NMS would be at least fun enough to explore if the game wasn't so up its own ass with inventory micromanagement. If you had to charge 6 different things to do anything, fine. If you had limited inventory space, fine. But you have both and it sucks, so what you end up doing is having about two free slots because you need to carry around 50,000 Plutonium and Carbon to charge your life support, environmental resistance, mining gun, regular gun, launch thrusters, phase jump, warp drive, shields, can opener - AKA "just fuck my inventory up." Also you cant access your ship or your ships inventory if you walk more then 10 feet away from it. There are next to no QoL features to alleviate this nonsense material hunt. You can't mark something for tracking like in Fallout 4 and your scanner doesn't tell you shit most of the time because its range is beyond wimpy. You can't stack things that aren't elemental materials. Everything is layered behind 4 crafting trees, none of which you can skip. You can't have stuff auto refuel, meaning in combat you will be pumping carbon into your shields most of the time and bringing up the inventory doesn't pause the game. The inventory system isn't even good, nor is the U.I. Whenever you want to do ANYTHING in the game you have to hold the button instead of pressing it. Even on PC with a mouse. What the fuck. What the fuck.
Oh my God its the worst. Yeah you can upgrade your stuff but that doesn't make the first huge amount of hours not a tedious shitpile. It's beyond frustrating. It's purposely made to be unfun. I can be sold on the idea of No Man's Sky as a game where you just wander around and be awed but they had to shove in this crapshoot of a gameplay loop to just fuck you.