STARMADE
It's like Minecraft...in SPAAAAACE!!
Like Minecraft, Starmade is a voxel-based game where you collect materials from blocks, build weapons and buildings, and fight monsters. Unlike Minecraft, you will be making spaceships and space stations; laser weapons, missiles, turrets, and machine guns; and fighting space pirates! There are different planets you can visit where you can set up a base or devour it with a massive planet-eating mining ship!
You start the game at a space station. The look of the starting area can vary from server to server depending on what the server admins have done with it. By default, you will spawn in a small room in a long tube-style station. If you walk outside, you will find yourself floating in space.
Don't forget your helmet!
The helmet is actually just a narrative device; you won't have your air sucked out in the vacuum of space.
With a little photoshopping experience, you can customize your own skin. I made mine to look like the orange space suit from Doctor Who.
Thankfully, nearly all blocks used have a bunch of shapes to them so you won't have to have a super blocky ship like you would make in Minecraft. There is also quite a large variety of color to play with when building your ship. Here are all the block shapes and many of the colors together. And some lights.
Simple little salvaging ship I just threw together for this review.
Once you build your first ship, you can go sailing across the galaxy. You may come across trade stations, pirate stations, abandoned stations, or stations built by other players/factions. There are also planets and asteroids floating around. Each planet orbits a star and is a dodecahedron (or a d12 for any tabletop gamers out there). You can build a base on a planet or just mine it for resources.
Mining an asteroid
Snow planet
Red planet
You can land on one of these planets and explore caves, build a base, or just run around. I love the floating rocks; Gives it a nice otherworldly feel.
Another amazing aesthetic they have in the game is just open space. Here you can see a mixing of different colored nebulous clouds.
Look out! A pirate station!
They shot me up pretty good! To help with that, it's a good idea to get a radar jammer to make it hard for them to track you and shields to absorb the damage.
So get your ship, fly around, gather resources, and build some cool ships. And by no means do they have to be as simple as the one I just made here. Some people spend a lot of time designing some amazing ships. Check out some I found in a search!
You can also just make silly ships. Someone on my server made an oven ship with a swinging-open oven bay door where he stored small pizza slice ships, I've seen a school bus ship, a Nyan cat ship, and this Minecraft piggy ship I made!
Beware! My piggy ship of DOOOOM!!
Starmade is currently in Alpha stage of development, and while it has made a lot of progress it appears to have a long way to go until it reaches Beta. Here's a forum post of the timeline so you can see what they're working on and where they're going. They are planning on adding music to the game soon; right now it's pretty silent. And they'll be adding animals to different planets as well in the future.
The game is pretty stable right now too. It appears their main focus was to deliver a solid framework for alpha testing, and slowly add in the content. During my time playing, they've added a shipyard feature where you can build a ship virtually with infinite blocks like you would in Minecraft's creative mode. You can save the completed ship as a blueprint, which acts as a "bag" where you can insert all it's necessary pieces to build later. Here's a Jack-o-Lantern ship I'm making.
They've added a Fleet system, so you can have multiple ships under your command, and they have a warp gate so you can hop great distances across the galaxy.
I'm really looking forward to seeing what they add next. I know they're working on a new power system, and there is so much more on the way. With an "infinite" field of space to play in, I expect a little of everything to show up in there somewhere.
Most images in this review are screenshots I took while playing. All other images I have given credit to.
Thank you for reading this review. If you'd like to play, visit www.star-made.org and head over to the download section to download the launcher. The launcher operates like the Minecraft launcher, and it will download the game client for you.
Have fun and happy building! Maybe somewhere in this vast universe, I'll bump into you!