Starbound Review - IGN (2024)

Each time I beamed down from my personal starship into the 2D sidescrolling craft-em-up that is Starbound, I found an experience that shoots for the stars and lands squarely among them. Exploration of a diverse array of planets, biomes, and subterranean nightmares is the highlight of the voyage, but the combat, scripted bosses, and rich backstory help this excellent evolution of the established Terraria formula shine nova bright.

Starbound handles the now-traditional routine of mining, refining, and crafting as well as any of its peers, and even allows you to group up with friends. The early game is a bit slow paced, as your handheld matter manipulator takes a while to bust through tougher materials until you upgrade it, and even the weaker enemies can get the better of you before you’ve found the right rare resources to craft some half-decent gear. What truly elevates this open-ended crafting sandbox above others like it, though, is the diversity.

Randomized locations, hidden ruins, resources, and quests round out these worlds.Each planet I visited had me breaking blocks, exploring caves, and hunting for resources to combine and craft into items, but each one is unique. There are over a dozen interesting planet types to discover, from temperate to jungle to roiling seas of magma, and procedural generation guarantees an endless supply of them to explore. Each also contains several different biomes, both above and below ground, so you can travel from one side of a forest moon to the other and see three or more types of arboreal environments. Below the surface, it’s the same story. I wasn’t fully prepared for some of the downright disturbing (in a good way!) buried biomes I came across, and I’d rather not spoil them for you here other than to say to expect the unexpected. It's fully possible to land on a frozen world and drill down to a liquid ocean, beneath which is a temple made of bones, which in turn hides a steampunk mineshaft leading even deeper to a lava-filled mini dungeon. And that's just in one vertical slice of a single planet. Exciting, randomized locations, hidden ruins, new crafting resources, and quests round out these worlds and help them come alive.

Other than gathering resources, the main way you interact with these places is by killing their inhabitants. The side-scrolling combat, whether you prefer a melee weapon or slightly more thematically appropriate firearms, is tactical, responsive, and at times intensely challenging. Diverse enemies and fighting styles allow experimentation and prevent battles from becoming stagnant and repetitive. Meanwhile each weapon type has a specific niche and encourages a different style of fighting, to the point that switching from a sniper rifle to a sword and shield made me feel like I was almost playing a different game.

I especially loved the story-based chapter bosses. Each of them is very distinct from the next, and some of the later ones are a serious challenge straight from the old-school Mega Man playbook, ranging from massive, skeletal dragons to lightning-quick swordsmen with complex attack patterns to learn. The frantic, retro-hardcore difficulty left me craving more.

It's easy for its risk-reward systems to catch you in a death spiral.Starbound did manage to frustrate me a few times, in that it’s a bit too easy for its risk-reward systems to catch you in a death spiral. Dying in most areas means dropping all of your crafting materials, food, and consumables. If that happens to be in the depths of an ice world past several fathoms of respawning enemies, getting back to your stuff intact can be a huge problem. That in itself is fairly standard roguelike gameplay, but the hitch is that healing items become absolutely critical in the late game, and sometimes I found myself in a vicious cycle where multiple deaths depleted not just my supply, but my ability to acquire more of these necessary provisions by draining my bank account. Farming resources to recover from that was some of the least enjoyable time I spent with Starbound.

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The story itself isn’t the most complex or mind-blowing, but the universe that developer Chucklefish built to tell it in is overflowing with character and detail. Each of the six sentient races has a unique culture, architectural style, and ongoing conflict that must be resolved in order to save the galaxy. From ferocious plant people struggling with a subculture of cannibalism to self-aware robots stuck in a humorously medieval mindset due to a glitch in their programming, there’s plenty of it. Books and other documents hidden throughout the sprawling levels provide details on everything from political history to hunting rituals, and the inventive, scripted dungeons at the end of each chapter let you interact with these hinted-at elements up close and personal.

A major highlight of the story quests was a full-on castle siege, in which my NPC crew and I had to defend a batty nobleman’s destructible keep from waves of enemies armed with catapults. I also really enjoyed the chapter dungeon for the super-smart primate Apex species, in which I infiltrated an underground facility run by their Big Brother-esque government to open the way for friendly rebels fighting a real-time battle, which was visible on the surface above me. It's clear the level designers weren't afraid to push the boundaries of what a side-scrolling dungeon can be, and it paid off beautifully.

Yet they weren’t vain enough to force us into it, so all of that story is optional. There’s nothing to stop you from going off and setting your own exploration or building goals in traditional Minecraft or Terraria fashion. If you just want to make an underwater Viking fortress on a remote planet with trophies of all the space sharks you've killed, you can be on your merry way. But if you choose to let the story guide you, it interweaves itself with the non-story-based progression paths in a way that made me feel like I didn’t need to pick one or the other. In between chapter bosses, I was often prompted to travel to new worlds, contact a new race, discover new resources, and craft better equipment – all things I would have been doing anyway. By the end of the story quest chain – around 40 hours later, granted I spent a lot of that time doing non- story related things – I had a good grasp on what further adventures were available to me, and how best to prepare myself for them. The story supplements the core gameplay, rather than merely sitting on top of it.

I've never felt quite so much stylistic freedom in a 2D crafting game before.If building is more your thing, there are hundreds of structural and decorative blocks that can be collected and crafted to create exactly the look you’re going for. From the various alien styles you can deconstruct and rebuild to craftable statuary and scores of available materials available across countless planets, I've never felt quite so much stylistic freedom in a 2D crafting game before. Even something as simple as a two-room A-frame shelter can be built a thousand different ways, to say nothing of planet-spanning fortresses that take multiple players multiple days to assemble.

Small, personal outposts can grow into full-blown colonies, as you purchase charters that allow NPCs to move into the makeshift neighborhoods you’ve created. They’ll even pay you rent for your trouble, and more elaborate and embellished settlements will attract higher-paying clients. This creates a compelling reward loop for what would otherwise just be a freeform decorating minigame.