Starbound: The Beta

This week I’ve been playing a game that’s in beta,  the games called Starbound and is being developed by the indie developer Chucklefish. Now I had no clue what I was getting into when I decided to buy and play this game, I hadn’t looked into the game at all and didn’t even know it was in beta before I brought a copy for a review.

I have to say, it was the best £10 I’ve spent in recent weeks.

After around three hours of continuous play I had pretty much given up following the in-game beginning objectives which serve as the tutorial, instead I filled my starting spaceship full of wood as fuel and set off in search of brighter horizons. This as it turns out cost me my life multiple times but on the plus side I got to building better equipment and machines quickly (my starting planet sucked).

The art style is amazing! It’s truly a gorgeous game to look at.

After playing for what seemed like days (really around 5 hours) I decided that it was time to try out the multi-player and one of my friends brought the game way before me so we decided to have a go together. Well after the inevitable of getting each other killed multiple times we started to build a house and try to survive the game the way it was intended. Now it may just be that I skipped most of the tutorials and he hadn’t played for months but it was almost impossible, and I feel like that is where this game is so good. We didn’t care that we were repeatedly having to start over losing most of our resources because it was fun, in fact in my opinion the time spent screwing around was more fun than when we actually got to playing the game well. This is a game that excels when playing with a friend (I’m not saying it isn’t fun on its own) it’s just the game was too much fun with another.

Now I’m going to have to say this but this game is just the science fiction version of Terraria, if you like Terraria then you will love this. I got to say that this is truly a great game, its beautiful, its mechanics are simple but work extremely well together and the soundtrack is absolutely incredible.

This game has given me a love for Chucklefish and I shall continue to play Starbound while I eagerly await their new game Wayward Sail.