Recent reviews by Clara Chance

Very accessible for a social deduction game, with a high focus on the deduction and social mechanics. It lets the gameplay form itself via simple rules. Much better experience with friends, it is not worth playing for the public games.

Well-designed, content-heavy, 2D adventure/sandbox game.

Starbound Early Beta Review

It is early days for Starbound, there is a lot of content to be added. At the moment the game looks and sounds beautiful and creates an amazing atmosphere, this is where the game excels the best right now.

Unfortunately everything else is rather shallow right now. I hope and expect for richer content but in the beta right now there is a tiny amount of content. There are a small amount of mob AIs, a land based simple mammal which will most likely do 1 of 2 similiar attack patterns or sometimes shoot a projectile. Flying mobs which will shoot projectiles and humanoid mobs with either a sword or gun. There are a few other rare mobs but mostly you will see the same things over and over.

The combat is fun at first but again gets limited to using similiar melee/shields/guns though the melee is quiet varied. The planets are all extremely similiar, block layouts are the same and there is not much unique to different planets. Different levels have different ores but the ores are currently completely unbalanced. Of course this is beta and everything mentioned should be changed and expanded on. Even the next patch should solve a lot of the balance issues.

The dungeons/temples/labs are cool and there are a lot of types but most of them seem to revolve around fighting the same mobs over and over in new rooms hoping to find useful stuff in the storage areas. There are occasionally jumping puzzles which can easily be done with blocks. Most loot from these areas and from chests on planets aren't that good except for the techs and legendary weapons which you really want to find on the highest danger level planets. This might change after the new update again, with everything else. The bosses need a lot of work and balance at the moment and are easily beaten by placing some blocks.

Most of the time I spent on Starbound was either travelling around planets or mining underground which gets really repetitive and boring. Although there are countless planets to explore the things you need to do to progress through the game are set in stone and there is not much replayability right now.

As expected from a beta there is a lot of work that needs to be done, this is far from a finished state, if you enjoy games like Terraria and this looks like fun you should get it, but don't rush as it is far from complete. If they can pull it off then Starbound will be an amazing game.