Yes this game has done a great job recovering from a poor initial launch - kudos, great. I don't really care because I waited till the community said it was ready. I don't suppose it fails to deliver on many of its technical promises, but what I heard when it was announced - as a lifelong sci-fi nerd - was that I would finally get my own ship on explore a universe as diverse and complex as the real one. I don't know if people 'cut it some slack' because of the mathematical limits of procedural generation but trust me - it's not this limited. I really was expecting self-consistent unique ecosystems, biomes, evolutionary systems, and just a lot more diversity of experience and content. Even in 'creative' mode I feel I'm being shoehorned into mining and crafting (play styles that hold no interest for me), and frankly all planets are roughly the same perhaps half-dozen basic flavors. Creatures don't even make sense, why would an organism have evolved in that way? Examine them -- do you detect any correlation between their environment and their biology? SO MUCH could have been achieved with this game, it's tragic. Sure it's pretty - great. I guess some people find it fun - great. But the only way in which a post-NMS world differs from the one before is that people may be that much less likely to take serious the assertion that a game is going to take seriously the job of simulating free exploration of an actual, scientifically plausible galaxy. Sorry NMS, I wanted more than anyone to love you. I guess I'm still waiting for my Rogue Space Explorer simulation.
I wanted so badly to like this, because I was hoping I would be lured into a creepy story disguised as a card game. It's so atmospheric and charming, you start to feel there must be more to it, but even after an hour or more in it still just seems to be just a really weird (and possibly unplayable) card game. One so opaque that figuring it out just isn't fun. But dang I wish it were!
