izigame.me

TL,DR: I love this game, but if you want to enjoy it, you'll need to mod it to hell and back. It's bland and clunky if you don't. Good luck finding a way to enjoy playing the story, its the world longest fetch quests that end in clunky boss fights.
You shouldn't have to mod a game from the get-go for it to be enjoyable
Ok let me preface this by saying ALL my hours on this game were after the 1.0 update. I only learned of this game history after I was 300h in.
If you are interested in learning it, I'd recommend watching the video by a youtuber called "The Good Trash", but if you want a quick recap, here it is:
The game was radically diferent before release. It was far more sandbox-driven, the story didn't really have a grasp on gameplay, and there was a TON more content. We're talking several cut bosses, biomes and entire features like the randomly generated monsters were a lot more developped. Unfortunately, the game had no developpement throughline. If a dev thought of a feature, it was gonna be added regardless of how well it would fits.
Speaking of the devs, they were abused. Most basically came out of university and were hired as intern. This meant that they were paid little to none for their effort. Any that said anything were berated by the higher-ups, or straight up quit. This meant that most of the game's code was a buggy, unoptimized mess of spaghetti coding.
The 1.0 update tried to remedy this by essentially butchering the game into what it is now, which angered the community even more than it was already by the way the devs were treated.
Now, for my actual review.
The game's arstyle is gorgeous, the music (even if it gets repetive quickly) is top notch.
Gameplay wise, mining and general exploration feels great.
Building is perhaps the best, there's so many diferent furnitures, blocks and decorations you can choose from for your base.
Fighting however... hoo boy. It is HORRIBLE. You can choose between ranged, melee and (later on) magic weaponry. You can craft some in each class, but if you want a worthwile weapon, you'll have to use one that is RANDOMLY GENERATED. Sure, there's unique weapons that alwasys have fixed stat (based on the planet you're on), but they are very rare and most aren't even worth it.
You're honestly better off using nothing but fast firing guns with some knockback, like a shotgun or something. Most dangerous enemies you'll be fighting are either flying, fast-moving, or just ranged guy that constantly run away.
Boss fights aren't much better either. The game WILL force you to fight these guys if you want to progress the story, and aside from like, the bird one, most devolve into a mess, be it by constantly spawning minions, having bad hitboxes (the 2nd to last final boss specifically), or because they have attacks that they do off-screen even if fully zoomed out.
Now, progression and story wise. This game's progression works in tiers. Every planet has a tier, going from 1 to 8. Higher tiered planets appear around specific stars, meaning you'll have use your spaceship to get over there. However, the big bad of the game broke your ship (and destroyed Earth but that's irelevant), so you'll have to at least take part in the story until the first boss to get the chance to progress.
After that? The story basically doesn't matter. Seriously you can just play the game without caring for it. Which is honestly a blessing in disguise, since it always the same formula of "Please go scan specific objects from these guys" to "Go defeat these guys' boss please". Repeat for every race except the umans and the Space cowboys.
It is so disappointing. Each race has a trope-infused but well crafted lore to it, so having all their quest being just fetch quest feels lazy.
And finally, we're gonna talk about performance. It is inconsistent at best, and its the game's messy code fault. Seriously this game is not optimized well. It can crash itself at complete random. Its rare but still. There's also a general problem with characters going to fast. If you fall from a great height, there's a chance the game will have trouble loading the terrain arround you. There's also time were the game just won't load a chunk at all. Or others were it lags as if you were having latency issues. In a single player game. Offline.
Oh and one final thing. The lower your FPS are, THE WORSE THOSE ISUES GET. No joke, if you limit your FPS to be under 60, these issues will pop up a ton more. It's not tied to your computer's performance, its the game itself tying a lot of the code to how high your FPS are.
I just can't recommend this game. I love this game but it is the definition of "wasted potential". If you're still interested in buying it, I can only recommend you mod it to hell and back
You'll see a lot of people using a mod called Frackin' universe. It's essetnially its own game, and is about as omnipresent as the Calamity mod is in the Terraria community.
I personally don't recommend it, since it changes so much about the game that there's mods to mod a mod. Personnal recommendations are the Shellguard expansion, the Starforge, Anom's Outpost overhaul and Project Redemption.