Starbound is the better Terraria

Starbound takes the Terraria formula and improves upon it in every aspect. It's full of stuff promised by No Man's Sky. It's also a bit of Metroid and a bit of 2D-Skyrim.

My life is happy, becaue I'm a gunslinging space raptor. I'm beaming down to a planet I've just discovered. I'm taking my engineer with me, who happens to be a green, bipedal cockatoo with a giant rocket launcher. I've also brought my argonian medic and a sniper, who happens to be a dragon. Thanks, Steam Workshop!

Space is dangerous. Bring friends.

The game features coop multiplayer, so Claire is with me, as well. She's... I'm not a hundred percent sure what the fuck she is. She's wearing a giant goat skull on top of her head and she's summoning space goats, which she captured on another planet with the help of some freaky techno balls. Yes, you can capture monsters like Pokémon and that's not even a mod!

The world we're exploring is covered in eyeballs. There are giant eyeballs on the trees, tiny eyeball monsters are crawling around and curiously watching us and finally, we come across this mountain of eyeballs, which is too steep to climb. I try to dig into it and create an avalanche. Of eyeballs. I nearly drowned in this game before, got buried in sand, but this is new. We dig into the planet's surface until we reach its core, which is made entirely out of flesh. Ew.

You can harvest the eyes and turn them into furniture.

Every new planet is full of wonders and weirdness. We've discovered huge underground cities made of miniature houses, shops and skyscrapers inhabited by pixel-sized gnomes. One world had a huge medieval fortress, inhabited by a bunch of robots, who attacked us using swords and bows. They're a playable race called the glitch. We've met talking mushrooms, frog people, fishy samurai guys under the sea and wild west towns on desert planets.

There's also a race of space apes, who build depressing towns and even more depressing laboratories. Their Orwellian towns have cameras in every room, there are posters telling the citizens to 'OBEY!' and they all seem a bit paranoid when you speak to them. "Are you allowed to be here?" Meanwhile, the labs have all sorts of caged alien creatures and the place is full of computer terminals and brains in jars.

Not the happiest world we've encountered.

There are mutated, radioactive worlds, planets covered in ice and snow or lava, mushrooms or even giant, sentient vegetables. Yes, I've been attacked by a giant carrot monster. Where Terraria gives you one randomly-generated world with a bunch of varying biomes like deserts, snowy mountains and jungles, Starbound gives you an infinite amount of planets with much greater variety. Granted, you'll ultimately see biomes and architecture repeat, because there are only so many possibilities, but there's a great community-created mod, which adds dozens of new biomes, hundreds of creatures, new quests, dungeons... oh yeah, about those!

Not every alien creature you bump into is friendly. In fact, most of them want to eat you in fun and creative ways. On top of that, many outposts have to deal with criminals, who abduct people and hold them hostage. You can lend a hand, rescue hostages, kill baddies, get rewards like tech upgrades and epic new gear and some NPCs will even ask to join your crew when you help them enough. Help a depressing space ape with a difficult quest and he might just become your new engineer! Use tech upgrades from reward bags to unlock wall jumps, dash moves or the ability to morph into a ball and fit into tight spaces like Samus Aran.

You can always start your own settlement on a planet if your ship gets too crowded.

Combat is nothing special. You equip a weapon and click shit to death, but at least there's a decent variety in weapon types and playstyles. I like to dual-wield pistols and attack baddies from a distance, then finish them off with dual daggers or claws when they get too close. Claire charges in with a sword and shield, tanking most damage for the group. On top of that she swings a huge katana. The blade can be powered up, causing it to hum and light up like a lightsaber. Lightsaber-katana. That's a thing on here. You also get shotguns, assault rifles, rocket launchers... again, it's a lot like Terraria, but bigger and with more possibilities.

Dungeons can range from small, five minute affairs like the challenge rooms (e.g. you have one attempt to dodge the traps and kill the baddies to get your reward) to huge story-driven arenas full of monsters, hidden treasure and a super tough boss battle at the end. Unlike most other areas, these dungeons are hand-crafted and not random-generated. This hurts replayablility a bit, but gives them a coherent structure, which is often difficult with procedurally-generated stuff.

There's still plenty of dungeon-like open world action like this prison.

Fun side activities include starting your own colony if your starship isn't big enough to make you happy, as well as starting your own band. We found a banjo and an electric base guitar, so we paused our adventure for a moment to play 12 Days of Christmas together. Because yes, that's also a thing on here.
I've seen reviews, which refer to this game as a 'Terraria clone' and talk about Starbound as though it was aping its 'big brother Terraria' and other such nonsense. Yes, of course the similarities are super obvious, but this game doesn't simply copy stuff to cash in on a successful formula. It takes everything you can find in Terraria and adds to it, expands it, adds depth and complexity. This makes the game better and even greater than the already amazing Terraria.

