No Man's Sky

I stayed away at the original launch due to the poor reviews. Since the Atlas update and discount, I decided to give it a try. NMS is deceptively shallow considering its scope. There's frankly very little to do, even with the Artemis missions and base building added. The missions are extremely limited and worst of all, cyclic. No matter how many times you start a new game or change the difficulty, the exploration and base building will have the exact same missions each time. So in base building it goes like this - build basic structures, plop down some terminals, hire specialists, do specialist missions, gather new blueprints to upgrade parts and buildings, rinse and repeat until finished. And it's like that EVERY SINGLE GAME. There's to divergence, no real randomness, despite the game's promises. The worlds themselves are basically the same. There's a few categories for planets, and each biome falls into these similar patterns. Dry arid, lush paradise, cold ice, and so on. That's it. There's no brown dwarfs, no gas giants, and even the planet sizes seem to fit to the same mold. The life forms follow the same pattern as well. 2 and 4 legged animals will dot the landscape of even the hottest or coldest of planets, yet they hardly vary at all, with the same pre-fabricated prototypes given only a few cosmetic differences. No giant fish, no packs of carnivorous dinosaurs, and certainly no infamous sand snakes. Lots of hot and cold planets with space cows roaming the surface. That seems to be the structure for NMS's entire galaxy. There may be wild variations out there, but after journeying to several different systems and cataloging numerous planets, I have yet to find any. No Man's Sky has amazing potential, but right now it's nothing more than a framework to which a good game could be attached. Perhaps with future updates or expansions it will become the game it was intended to be. For now it's giant toy box with a very poor selection of toys inside it.

I'm sorry, but the game is good. Yes, I am aware of the hate this game deserves in theory, and that they shipped a broken game and lied about it and all. Bottom line though, the game is good as it is now. some fps drops here and there but no major issues, not game breaking issues. A LOT of content. Don't pay $60 though, that's just wrong.

The pros: > Fresh take on survival/crafting. 3d minecraft in space, if you will, with some realism. > While initially complex and complicated, the menus and UI are good once you get used to them. > There's a LOT of good bones in this game. There is a lot of potential for quality mods or even paid DLC. > There's hours and hours and hours of stuff to do. If you get bored, it's your own fault. The cons: > It's poorly optimized. Frames drop, textures go muddy and blocky, and pop-in occurs sometimes. > This game crashes ALL THE TIME! I can't tell you how many times I've been in the middle of excavating an ancient ruin, deep in the wilderness grabbing all the resources I can get my hands on, or otherwise away from a save station for awhile... and with no auto-save, it's really aggrevating when this happens you've been hours between saves. > While the menus and UI are good, controls could be better. It's definitely meant for a controller. I guess if you have a controller, you should be fine with controls... but I'm a keyboard and mouse kind of dude. The gyst: Have back stock of save stations with you so you can drop them every 15 minutes so you don't lose too much progress. This game would be a 4 out 5 if it weren't for all. the. crashing!

*note* I was gifted the steam version of this game otherwise I would have purchased it on GOG.... It's pretty well known how lacking this game was at release and how it's now amazing. Well, this game is HUGE. If you like survival game, space games, building games etc then this will definitely have something in it for you. If you like all three of the above genres then you're in for a REAL treat. My only complaint about the game (and I've seen this mentioned a lot) is the game seems to think that you should have to have to hold your mouse button for a second for almost everything. There's no option to disable this and it gets annoying VERY quick. There's simply no reason for it and it just absurd. I hate to take a whole start off for this but it really is that annoying for many people. Great game!

it's drawn out, confusing, the graphics are weak, the controls are indistinct