Games Design Fundamentals - Game Review (For Pitch)

Starbound Game review
Genre(s): Survival Adventure Sandbox Game

You are attending your protector graduation on Earth when a devastating attack leaves the planet in ruin and yourself stranded in space, orbiting a distant planet which you must venture for resources and clues to solving this galactic crisis.

Aesthetic

The pixel art style is used very well here and the use of color gives it that charm that a lot of similar titles lack. Different biomes appropriately range from being vibrant and whimsical to bleak and spooky, telling a story about the game's environment outside of its codex system. One small gripe about the game’s look is how the size of the pixels changes based on the scale of an asset.

Animations

The game’s animations are so smooth and particle effects work well at making the game's environment more lively than just lifeless, static props. The animations use smears to convey a powerful swing or faster motion which I believe works really well at developing believable, good looking weapon animations. These vary from weapon types too, with swords and daggers differing from axes and spears.

Difficulty and Balancing

Chucklefish games have balanced Starbound in such a way that you always feel like you're progressing, whether that be you’re finding new materials to upgrade your tools and equipment or traveling to more hostile star systems, I found myself spending an equal amount of time at each stage of the game researching races and their culture before fighting a mini-boss alongside them.
While the difficulty for the survival difficulty was fine for me, there’s a steep divide between the two other difficulties with one acting almost like a creative mode with no stakes or consequences for dying whilst the other ensures the player stays dead when they die. What I believe would help is a middle ground between either difficulty with one being an easier

Customisation and Variety

Starbound provides the player with an array of species to play as, all with different traits, vanity and starship types. Players can also change to colors of their skin, clothes and even the color of their houses once they unlock the tool to do so. It helps players feel a sense of ownership when they create something they're proud of which a lot of these "open world survival" games with building mechanics seem to lack.

I noticed that once I’d visited enough planets, I began noticing the similarity between them, some environments from different planets looking the exact same with a different shade of dirt which, whilst not too problematic and very easy to miss seeing as the planet's surface is littered with dynamic discoveries such as camps, dungeons, and villages, it does eventually become quite samey.

Soundtrack

The game sports a six and half hour soundtrack ranging from passive exploration themes to boss fight melodies that loop seamlessly and do a fantastic job at setting the scene and making the game more charming and emotional. Some of the music feels out of place or doesn’t fit with the environment it’s playing in. An example of this is when the player first engages in space missions with the mech, the music is too upbeat and would be much more fitting for that of a boss fight or campaign mission. That being said, most (entirely opinionated, take with a grain of salt) atmospheric pieces set the mood just right and make for a more pleasing experience.

Traveling Satisfaction
With exploration being a driving selling point of Starbound alongside being about fighting and building across an entire galaxy, it’s extremely satisfying to traverse the surface of a randomly generated planet and discover friendly settlements and hostile strongholds along the way.
After experiencing No Man’s Sky and witnessing how barren and lonely they've made their planets firsthand, I must commend Chucklefish for not presenting the player with a wasteland and tell them to "make their own stories".
Where Starbound is a little weaker is space travel mostly due to the fact that the player's ship used to traverse between systems is essentially just that: a slow, boring vehicle. Another point I’d like to make is some of the obvious loading screens, while nice with some of the sprite loops like genuinely stunning, due last a little longer than I can mess around in my inventory.

Optimisation

For the most part, Starbound runs really smoothly at a constant 60 frames per second. Besides a couple of forgivable frame drops when in boss fights or a lot of entities are present on the screen
As someone who has played the game from early beta when the game was littered with bugs and would occasionally crash, the current build of Starbound is a lot more stable and, besides a couple of freezes that don’t hinder or take away from the experience too much, still functions better than most AAA titles on release.
This may have been because my computer has weaker specs than what’s recommended (the RAM being particularly underwhelming) but whenever I got into an encounter with hostile AI, everything would freeze periodically before speeding to the point in time where the attack has already happened and given me no time to react. This left me feeling slightly cheated and a little frustrated however this only occurred a handful of times and hasn’t happened for some time since (probably due to the fact that they patched in a hotfix).
That being said, Starbound isn’t bug-free. In my time with the current build I discovered a game breaking bug where if I equip the firearm I got from killing the third boss, it would crash out my game. Not only that but if I tried reloading my save, it was a gamble whether that game crashed again immediately or gave me just enough time to unequip/ destroy the weapon before it’d crash again.