Time to rewrite this old thing now since it's out of EA. Let's start with an admittedly bad metaphor.

Imagine you see a food stand that makes sandwiches. They have only one kind of sandwich, the 'Mystery Sub,' but it's promised to have the ingredients you like on it. Specifically, pickles, butter, and white american cheese, with just a little bit of mayo. It's also pretty cheap, so you order a sandwich. You're told it'll be ready in five minutes.

Those five minutes go by, but still no sandwich. So you go up and ask about it and the guy at the stand says he just started in the food service industry yesterday, and he misjudged how long it would take. Since he's just starting out and he says it'll be the best sandwich ever, you decide to give him the benefit of the doubt and wait for a little while.

After half an hour of waiting, he finally gives you your sandwich. You decide to open it to see what's in the 'best sandwich ever,' and you take a look at it.

Mayo. Lots of mayo. With one pickle, a big glob of butter, and half a piece of that awesome cheese you like all placed in different corners on the bread, covered in that white goop. In other words, it's technically what you ordered, but it's not half as good as you expected it to be, and was given to you in much more time than you were told it was going to take originally.

Starbound is that sandwich. It has everything they said it would have; exploration, building, even a few dark themes. So technically everything they said it would be. But there isn't nearly enough of that stuff, and mostly samey fetch quests and grinding. The all-important story is shallow and derivative, with every quest pretty much being 'scan random crap, go though dungeon, kill boss.' Rinse and repeat.

Over all, it's not a bad game. It has plenty of stuff to keep you busy for a while, with tons of cosmetics and building items. I would even say the building system is better and more fun than Terraria. But there just isn't enough of everything else that would make it fun and unique; as the old saying goes, it's as wide as an ocean and as deep as a puddle.

There's plenty of bad stuff that happened in development; with the devs, with the missed release dates, and plenty of other problems. I'm not going to go into it here; if you haven't heard of all the problems with the development and the devs themselves and are interested, you can look it up yourself. God knows you'd get a better explanation from anyone other than me.

So I'll judge it on what it has in it now, not what happened in development in the past. And for me, in it's current state it's a resounding 'meh.' Good for one or two playthoughs, but you'll probably get bored of it before you even get to experience most of the main features. I still haven't even tried the colony stuff, and I did very little farming after 1.0. It's only fifteen bucks though, so if you think thirty or so hours is enough for that price, then go for it I guess. Will you get as much play out of it as, say, Terraria though? No, probably not.

I'm sure I've 'gotten my money's worth' out of it while it was in EA, but I still don't like the game much, so I'm giving it a negative review. Maybe a 4 or 5 out of 10 for me.