting ring!"...oh...wait. Nope, cant capture "combat pets" anymore. Only...you know I'm still not sure what you CAN capture...all I know is that its something not worth the effort...I threw those pods at literally everything interesting.

"Ok, well, how about I do what my friend was doing and collect cool trees?" Nope! None of the non-basic ones drop saplings anymore...ok...

I had nowhere to really go, nothing to really do and all of a sudden I realized just how hollow the game had become.
I considered building a base. I mean, every planet does have a massive cliff somewhere that I could just dig into now...
Then again...that's every planet.
I could go on an ice planet...but survival has been removed for a long time and all the upgrades make everything safe. (oh, minor note, I haven't found a single background that struck me as more than mildly interesting. They used to have some really gorgeous ones, like aurora backgrounds, particularly on ice planets. Now, at best, we get a mountain range. At worst, a bunch of mildly weird trees that really muck with your depth perception.)
what about a lava planet? No...It takes eons to reach the floor and I'd probably just find another village.
How about I settle on a planet with lots of those cool creatures the procedural generation always comes up with?...oh...wait. I haven't encountered a single procedural creature since I re-installed.

It used to be hard to find a perfect planet, with a nice background and dangerous weather (seriously, meteors used to be everywhere, it was awesome!) and cool animals and a nice hillside to carve a castle into. And when you finally did, you WANTED to build there. You were COMPELLED, to build there! Now, every planet is...bland and identical. Everywhere, the same dopey rock throwing crab, the same weird, super annoying spider/rock hedgehog thing and the same...is that oddish from pokemon? ((0))_((0))

This game used to be amazing. And I mean, AMAZING. It looked like terraria, granted, but it was in my top ten games of all time. Since the updates, I hesitate to say its even on par with terraria. The balance was lost. The devs left out most of the features that they were supposedly building (custom ships, being a big one. Wouldn't even be hard to do, its one file and a couple of tile types. ENTIRELY feasible and easy to make completely optional!), they increased chests, ore deposits and village areas to ridiculous levels and all but REMOVED procedural generation. Where are my shadow dogs? Where are my eyeball trees and strange giant, lightning spitting, barbarian hylotl? (I want to take a moment to impress upon you, the importance of this last bit here. The procedural generation was about 80% of what made this game amazing. Its gone now.)
And where are those danged ship raiding pirates that we were promised?
Congrats, you added a rail system...something that the community did for mods... in a few days...years ago.

There wasn't a single second that I regretted purchasing this game before I reinstalled last week. Now, I'm not sure I'll ever play it again.

So here I go, onto the next game that promises to be exactly what this game used to be.