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Entertainment

Zekes Game Review:

By: Zeke Egherman, Staff

Starbound is a well-designed adventure role playing
game (RPG) focusing on space travel and exploration. With
its strong focus on combat, it encourages the player to gather
higher level materials through exploring to create better weapons. The higher level weapons allow you to fight your way
deeper underground and gain even more materials, rare items,
armor and weapons.

Graphics: The graphic style is very appealing, all of the
graphics are in a unified 16-bit style, giving it a relaxing, retro
feel. The graphics are very consistent between items, however
they vary slightly, which is a nice touch.

Gameplay: The gameplay of Starbound is very relaxed
at times, and at others it has you sitting on the edge of your
chair, hoping your energy will recharge so that you can use
your homing rocket launcher one last time to kill a mini-boss.
A mini-boss is an enemy that deals increased damage, and
has much more health than the regular enemies. The game
has several different mini-bosses, some of which spawn randomly, some of which are predefined. There are also regular
bosses, which are much harder to defeat, but reap much larger
rewards. A fairly large issue that was very apparent was the
lack of a formal tutorial in the game. The tutorial explained the

controls quite well, but the game mechanics themselves were

not very
well covered. I found that after I left the tutorial, teleported to
an unknown planet, simply with the prompt Find the archaic
energy source Over the next three hours, I continued to dig my
way down into the depths of the earth, searching helplessly for
the source, until losing my items to a pit of lava. What made
things more frustrating was that, when I respawned, I discovered the energy source I was looking for was a mere 30 second
walk away.

Soundtrack: The soundtrack was incredibly well put
together, with exactly the kind of music to match the mood of
the current events on screen. When I was in combat, I would
get an intense tune, when I was exploring, I would get an upbeat, encouraging melody, and when I was sitting back building a house or crafting, I would get a calm, relaxing refrain.

Overall: I give Starbound a 7/10. Its lack of an in depth
tutorial brought the score down significantly, however what
saved the rating would be the vast amount of content. From
online multiplayer, to over 500 unique items, and many other features, you get quite a lot of playtime and value for just
$15.00 USD

I feel like the game is a mile wide but an inch deep. While
there is variation . . . a lot of the dungeons repeat, and it has
failed to hold my long term interest Toob (203 hours played)
I love making music [in game] and playing them
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Starbound is a game full of ex

ploration. While you might find
a
planet bursting with life at ever
y seam, you might also find a p
lanet
devoid of life altogether -Aimle
ssinscorporated (143 hours pla
yed)