Starbound

I've sunk enough hours into Starbound to have strong opinions about all seven playable races, and the honest verdict is this: it is one of the most charming, wide-open 2D sandboxes on PC, held back by a combat loop that never quite earns the screen time it demands. Pick your species at character creation, the medieval-robot Glitch, the carnivorous plant Florans, the gas-based western drifters called Novakids, or four others, and each comes with its own aesthetic flavor baked into the lore of the universe. It is not deep role-playing in the Disco Elysium sense; choices here are more about identity than consequence. But the worldbuilding texture is genuine, and the randomly seeded planets are stuffed with ruins, alien cultures, and strange little micro-stories worth discovering. The game opens with your home planet destroyed and your ship limping through space on a dead FTL drive. That early repair-your-ship structure acts as a light tutorial gate, giving you a handful of quests and boss fights before the universe properly opens up. Once it does, the freedom is real. You can run the main story to uncover the ancient evil behind the Ruin, build elaborate colonies and recruit crewmates, farm crops, terraform planets, or spend three hours raiding a bird-person temple for its ornate furniture to decorate your starship. The Matter Manipulator, your upgradeable multi-tool for mining, wiring electronics, and manipulating liquids, keeps progression feeling tangible without forcing a single path forward. Three difficulty modes (casual, survival, and permadeath) let you tune the stakes to your tolerance. Where Starbound stumbles is exactly where RPG-focused players will feel it most: the quest design is thin, the main storyline is a fairly linear escort through predetermined story beats rather than a branching narrative, and the combat, swords, axes, bows, grenade launchers, blink-explosion broadswords and all, is repetitive by hour ten. Enemies swarm on sight across nearly every planet, and most encounters play out as simple hack-and-slash interruptions to whatever you actually wanted to be doing. The boss fights attached to story missions are the exception and provide some genuine challenge, but filler combat is real and it is constant. Co-op is where the game finds a second gear. Splitting exploration duties, coordinating base construction, and stumbling onto absurd procedural scenarios together, penguins in tanks, underground toy civilizations, techno-Egyptian bird dungeons, gives the whole experience an energy that solo play only partially captures. The modding community has also been doing heavy lifting for years, adding new races, quality-of-life fixes, and expanded mechanics that Chucklefish stopped delivering after the game effectively went into maintenance mode post-1.0. That development slowdown is the elephant in the room: Starbound is a polished, feature-complete product with a committed modder ecosystem, but official post-launch support has been minimal. What you buy today is what it is, and for a certain kind of player, someone who wants a chill, creative sandbox with a sci-fi skin and doesn't need a dialogue tree to feel invested, that is more than enough.

Monika · Scout Team

RPGs

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