NMS has been making the rounds again across the internet for its continuing updates and incoming content from the ever diligent Hello Games studio. I bought it a few months ago for a friend and myself. And despite my friend's hardware being better, the game runs very poorly. They have better hardware than I do in every way - an SSD over an HDD, a desktop over a modest gaming laptop, etc. And for some inscrutable reason it refuses to run smoothly on their system, having choppiness and stutters every second. Their rig has **never** had issues with any other game. In 2020, 4 years after release, that's a huge flaw. NMS is not guaranteed to run on your system regardless of performance. A dealbreaker for most. The game's core gameplay loop - exploring, adventuring, and looking for things to do, is very one note. It doesn't take more than 20-30 hours to have "seen it all" because it's all procedurally generated. You know everything you're doing and getting, upgrades, ships you see, their color schemes, the plant flora, life, ALL of it is completely RNG. You have very little way to influence this exploration or even the way your gear and space ships looks, if any. Sure you can upgrade your ship infinitely now, but if you want to find something that looks the way you like, you're going to be wasting literally hours waiting for ships to land, and hoping they're high rank. If you want to base build however, and do stuff that makes 0 use of their world generation system, you can do all that. It seems most people who like the game enjoy this type of content which is why it has so much praise. If you're looking for intense space exploration, you'll want to look elsewhere. Also - the UI is designed for the controller but the game controls better with a mouse. Performance is garbage. Feels like an early access game that's adding more "things to do" but without fleshing out WHY to do them at all. 3/5 is generous given egregious performance problems.
Some games you can tell when you'll like them immediately or not. This was one of them, and I could tell from the start this game wasn't for me. Never played this game before, hopped in blind after a quick look on GoG. That is to say, this review is based on someone who holds no nostalgia for this game, nor any previous knowledge/biases. Old graphics are not the issue here - the graphics themselves just don't seem well done, period. Your characters are nebulous blobs that change shape and design over time. The gameplay, while passable, relies solely on the somewhat in depth gimmick of evolving your characters based on what you kill. There's some complexity to it but none of it is very intuitive. You run around and kill stuff and depending on what order and how many you kill, you eventually get enough evolution points to go up a notch, or end up avoiding enemies and being overtly picky about what you kill and pick up because of it. It basically boils down to interruptive micromanagement that intrudes on gameplay. The levels take place in an alien world, which is visually great at first but all blends together as the levels go on while the story never actually adds much more. At first it's fun, but there's really not much in the levels that make them remotely interesting to interact with. Short of its one gimmick, the gameplay feels bland (the gimmick itself isn't great), the story is non-existent, the graphics are...not even appealing, there really just isn't anything in this game that makes it worth it unless you have some other former investment in it. Put bluntly, I found it tedious and boring. But for those who know nothing about this game and are looking for some quality good old games to surprise them pleasantly? You're most likely not going to find that here. Buy it on a steep sale if you're interested. This is one of the few purchases that has actually disappointed me enough to write a such a review. Be wary of nostalgic-based reviews.
Divinity OS2 is by far one of the best RPGs to have come out in recent years, rivaling with The Witcher 3 in terms of world design and effort put in. The combat is satisfying and there a number of options to approach combat, all of which can extremely effective. However there are many flaws to the game itself, and the most pertinent I have found is that while encounters (battles essentially) in Act 1 are very well balanced and polished, Act 2 relies far more on gimmicks to defeat players. Worse yet, many enemies begin to get arbitrarily inflated stats that you as a player cannot compete with. A key example of the stat inflation is one that ties to initiative. WITS is the attribute that defines your initiative. For players, it looks something like this: 20 Wits + 5 initiative (gear) = 25 initiative. On NPCs in act 2, it looks like 25 ("base") + 15 wits = 40 initiative. Or 50 at times. There is literally no way for one to compete against said initiative. It's not every enemy and typically those enemies that do have that initiative don't have Total Party Kill gimmicks, but it's still there. Stat issues wouldn't be a problem if much of your stat bonuses did not come from one's gear, which is almost entirely RNG generated (more later). There is *scaling gear* drops in this game. A scaled armor at level 9 has double the armor values of scaled armor at level 6. Every level, weapon loot scales an entire interval higher in terms of raw damage. There's too much playing equipment upkeep instead of playing the RPG. While it's not completely difficult to make it through with top of the line gear, it's certainly a pain to having all your gear become outdated every single time you level up, and then having all the gear you find be completely RNG generated. It essentially boils down to getting lucky in order to get the right gear for your characters, but by the time you do, you've outleveled half of it, even though most of the stat bonuses remain the same.
