First, I love D&D and isometric games like this. They are AWESOME....generally... I'll say that I've not even escaped from the starting area, mostly because I've seen many glaring issues. Bugs, while rather minor, are still present so early into the game. I'll equip invisible weapons for instance. Walking, in general, is rather... slow. Moving my character feels like I'm walking through tar. Rather than briskly walking or running to my destination, my characters mozey on over rather casually... nevermind that we are besieged by an army of mercinary assassins. Get that swagger yo! BALANCE!!! The game's balance is awful... just awful... You have lots of options to adjust the difficulty, but using the "hard" mode creates an insufferable game that derives its' difficulty more to RNG (9/10 attacks seem to miss) while the "challenging" mode, one level below hard, creates an experience of "press face against keyboard and roll it around... and win". The difference between these two settings? ONE factor. You can actively see the changes between the modes (there are MANY options) and the difference between "facerolling easy" and "insufferable RNG" is ONE factor... ONE! Even beyond that, the game begins with you creating a character from many options... That's great... as long as you choose a tanky class, becaues early on ALL the companions you run into are glass cannons, so if your like me and pick a druid early on... whelp, your F***ED! Get ready to get one shot! This is all sad though, because what it is based off of is so great. Character creation is second to none in current isometric games. The voice acting is amazing. The art likewise! It's all a shame, because if the game was properly balanced it would be amazing, it's just not. Either suffer no challenge or suffer RNG. Even the first, non scripted fight is nigh impossible (taking 10+ reloads at least) simply because I couldn't roll dice well enough.
TONS of potential... but it is just that, potential. Unrealized potential. I have roughly 10 hours into the game and if you've played the game for 5 minutes, you've played it for 10 hours. The game starts out with you and your busted up ship stranded on a random planet. You begin by finding resources to repair your ship, fuel your ship, and charge your suit systems. And that's it. I fixed my ship and now I travel to new planets to rinse/repeat every time. To make matters worse, every planet feels the same. Every planet feels lifeless and devoid of any personality (though there is life, they all look/feel the same). The only real significant difference between planets seems to be the quantity of the rarer resources (one planet has tons of gold, another has tons of copper, another has tons of something else) but overall, I've been on 6 different planets so far and so far, they all felt like one uninspired procedurally generated blob of "who cares?". Meter management is super easy, but super boring. Get off on a toxic planet and explore for a while and you have to resupply your suit's toxic resistance that deteriorates over time, it's super easy to do which is why it just feels like a useless gimmick of a mechanic rather than an actual feature. Get off on the next planet and rather than being toxic, it is super cold, and you need the same resources to fill the continually depleting resource. To fuel your ship you need plutonium, same with your gun and a few other systems, which would be an interesting mechanic IF you couldn't find plutonium every 5 feet. Overall, No Man's Sky has a ton of potential, but right now it is so under developed (in terms of being shallow) that I woke up the next day and don't care to load up the game. I'm reminded of an ARPG like Diablo, a loot grinder, but unlike Diablo, where you can find an interesting sword or a cool new spell, you just find the same stuff over and over. I'm seriously considering a refund, if only for the bugs.
