Surprisingly Impressive. The gameplay is relatively simple but addicting, and one of the main draws of the game is that it includes a lot of quality-of-life features that other MMO games sometimes struggle to provide. It is quick to get into adventure, inventory management is pain free, cosmetic slots that you can change whenever you like, housing and club worlds, crafting from storage and being able to teleport to your friends and other players.

I have not reached end game yet so I'm not sure how that fares, but the exploring, combat and crafting while leveling is ver straight forward and pretty fun.

Starbound is a game of depth. If you enter the game with a bias towards other similar games (Terraria/Minecraft) then your immediate impressions will be of disappointment. As someone who put a lot of time into Terraria, Starbound at first came accross as slower, clunkier and with a lot less to do.

However, the more I played the more I saw what Starbound really had to offer. Starbound is an exploration game, where everything is randomly designed. You are meant to travel around to different planets, and each one is never the same - different biomes, rock types, monsters, scenery and landmarks. You still have to gather resources to advance to higher tiers of technology but it can be fun to just travel around your sector to see all the variations of planets.

The game is still in beta but has a decent amount of content so far, and seems to support modding really well at the moment if you're into that scene.