However, there is also a downside, which comes in the form of a much steeper learning curve. Important features such as harvesting rocket fuel, hiring crew members or upgrading your crafting stations aren't exactly self-explanatory and the game does a poor job at explaining its features to new players. This game probably isn't for you if you're not willing to make regular trips to the wiki. But if you're content-clear on Terraria or simply looking for a fun, vast game to keep you busy for dozens of hours, then Starbound is a great choice.

Vacation Simulator

The Crew is a shitty racing game. But it lets you enjoy one hell of a road trip when you're too cheap to go places in real life.

Claire and I are broke as fuck. Now, when most of you guys think 'broke', you imagine having to use regular four-ply toilet paper instead of the gold-plated stuff you normally use. But I'm talking seriously poor here. We don't just re-use our teabags for extra tea. We use the string to sew the holes in the potato bags we stole from Farm Foods to wear them like clothes. We don't even eat all the potatoes! We set them on fire, so they can serve as a source of warmth and light. So imagine how happy we were when Ubisoft gave The Crew away for free, because it sucks so hard, people have long stopped buying it.

When I first tried to get into The Crew, I tried to pretend it's a racing game, which is wrong. The game has you play a young Gordon Freeman, who witnesses the murder of Mr. Clean. Then Colonel Sanders shows up and blames you. Now you have to take revenge on the KFC mascot and his gang by beating random people in street races. It all makes perfect sense and is highly entertaining, well-written and in every way as gripping as a Wednesday episode of Coronation Street.

The driving physics in the game are total ass and your car only stops handling like a brick after you spend several hours raising your vehicle's level. There's also some overpriced new DLC, which apes the police chases from Need for Speed and GTA, without adding any of the stuff that makes them fun. The main feature of said DLC is to remind you that you should totally go buy it every thirty or so seconds.

It ain't fucking free if it costs 25 Bucks to unlock it!

There's also a shitty ingame GPS, which constantly forgets where the fuck you're supposed to go, cutting off in the middle of nowhere. So basically, you get to drive around with zero directions while some lady keeps nagging non-stop. The only way to make the driving experience any more realistic would be if they patched in some children, who complain, get hungry, throw up in the car and need a piss stop every five minutes.

There's one genuinely impressive feature about the Crew - its absolutely massive world. You get to visit miniaturized versions of New York, Las Vegas, Los Angeles, Miami, drive through the snow in the Rocky Mountains and enjoy some virtual scorching heat in Death Valley and the Grand Canyon. There's a whole ton of amazing landmarks here, a great deal of visual variety and while the entire game looks a bit dated and fugly, just driving from one coast to another and seeing all the sights can be really exciting.

So that's what we did. Claire and I fired up our favourite MP3 playlist (because the ingame radio is complete garbage), got in our cars, skipped the whole shitty story and most of the racing against the retarded rubberbanding AI and just went from the east coast to the west coast and back. And there's an amazing amount of love and detail in that game world. People with RVs and lawn chairs camping in the middle of nowhere, little lakes and cafes near dense forests you would normally just race through at 180mph and tons of wildlife. Eagles, vultures, bears, deer, fighter jets and stealth bombers happily frolicking about!

Suddenly Vegas

We had lots of random challenges popping up along the way. Sometimes you have to maintain your speed and stay on the road, then you have to zig-zag around targets or smash right through them. Doing so will unlock new car parts and upgrades, so it's perfectly cool to just drive around all day, upgrading your vehicle in the process.

This game doesn't look as great or handle as well as Forza or GTA. The story is a total joke. Most of the generic traffic vehicles look so bland and devoid of any detail, they would have looked crap a decade ago. We've also encountered a whole bunch of bugs and problems. Traffic spawning inside buildings or simply disappearing into thin air, infinite load screens, as well as 38 billion mission popups for races we cannot even access without the DLC. Granted, you can filter those out, but you shouldn't have to. The Crew is genuinely bad. There's one notorious, game-breaking bug, which has been around for two years with no apparent fix. The official forum thread about it is 41 pages long.

Having a dozen menus pop up while I'm
driving at top speed is brilliant game design, you guys!

I've played Forza, Shift, Dirt, Outrun 2006 Coast2Coast and just about every other racing sim and arcade racer that came out since the first Screamer. The racing felt better in pretty much all of them. Driving in The Crew doesn't feel any more solid than it would on Autobahn Racer or Eurotruck Simulator. But, also much like Eurotruck Simulator, it can feel incredibly satisfying when you just pick a random far away location, play some good music and enjoy the dated, but highly varied and still rather beautiful landscapes. And it gets really good when you have somebody to enjoy the ride with. And if you grab the game for free or get it for peanuts at one of the many Russian key stores, there really isn't much to lose. But fuck 'em for trying to force that DLC on to people as aggressively as they do.