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Recommended
1.4 hrs last two weeks / 765.1 hrs on record (603.9 hrs at review time)
Posted: 11 Oct, 2021 @ 1:43pm
Updated: 21 Dec, 2024 @ 3:01am

Changed my Mind
Imagine Elite (David Brabham, Ian Bell 1984), modernize the Gourand shading rendering system, throw in an extensible RPG-like inventory system, and then add planetary exploration on foot and in vehicles to give it a real survival feel. Make the tech tree crazy wide and turn it into an MMO. Ticking all of the boxes for a cool game, this game is still a procedurally generated universe, and that is the charm but also was a small source of bugs when it first released.

Free content
Every so often a new community mission is added to the game, for a limited time you can play this special mission (I count about 14 so far) to add a unique item into your game. Each community mission adds a bit more content for everyone too.

Mainly I find the game to be a bit like playing Minecraft, fun to see what the incredibly vast procedural universe has generated for me, and with a moderate difficulty level as the default. Relaxing.

My original Review
If you are still reading, this is what I though of the game about 2 years ago... 90% bugs fixed, some remaining as quirks.
It's a fun game, but the list of minor defects that the developers do not seem to want to fix spoil the game a lot. Things like the inventory tabs always opening on the tab that is furthest from the one you want to get to, every single time. I just get RSI after a session fo clicking all the time, too many clicks required for many recipe based tasks because things empty out real fast. Issues like how unattended ore refiners sometimes retain their contents, and sometimes they don’t. Things like the "Technology depleted" messages which are still a tad too frequent to make the game immersive, things like how easy it is to abuse the economy system because travel via teleporters is no cost. annoying animations for interactions that work well on console games, but are terrible on PC, and you the setting to disable them has no effect, things like building a base being really tricky because blocks don't actually snap to the grid at all well, things like how raising or lowering terrain around a base is not really saved, so your base will alter on appear to be underground or even above the terrain that you backfilled. Things like how combat is for a survival game, just a bit too easy for 90% of the players, and how the physics engine sometimes catapults the astronaut about 2 kilometres into space if they get melee'd. Bugs like the error message when you attempt to summon a starship at any point when doing so is not possible, (like in your freighter where the positions are not controllable) is a misleading error. Things like when doing a quest, that the quest giver will stop talking to you altogether and not interact at all until you have gone to fetch the next item they want. And how plants and enemies will spawn under your base in places where you cannot harvest/destroy them at all. Pain points how the docking procedure when a player approaches a station will sometimes just crash the ship into the side of the station or freighter, killing you. A player camera that shakes a lot in general. Poor video performance, and the nasty way the camera moves when you interact with an item, why oh why make us dizzy moving the camera about all of the time? Why can we not set the brightness, the game is dark dark dark? Why do screen/level transitions do the opposite, just white out the screen that you jsut been straining to see and now it's totally white and blinding after you ride the teleporter? Why when player walks just slightly sideways up a hillside, why does the game make you crab along towards the down slope?
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5 Comments
zaphodikus 2 Jun, 2022 @ 11:58pm 
It's a bonus at 50% off, also the best time to play it is on the day they release new content. Loads of people jump into the servers and it feels almost alive, because everyone has to start fresh to play the content. After a while the online server feels full of debris left by people with more time to play than you have, and then it is perhaps the time to start a fresh game in pure single player.
GX7 2 Jun, 2022 @ 3:14pm 
This game has a weird positive to negative review ratio overall. About 1 out of 3 players seem to dislike it. I might try it some day, if a huge discount presents itself...
VulcanTourist 20 Oct, 2021 @ 11:12am 
It took me over 800 hours before I wrote my equally critical (but less detailed) review. You arrived there four times sooner, and playing the game years later that gave Hello Games a multitude of additional chances to correct the flaws! Instead they relentlessly added new content, piling new flaws onto the old ones.
zaphodikus 13 Oct, 2021 @ 5:28am 
which reminds me i need to login to their zendesk and raise a ticket.
Runeshadow 12 Oct, 2021 @ 8:19am 
After the survival games we have played, there is a high bar for performance and development. NMS has been successful since the troubled launch. No reason why they cannot fix, or at least address the issues.