ZEALOT'S NO MANS SKY REVIEW:
I'd like to cast one aspersion aside right now: this is definitely not a "chill" game. It's highly tedious and involved. Unless by "chill" you mean "thoughtless and repetitive."
Well, I legally played a friend's copy of NMS for 3-4 hours and wow that was really underwhelming. I would honestly feel kinda angry and betrayed if I got suckered into paying $60 for this mess. The planets are certainly cool, but they are all one biome and most of them are extremely barren. I had one experience I'd describe as being really great, and that was when I was scouring across my totally barren desert planet, and I found a canyon that was entirely full of plants with water at the bottom, almost like a jungle in the crack. The rest of it was pretty dull.
So, the planets are definitely cool, but I've got a few gripes. The flying is terrible. It reminds me of flying in Spore, how you can never actually fly down onto the surface, you just zoom around at a safe distance from the ground and press a button when you are ready to land. The speed progression feels totally wonky. The combat was honestly pretty terrible. You have one gun, which fires a laser at hordes of flying robots that zoom at you, as they drop one by one from the sky and give you nothing. The ship combat is pretty bad as well, and as far as I can tell the only purpose it might serve is self-defense. It's like a crappy version of Elite Dangerous all around.
And the core gameplay was just dreadfully boring. You have a few meters (life support, hazard protection, all your ship parts need fuel) and the only way to reset them is to go mine for elements on the surface of a planet. This is accomplished by walking and jetting around the surface for a few minutes until you come across a tower of whatever element you need, then spending 3-4 minutes completely demolishing it through a highly boring mining system. Also, there's no gravity, so the bits you take out will have pieces floating above them, and usually you'll be left with a few unmined little rocks floating high in the air.
So, discovery is pretty lame. You look at a plant or animal with your binoculars and it gets a generated name, then like 200 credits (or some other extremely small amount of money) appear in your bank account. So rewarding! You then get to turn those elements into fuel, go sell the stuff you don't want at a station, head down to the next system, and repeat.
Incredibly boring gameplay loop. Pretty visuals, but most of the planets are barren and you can see all they have to offer in 90 seconds. Don't think you'll be exploring jungles or anything fun in this game. It's quite literally a race against time to go mine more Heridium which appears as a random tower of ore jutting out of the planet's surface.
Incredibly disappointing. I've played for 3-4 hours and I feel like I've seen it all.
FINAL SCORE: 4.5/10
+ Very nice visuals on planets
+ Interesting crafting/ship system
- Ridiculously quickly depleting resource bars (fuel/life-support/hazard-protection)
- Extremely boring mining is the backbone of the game and will be most of your time in it
- Very simplistic and restrictive flight in ships
- Boring and mindless combat in ships and on-foot
"But I have to spend my money somewhere!"
IF YOU WANT TO EXPLORE IN A CASUAL GAME WITH ACTUAL MULTIPLAYER: Go buy Pulsar: Lost Colony. It's an incredible little space exploration indie game where you and a crew of up to 5 friends explore space while working specific roles to keep your starship operational.
IF YOU WANT TO TRADE AND MICROMANAGE IN A DEEP GAME WITH PVP: Go buy Elite: Dangerous. It's not as pretty as No Man's Sky, but achieves a much more gritty and realistic feel. The gameplay is actually addictive, unlike NMS, and I've spent almost 400 hours in it.
