So, let me tell you about Starbound, a new game that's currently in beta by a little company called Chucklefish.

Starbound is a 2D space and planet exploration game designed to let you build and explore to your heart's content. No, seriously. There are THOUSANDS of planets to explore in 5 different star sectors. The planets can have biomes like desert, jungle, snow, magma, forest, grassland, volcanic, and my personal favourite so far, tentacle. You can explore moons and asteroid belts. You can play one of six different races, Human, Floran (a carnivorous plant race,) Avian (birds,) Apex (intelligent apes,) and Hylotl (amphibians,) and Glitch (robots/cyborgs.) The character graphics are cute and highly customizable. Once you get your character built, you get your spaceship...

Each race has a backstory as to why you're out running around in the galaxy instead of staying home and getting married and having little tadpoles or eggs or whatever, but that's not so much the point of the story as exploring, amassing wealth and technology and becoming the greatest space-captain to ever pilot a ship. Now, remember, this game is still in early beta. It's very playable, but does tend to crash occassionally and weird bugs show up, which is totally to be expected. Character wipes and loss of work is ALSO to be expected, so don't get too attached to these early characters or the palace you build.

You start out with a couple basic tools on your ship (you were escaping your home planet and forgot to pack I guess) and can build up your technology as you go. You do that by... MINING. Yep. Sound familiar? You can also pillage towns and cities you find on these backwater planets if that's more your style, but the villagers are probably better armed than you are. There are always hideous alien monsters trying to eat you. The best you can hope for is that you're poisonous to them...

I've been having a blast with this game. The soundtrack is great. The graphics are reminiscient of Terraria, but unique. There is a lot of gameplay that has yet to be implemented like ship-to-ship combat. Servers have set up clans and companies and trading centres, and multiplayer either online or LAN both work well. For $15 you'll have a great time playing. Go get it on Steam!