Reviews

• gamedeal user

  Oct 21, 2021

  It's an interesting and ambitious concept. But in the end, it's a mmo hardcore full loot game. And looting aka salvaging ships isn't even worth it. The yolol system is super fascinating to me, as well as the ship building. And the mining/prospecting is an ok gameplay loop. I spent weeks learning how to program, repair, modify ships, which resources are most valuable and where to find them as well as grinding resources to buy ships from other players and otherwise learn how to technically play the game. But a good chunk of that resource gathering progression ended up lost trying to mine the moon belt. It takes about half an hour to travel to the warpgate and go through to the moon side (which is a very short distance to travel timewise in this game). And there was always someone on the other side with the tiniest, smallest fighter that was just faster and more maneuverable than mining ships can get. And even if you're on the edge of the safe zone, ships are just fragile, so a few shots almost anywhere and your ship is permanently dead in the water and effectively destroyed as it slowly falls to and crashes on the moon below. After losing half a dozen ships I realized that this was basically a space engineers skinned rust in space. Few people have the time or desire for that, and I am not one of them. The game's good until you come across someone who just likes to wipe other peoples' progression for their own amusement. Then you realize that it's just a waste of time.
• gamedeal user

  Oct 28, 2021

  Starbase shows a lot of promise, however there is currently very little to do in game. The majority of my 650+ hours played were spent AFK crafting in the first month to complete research. For their part FrozenByte have stated multiple times Starbase is in true Early Access and they expect Early Access to last about two years before Starbase is ready for release. My advice if you love the space genre is to Wishlist Starbase and check in every two to three months to keep abreast of development. Shout out to Kenetor's youtube channel for covering weekly updates to both the PTU and the Live game, well worth checking out for the weekly progress reports.
• gamedeal user

  Nov 27, 2021

  LauriFB is the disease of this game. Everyone that was loyal has left. The only people here now are the multiple dev accounts or the yes men that the devs like having around oblivious to their own existence. Or the few left in the ship designer. No PVP - they banned them all for not PVPing the way FB wanted them to (banning in an alpha LOL) No PVE - Devs are idiots - no trade, no missions, no bounties, nothing to create a single drop of PVP. They even stated NO PVE EVER, should tell you their brain capacity. I mean look at all the other successful MMO sandbox space titles with PVP only. HAHA No Players - Imagine trying to give amazing suggestions that the community agrees with only for the devs to laugh, ban, block and remove you from everything. No Game - mining & ship building tech demo for a game that won't exist. BuT iTs AlPhA - sure is. EDIT: Was finally banned from the steam forums for Starbase now. https://i.imgur.com/a30rfX7.png https://i.imgur.com/NFjR2ae.png Funny thing is as you can see in the quotes, my name is nowhere around, these were two other individuals arguing. I've never been banned from any forum anywhere in my life. Now they have banned me from two forums. They do not want ANYONE making suggestions, or asking questions about their game, you will be BANNED! They blame it on 'borderline toxicity'. Same thing happened to several other players. All of us in support of their game originally. Many of us multiple years of giving feedback, bug reports, etc. The censorship is real with this one.
• gamedeal user

  Nov 28, 2021

  Game flopped at launch. Game flopped post launch. Game has 300 concurrent highest peak players. Feels like you're playing battleship against 3 other players in the ocean, on a canoe with binoculars and a bow as a weapon.
• gamedeal user

  Dec 16, 2021

  tl;dr: this game is too early in alpha for them to be charging anyone money to play. There is no economy, no risk/reward system of any kind, no PvE or related challenges, no character development or skill/ability system, and an AFK crafting system where you throw out everything you make once every 45 minutes or so. But the #1 problem: none of these things (or improvements to) are planned for or in development according to the Devs themselves. Years into development, Starbase is still nothing but a ship designer - but now they're in the process of removing even that from the game, replacing it with a clunky, buggy, creativity-stifling cookie-cutter box maker called the Easy Build Mode. Literally the very first ship you get is (almost always) bugged for new players, and they haven't fixed this in 5 months - nor even acknowledged it as a problem. Nearly every day there are new players asking for help in their official Discord for the same issue - "I can't add modules to my ship" - yep, welcome to the club. The least they could do is tell people that this is bugged, provide a simple workaround in-game, and tell everyone it isn't going to be fixed any time soon. But they haven't done that, and they never did respond to these inquiries, leaving it up to the player base to figure out a workaround and inform the newbies how to add more boxes to their new (not-so) shiny box. It appears they want you to bang your head against the wall long enough that you can't refund your steam purchase. I sunk almost 500hrs in (mostly in the soon-obsolete ship designer and AFK crafting) and I regret it. I wished for much of that time that I could recommend the game and held off writing a review, hoping things would turn up, but I can't shake the feeling I got conned out of some cash. It's either that or the studio forgot to consult with a game designer. Like so many sandbox games that have come and gone, there is potential in what they have, but following the development in their Discord, vids, and weekly updates, progress is imperceptibly slow and it just seems like one perplexing decision after another. According to their own weekly updates, it's taken them fully a year just to figure out how to stack duplicate items in the inventory - and they're still not done yet. That's not a good selling point, EA or otherwise. For a game like this to be immersive, people need to be given a reason to play. We need to be able to specialize our skills to develop a diversified economy where others value our time and ability. We need to be challenged such that risking our character's lives carries the possibility of reward. Mining resources needs to provide value for ourselves and others, instead of raw resources being completely detached from anyone's ability to build their ships and stations. All anyone has to do is click a button and poof, all of the resources and ship parts to build the most complex of ships are instantly spawned into the universe, fully assembled. Why mine ore if it is not needed by anyone anywhere? Why learn to craft if nobody actually needs to buy those high-level parts? Why build a ship if the only thing to do is mine ore? Much has been said of the decline of the player base since EA, but the truth of it is there's only ever been a few dozen persistent players. The rest are newcomers that are spending their time as I did... playing around in a ship designer that the Devs have no intent on keeping in the game and leaving themselves logged in while AFK and crafting, returning every few minutes to empty their inventory. Maybe some year I will check this out again, but for now it's getting uninstalled. If you think the game looks interesting, continue to follow their Discord, but don't waste your money or time actually playing it. Edit: Hasn't been long since I wrote my review, but why tf does the price keep going up? They claim to have plenty of cash, so why do they keep jacking an EA game's price up every few weeks? Something wrong there.
• gamedeal user

