No Man’s Sky was a huge mess when released. Boring, repetitive, doing the same thing 20+ hours in as you were doing at the start. Huge hype and lying about what it would be hurt it.
I have heard, though, that the game has been regularly updated and major improvements have come along.
So those who have played it and seen what they’ve done with it, has it become a good game?
I bought it for the PS4 earlier this year and liked it quite a lot, for some weeks. The Survival mode adds some good peril, and I was impressed with the graphics and world generation. The space stations and freighters help create a sense of cosmic scale, though not as literally and tiresomely as Elite Dangerous does. The base-building seems okay, if over-dependent on fetch quests to gain the different building modules and so on. I just about ground my way up to having the Terrain Manipulator which was fun.
To me though, the fundamental flaw at the centre of the NMS galaxy seems to be that every quest and action is rewarded by increasing your inventory, be that of your space backpack, gun or ship. It feels like a grand Space Opera where the hero prevails by acquiring a steamer trunk and a warehouse.
I have not played it but FWIW the recent reviews on Steam are “Mostly Positive” (whereas before they were “Mostly Negative”).
It’s alright, now.
There’s some odd issues around where the original game and the additions clash (such as language - to understand some of the aliens, you still need to decode the languages from monoliths. Other aliens, of the same species, just talk to you in English), but if you can ignore those it’s a decent exploring and base building game. It’s not the massive long-term life stealer that was promised originally, but if you don’t expect that there’s a lot of fun to be had with it.
There’s still no actual multiplayer, although they are teasing it now.