I like NMS so far. The game runs pretty good on my rig at a mix of low and medium settings. I do get a little stutter now and then but it's only when there is a lot of stuff going on, and only once in a while. For the most part it runs pretty smooth and is playable. I'm using an AMD CPU and GPU however, and I hear a lot of people who are having problems are using NVidia cards. The game is entirely focused on sandbox exploration. It drops you in, and pretty much leaves you to it. There is a "tutorial" that guides you through repairing your ship and getting warp capability. But there's not much beyond that. IMO it needs lots of side-quests, and more stuff to do. Base-building is supposedly in the next update, and it can't come soon enough. I would also like to see new ship types. Before release we were told there would be 3 ship types: fighters, cargo ships, and exploration ships. Right now there aren't - they are all the same, with just different modules installed on each. IMO this was a mistake. It makes the game feel more empty and casual. If we had different ship types to try out it would at least give us something to do for a little while. Jumping to new systems, scanning wildlife, finding monuments, and mining is pretty much all you do right now, and that only takes you so far. Finding monuments has been the most fun for me so far, as I like learning more about the lore behind each of the races. Right now it's kind of meh. If they flesh it out a little more and add more content, I would give it 4 stars easily. IMO it should have been in development longer, so they could add more stuff.
As someone who has never played this before, I had nothing to go on but other reviews. I tend to like old games with good stories so I thought I would like it. It starts out fairly boring and it lags when leaving a conversation or cinematic - seriously just shifting the camera from the guy you were talking to back over to behind your character takes half a minute sometimes, and I'm running the game off of an SSD! I finally called it quits when I got stuck in the floor of Frank's Flophouse after accidentally walking into the corner of a railing and falling through part of a catwalk. I think it's fun for those who have played it before, but I can't recommend it to someone new. The problem is not that it's just old, but that it's old and it's slow and it's buggy. Go play something else.
I think Dungeon Keeper 1 is a better game. Many of the levels in DK2 have time limits that press you to push forward into enemy dungeons and this really screws up the whole dungeon building aspect that is really what this game is supposed to be about. Why bother building sentry guns and doors when you have only 15 minutes to kill the enemy boss? Train your units? Phah!
