Starbound

this game is kind of a Damn mess but yet i still cant hate it. its so fun to just mess around in here from time to time even if its an absolute slog to play thru without mods

I have played this game for hours and I still have no idea how to play it.

Played this game on and off from its beta all the way till it fully released. Its atmosphere, soundtrack, art, and combat are all quite great but that's mostly the extent of the cool parts here. The shipbuilding features are sorta cool but could have been fleshed out WAY more. It's mostly just collecting resources and then turning them in to have an extra room added onto your ship. The story is by far the weakest point of this game. During development they seemed to have a few different ideas on how you would progress the story but the final result is one of the worst possible ones. Essentially, to progress through the story you use a little identifier gun on different civilizations on different planets and once you identify enough things for that specific civilization it unlocks a boss. That's it. I can see that it sort of encourages exploration but indirectly, and regardless it is just a lackluster mechanic. It's just point and clicking anything that turns green on the identifier it's very lame. What the game ends up being is just a bare bones version of itself. It has all of the mechanics it needs to be successful it just doesn't explore those mechanics enough to be a truly great game. Despite all of that, though, I did not hate it as it's a great atmospheric experience.

It's Terraria, but kinda worse in every way. I don't really understand the decision to lock unique movesets to legendary weapons, as the combat is a cut above Terraria's on its own, but a game that copypastes its core progression loop this hard doesn't get much credit from me, anyway,

It's like terraria! But in space! And really badly designed!