Terraria And Other Indie Games

"Dumbed down Terraria" is accurate but doesn't entirely do it justice.

It's still early access, so things are still likely to change but:

It's mostly like Terraria was when Terraria first released (for those that remember the good old 1.0 days). You've got a basic gear grind, a few bosses and VERY VERY generic mobs. Terraria had more interesting mobs at launch than this game currently does.

The whole galaxy, travelling between planets, feels like a gimmick at the moment. Aside from different ores being on different world types there's not really much of interest in other worlds and it konda gets a bit old after a while...

Exploration is practically non existent, which is something you'd want if you've got thousands of planets to visit... Like there's Avian tombs, Apex labs, etc, but they never have anything in them that's worth the effort to clear them out. All I ever do at them is take the cosmetics.

There's definitely more potential in the base building aspect but where Terraria has a purpose for this (to house NPCs), there's currently no incentive beyond being creative in Starbound.

There's loads more but I'll just sum it up:

It's a game that has a lot of potential, and you can see that potential in the current version. It's still in early access so by the time it is officially released it might have reached that potential... But currently it is not a game I would recommend if you already have Terraria because it will end up feeling like a lesser version.