TL:DR: This game is very shallow. At first, it looks like there’s a lot to do and see, but soon you’ll realize that most of it lacks any kind of depth. Get it only if you really, REALLY like building for the sake of simply building, or if you’re used to modding your games a lot, otherwise hold on to your money.
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BUILDING:
Building in this game is pretty good, plenty of blocks and furniture to build pretty much anything you want, and the best part is that you can call in a tenant that is themed to whatever you built, so not only can you build anything you want, you can also populate it.
The bad side, is that there's absolutely no reason to build. Your ship gets upgraded with much more room than you'll ever need, and tenants aren't useful in any way nor profitable enough to justify the work it requires, which make one of the best parts of the game mostly pointless.

MODS:
There's a wide selection of mods at the workshop, and you can install anything you want with a single click, however, if your mods start conflicting or one of them suddenly give you errors, you won't be able to fix that just as easily. Not saying it's impossible, but don't expect a single button to save you from a mess like the one you used to get into it.

RACES:
Most of Starbound’s alien races and bland and unoriginal, either on their design, their culture or both. It's common for fictional races to be based on our human history, but in Starbound, most of the races got nothing going for them but a shallow representation of those.
Glitch are medieval robots, Hylotl are Japanese fish, Floran are tribal plant people, Apex are futuristic Apes, Avians are Egyptians birds and Novakids are cowboy humanoids ball of gas.
With the exception of Apex and Avian, every other race culture are carbon copy of past human civilizations. Unfortunately the game compensates for that by having the most unoriginal design. The Novakids are the worst of the bunch: a literal mini-sun cowboy is something you would expect from a fantasy game, not from a Sci-Fi one.

SCI-FI:
Speaking of which, the game is filled with weird things such as those. It feels like the developers wanted a sci-fi game to make it stand out but had no idea on how to do it, so they just made a fantasy game with a Futuristic paint coat over it.
You get people firing arrows at, and managing to hurt you even if you got a full body armor of the best material you could find throughout the universe. There's also talking penguins building robots, staves that can summon clouds of fire/ice/shock/poison to rain down on your enemies, among other things.

OPTIMIZATION:
It's bad. It feels like playing an online game even though you're playing alone. Sometimes enemies just stop in their tracks like you lost connection to the server. During these periods, any damage you do during is distributed to all of the enemies once the game goes back to normal.

REMOVED CONTENT:
Imagine my surprise when 1.0 finally launched after various delays, and i realized they simply removed as much content as they added: weapons, clothing, techs, hairstyles; even racial weapons which were simply reskins the different races had for craftable weapons got removed once the game "launched". Most of those things had no reason to be removed and some of the old systems were better than the new ones, in the end the game felt like it had less content at launch than at the beta.

TECHS:
Special abilities you have. Before 1.0, you had quite a few different ones and most of them were unique. Instead of rebalancing and refining those, they chose to stick with only 3 slots of techs, a Metroid-like morph ball, a dash, and an air jump. Each of those has 3 slightly different choices. Sadly most of those are completely unbalanced and there's a clear best option of the three, making this entire thing boring where everyone has pretty much the same techs.

COMBAT:
Also lackluster, it's often unnecessary to fight monsters, as they rarely get in the way and they only drop half a dozen materials (for a few weapons that you may or may not want to craft), humanoids are a simple A.I, no matter the race. They either rush at you with melee weapons or keep their distance and shoot.
But the worst of all is that you can use healing items with absolutely no cool down or use time. The only real limit to your healing is how many healing items you are currently carrying, which denies much of the consequence of getting hit.

EXPLORATION:
Also boring, you get excited at first, but most worlds work basically the same way, one biome may look prettier than the other and have a unique monster, but that beauty will fade the second time you see it, and the monsters won't give you anything special.
Dungeons are the same deal. Most of the monsters inside are the same you'll find outside, and humanoids act the same as everywhere else. Since the loot is random generated there's nothing inside you won't find anywhere else.
In conclusion, exploration is shallow. You may be in awe the first time you find something new and see a new monsters in action, but you’ll get bored quickly once you realize that due to random generation every dungeon has the same loot; that monsters are unimportant and ignorable (you can just walk past them and heal the occasional hit), and that planets are basically reskins of past ones.

MINIGAMES AND COLLECTIONS:
Fishing or Paleontology serves no purpose. They are incredibly repetitive and lady luck interacts more with it than you do.
Do any of those once and you already seen all it has to offer; it won’t get more challenging or engaging. You'll simply do the same thing over and over again, what fish/bone you get from that is completely up to luck, and you have no control over your prize.
On top of all that there’s no additional prize for completing your collection, you can display the bones you excavated or put the fish in an aquarium, but other than that, it’s pointless.

MECHS:
The ability to build and customize mechs is good, but since you have a time limit when using it on the ground and there are only a dozen different enemies in outer space where you're supposed to use it, you won’t get much use of that. In the end the most fun part about them is crafting and customizing your own.

MISSIONS:
The history missions are divided into scan missions, where you have to go to a planet and scan it to progress; and dungeon missions, where you have to go through a dungeon and fight a boss. Scan missions are boring and repetitive, and their only purpose is to hold your hand instead of letting you explore on your own. Differently, dungeon missions are actually decent for the most part.
The NPCs you recruit start out well but get progressively worse. The first two NPCs gives you side missions; third one gives you random buffs; the fourth one sells upgrades; but the last one only upgrades the sword you got at the beginning of the game. Once you upgrade the sword, (if you still have it) there’s no other use for him, you literally press a button and that’s all he was there for.
On top of that, your prize for completing the history mission is a bag containing a random generated weapon, a bunch of money, and a thank you card from the devs. Nothing unique or worth your time.

PLOT: (Spoilers)
Simple and basic, but I find it weird how they thought it was a good idea to make Sci-fi game’s story about a space-god that fights space-Cthulhu to seal him away, or make this same space-god revive you at the end of the game.

CONCLUSION:
If there’s one word to describe this game, it’s shallow. Mostly everything in the game is shallow and merely present for superficial, short-lasting beauty, or so the devs could say they added that to the game. I’m not even going to mention the numerous delays and broken promises from the developers because I don’t have room in this already long review, and because frankly it doesn’t even matter, even ignoring all that this is still a lackluster game, and not worth your money or time.