Eventually, this game could be truly magnificent: vivid worlds filled with buried secrets, with spaceship combat and large-scale planet modification, while the whole adventure will be stitched together with story missions. It's a tantalising prospect, then, and Starbound's delivering on its core promises even in its early access incarnation. Fight, craft, thrive, travel! Finding tech allows you to add special abilities to your character - I got a neat double-jump. This is Buck Rogers, not Robinson Crusoe, and the first planet the engine offers up to you is only that. There's one difference, though, and it's a big one. Fight, craft, thrive! The UI's not entirely dissimilar, the mouse-and-keyboard controls will feel familiar, and many of the incidental details between both games mesh rather harmoniously, too. Grow stronger by growing more knowledgeable, and watch as each trip outwards takes you further, earns you more, and leaves you alive that bit longer. Mine ores and gather wood, build tools and a shelter - then build a means of building better tools and better shelters. It offers a procedural - and destructible - 2D environment in which almost everything wants to kill you and where you'll only survive by scavenging your way up the food chain.

Starbound is a lot like Terraria when you get in really close. I could be richer than a king if I ever found a way to survive here. It was filled with natural treasures, though: fabulous ores winking at me through the compacted strata of grey dust.

A moon: a stubbly piece of rock, no atmosphere and the place was colder than hell. My riches wouldn't protect me, because I'd crafted nothing to keep me warm, and my third planet was ever worse.

I froze after a few short steps and died. I built useful gear and fought a UFO loaded with penguins, and then I moved on leaving little but rubble. The wildlife was aggressive but puny I could be a king here, and I was, I was! I drilled the mineral guts out of the place and felled all those trees. I beamed down to a bright alien installation filled with money boxes and secret passages, while behind me claret-covered hills rose above forests in which every tree looked like a human brain.

Starbound how to make food