Ugh - that's a really quite unfair and irritating comment.
Generally I love games like this, looting and crafting is my thing. If the loop is good and I feel I'm progressing it can be insanely addictive. IMO NMS is just a joyless, dull chore and it's incredibly frustrating and disappointing. It's a game about the vastness of space travel and the wonders of new environments which lacks any sense of discovery and they don't let you do anything in any of them of any note. I can't remember a single game with such a wonderful first impression and a precipitous dropoff into reality.
I'm going to unload a bit here, because I've been thinking about this game a lot while not playing it and it's starting to annoy me. Lol.
There's no stuff like waterfalls or any motion/activity on the planets. The animals all act the same, all the tiny POI's look the same on a planet, there are none of the weather systems that you'd expect on such varied planets. I've been on snow planets with no snowfall, lush ones with zero rainfall, haven't seen a single storm with any visual effect yet. As you do a slow flight over the planet's surface, which can feel quite cool at first, everything dissolves in and out of view so you can't even see the elements you might need. Every outpost is just a shed, a save point, some busted machinery and sometimes a light on a stick you can turn on and off for some reason, surrounded by nothing. I haven't seen one single interesting outpost or structure. Not one. It's lonely, and not in an isolated, Metroid Prime way - more in a miserable, sterile, stuck in a computer lonely.
Nothing has any real consequence at all. Nightfall doesn't bring any dangers except lower temperature (just hit a button and dump some element into your suit and it negates any 'extreme temperature' effects. There are no local quests beyond finding an alien trashcan thing that teaches you a word. ALL the space stations have the same spartan layout, the same office, some lonely alien and the same faceless 'trade hole' that you have to walk up some stairs and go down a hallway to use. It feels so unfinished - and I'd wager it probably is - so robotic and sterile. It's a fictional universe FFS. Where's the creativity and imagination?
A comparison to a much stronger, similar game I'd make is Subnautica, which has its own frustrations but you at least feel like you're being rewarded with progression / new items, and not constantly fighting the very game itself. It's also a quarter of the price.
This just isn't very good once you've played a few hours of it. The scope and scale and giddy PR completely obfuscate the very, very simple game mechanics that never seem to change. This is as shallow as it gets.
It's clear a lot of work and passion went into creating this project, but I honestly feel they got so caught up in the hype of the planetary network and the geeky 'procedural' programming elements of it, they forgot (or, possibly - ran out of time) to create an actual game around it.
I'm done. I keep firing this game up hoping it'll show me something interesting but it just doesn't. I'm really fucking annoyed at myself for dropping the full price on this one, and digitally to boot.