  Dec 22, 2021

  A game with a unique playstyle. If you are into engineering, coding, math, physics and stuff then the ship designer could be alot of fun for you. Otherwise you can only go mining or do pvp. A decent pvp ship costs 1.3 - 1.5 Million credits. Beaware of people from the ship shop, they will sell you a 300 k ship for 1 - 2 M. They will tell you that you are "legitly" paying extra for their work and effort that they put in the ship. But with just 102 players, you wont find anyone in this game at the live server at all to fight with. Mining is boring. If you got 8 M at your disposale then buy a very large miner. It will make you 4 M per hour on the right spot. Will take a while, good luck. If you find an illegal item somewhere then keep it. There is a chance that an moderator or developer spawned it in. If you would try to sell it then you might get punished for it. Happend to me personally. I salvaged the ship of the CEO from Frozenbyte (LauriFB) and got a professional yolol chip through this. I sold the chip for 13.5 M. I got punished for this a couple hours later with a withdraw of 15 M from my bank account. And i got a message telling me that when i do this again further consequences will follow. (i can proof all of that) Oh and there is a research system in which you can unlock tech to craft. But in order todo that you need to get 4 different types of points. And you get those through crafting. You will find yourself crafting ten thousands of items over a course of 24 hours (costing millions of credits), in order to get the research points for a single tech. Then there are hundreds of different bugs. Items will disappear from you inventory. Ships will be just gone. Blocks for stations too. Imagine building a Foward operating base deep in the belt where you store your ores. You might experience that it will be completly gone when you come to grab that. Sometimes when you parked your ship at a station and logged off you might find your ship to be gone when you login again. Sometimes your ship might just randomly explodes for no apparent reason. Or sometimes hinges, turntables and stuff just falls off. And you cant just bolt it back together then, you have to replace this part. Maybe you choose the salvage route and try to pick up guns, turrets, engines, thrusters and stuff but nothing of it will show up in your inventory. Will you get a replacement if you loose stuff for a bug? if you have proove yes. Some players claim they lost tens of millions through this and didnt get it back. Found a wrecked ship in space and you repaired it over the course of multiple hours? well head back to the safezone and you will find yourself be pulled out of the seat. Because its not possible to obtain ownership through this. Oh and the game uses peer to peer. So dont build a multi crew ship. Only a single player can fully operate a ship. Every other will have serious lag. So if you think of building a turret that another player should operate then this player wont be able to hit anything. Since he has imense lag when trying to aim. I cant recomment that game at the moment. The future will maybe make me change my mind.
• gamedeal user

  Jul 7, 2022

  Do not buy this. Developers have paused development indefinitely. This is nothing more than a cool tech demo that will never be finished. Just go play Elite Dangerous, Space Engineers or even No Mans Sky. The developers on discord claim; "We're not shelving the game, the plan is for Starbase to return into full development later yes, it's not being scrapped." "It's a big slowdown, which is why we wanted to put a lot of stuff into this patch. Plan is to resume development, not abandon it, but we have to pause updates and development for a while, so the point with the patch is to make some changes now rather than after the slowdown/pause" The same developer went on to later say that members of the developing team have been put onto "Forced vacation" again, a quote from the discord. "But yeah I'm not really leaving as much as uhh being forced to take a vacation" If you want to look into this yourself, you can find the Discord link on the storepage - Discord.gg/starbase (Steam thinks this link is bad, not sure why, it's literally what's on their link on the storage page description lmao) Youtuber "Kenetor" has been producing excellent coverage of the news around this game and can give you a much better overlook of where this tech demo is at. It's also worth mentioning that instead of using Early Access as Early Access the developers instead chose to set up an Early Access build for the Early Access to demo out Early Access updates before putting it to Early Access. Makes sense. The underlying sentiment here is just don't buy it, keep an eye on this tech demo until *maybe* it becomes something more than a tech demo. For now, RIP Starbase, 2021-2022.
• gamedeal user

  Jul 11, 2022

  The developers have stopped work on this game to "focus on other projects" because of "low sales numbers", after initially claiming that funding was secured.
• gamedeal user

  Aug 2, 2022

  I hope that this gets a No Man's Sky like redemption someday, but that is sadly very unlikely
• Space

  Nov 1, 2022

  Development discontinued. Player-base inactive. The game is dead.