Explore an open world galaxy teeming with life and adventure in the early access for “Starbound.” “Starbound” is in early access, meaning the game isn’t finished yet, but players are being invited to play it anyway and help the developers come up with new content and ultimately shape the way the game looks as a finished product.

“Starbound” is an open world block-based RPG made by developers Chucklefish. The game has a lot of distinct similarities to games like “Terraria” due to the fact that several of Terraria’s developer team have joined Chucklefish to work on this new title.

In “Starbound,” you explore the galaxy in your spaceship, moving from planet to planet, system to system finding more and more rare materials with which to craft more and more extravagant spaceships and equipment in a never ending cycle of delicious madness. Yay, madness! This game is massively addictive and will keep you entertained for actual days of continuous play.

The gameplay is pretty simple most of the time. “Starbound” is a side-scroller and has controls a lot like the original “Metroid” or “Castlevania.” The whole galaxy is broken up into little blocks of variable composition that can be destroyed and collected to make a variety of interesting items. There are NPC characters to meet that will give you quests of varying difficulty. There are bosses to fight that range from trivially easy to soul shatteringly difficult.

The real appeal of “Starbound” comes from the scale. It is difficult to truly capture just how large this game is in words. Here goes, “Starbound” is a tremendously monstrous gargantuanly vast enormous monumental leviathan of a game that is so stupendously large other games fall into its gravitational field and get compressed under the weight into tiny in-game references. But seriously though, it’s big. There are 12.667 quadrillion planets that can be explored. And if that wasn’t excessively large already Chucklefish intends to have 422.22 quadrillion explorable planets when the game is finished. Just let that sink in for a second.

The worlds and galaxies in “Starbound” are generated by an extremely advanced algorithm that randomly generates worlds within specific parameters. Each individual planet can have any number of interesting features like alien civilizations, ridiculous meteorological phenomena or fantastic flora and fauna and each world is completely unique.

The graphics are going to be where a lot of players get less interested. “Starbound” runs on 32-bit graphics. This is not the kind of game where you are going to look at something and say “Wow, it’s like I’m looking at the real thing;” it’s not “Crysis,” it’s barely even “Doom.” That said the game is still very visually appealing due to its stylish nature.

“Starbound” is the kind of game that players will either love or not give a crap about. But at 15 bucks to play, it’s not like you’re out much if you don’t like it. And if you do, well let’s just say that 15 bucks goes a very long way. Final verdict: buy it.