For the love of GOD: do not get this at full price or anything less than a 50% discount, you will almost certainly regret it. Having gotten it at half price I'm still torn on whether the game represented any real value for money, even in its current state.

The core gameplay loop is tedious busy work and quest marker hell. Knowing about the game's development was a clear detriment in this respect, as I quickly became painfully aware of how I was spending precious hours of my life on what is essentially a visual skin over a noise function. At least when you're grinding away in a Far Cry game, you're interacting with hand-crafted content that hundreds of people labored on for years. Here you are doing the exact same thing you do between missions in those games, only what you see on screen is all generated at run-time using some nerd's fancy Perlin noise algorithm. The more you think about it the more disconcerting it becomes.

The sheer idiocy that the game's systems generates and expect you take at face value is staggering. We're talking swimmable liquid oceans on planets with 130 degree or deep sub-zero temperatures, vibrant plant life and mammalian fauna on planets with little to no water... the list goes on and on. Every space station and point of interest is not just very similar, but completely identical, up to and including the placement of chests and other interactable items. The repeating patterns become obvious quickly, contributing immensely to the overall sense of tedium and despair that sinks in after a few hours with the game.

Yet, as I've progressed through the story I have to concede that it has kept introducing new systems and switching things up, enough for me to be compelled to continue as a sort of ambient activity when I'm too tired to do other things. At around twenty hours, I'm still getting new hooks introduced around the core loop, and have started seeing new varieties of alien life pop up that are significantly different from the mammal analogues that have populated the game until this point.

I don't know if the devs really believe their pablum about the game somehow being about the "joy of discovery" or whatever. In any case the game is not about that at all. It is certainly an interesting exercise in... something, but that something seems more like a variation of the dumbed-down gambler/collector loop that powers most of today's open-world time sinks. Like these games, it consumes a lot of your time and gives almost nothing in return. And unlike those games, you don't get to absorb the energy of intent and artistic flair from all the effort that goes into their production. One and half stars. May update if I ever manage to complete it.

Lo compré día 1, vi todas las entrevistas y me maravilló las primeras semanas que lo jugué. La estética del juego me encantó, desde la selección musical hasta el tono visual que hace referencia a las portadas de libros de ciencia ficción y aventura espacial. Pero, con el tiempo algunos sistemas para avanzar y tener mejor equipo me fue pareciendo cansado. Recursos increíblemente complicados de conseguir y diseños repetidos, que no me fomentaban mucho el seguir jugando.

Tiempo después, admiro al estudio por crecer tanto el juego y dar variedad de jugabilidad, diseños, planetas, naves... sin embargo, el núcleo de lo que me cansó la primera vez que lo jugué sigue ahí. El sistema de creación y avance, me parece aún complicado, sin que fomente mucho mi sentido de exploración y evolución espacial.

Aunque este juego no terminó siendo para mi, admiro mucho todo lo que los desarrolladores han mejorado con el tiempo y espero que sea un gran ejemplo para varios de que siempre hay espacio y tiempo para mejorar u experimentar.

J'ai testé le jeu avec des potes en fin d'année 2023 parce qu'il était sur le game pass, et franchement je me suis régalé, malheureusement en jouant en multi on avait tous un bug qui faisait qu'on pouvait pas avancer l'histoire, ce qui fait que j'ai commencé à la faire après avoir joué une 50aine d'heures et donc après avoir fait la majorité des trucs à faire. En commençant l'histoire j'avais l'impression que c'était surtout un tuto de tout ce qu'on pouvait faire sur le jeu et donc j'avais pas vraiment la foi de continuer. Donc conseil, avancez l'histoire en solo dès le début voilà. Sinon c'était très très cool

Before I say anything else, I wanna say that this game is purely exploration/survival with a hint of other elements like combat, trading etc. So if you don't like exploration, don't buy it. And most importantly, don't buy it because of the hype. Its hyped because of its technical complexity and because no other game has ever attempted Procedural Generation at this scale. Basically this game became so popular before its release because its UNIQUE. So if you are looking for an experience similar to other games, don't go for this and do us a favor, please don't say ♥♥♥♥ about the game based on your self assumed expectations of the game.
Anyway, this game is a technical marvel and just being in there, playing for hours alone, trying to explore and survive makes you realise how vast the game universe is and in turn how vast our real universe is. It has a sense of awe about it.
The gameplay could have been less repetitive and the PC version should have been better optimized/tested for the lag issues. I'm sure Hello Games will fix it soon or I hope so.
Conclusion: I would request everyone who likes trying out new, unique games and who like exploration to definitely try NMS and for the others I won't recommend it.

This game is weird.
On one hand it has a LOT of things to do.
But in the other... not that many?
After you play it for a while, you realise there are things that you'll be doing all the time (base building, building resource gathering machines, space fighting), and things that are not worth doing more than once for the experience or beacuse you need a specific item from them every full moon. (archeology, exploring derelict ships, building and upgrading Exocrafts, underwater exploration.

And i get it. It is, at the end of the day. One of the many atempts at a Space Sim game. Which is not easy to do, beacuse you pretty much need to make a miriad of systems and mechanics, and stick them together in a cohesive way and make them all stand on their own feet.
They are slowly getting there for sure, and i have to give a lot of credit to the small team working on such a game.
Which is the entire reason why reviewing No Man's Sky can be a little difficult, because in the next year or two this wall of text may just be awfully outdated.

Top 50 Favorites: #11

Legal high. Audiovisual synaptic connections of humanity at its core, stripped of all desires and/or ambitions (here seen as miscellaneous), left only with purpose - and what kind of effect that would have on a mind. Delirious, hypnotic, deeply meditative, disorienting but simultaneously so clear-eyed... bottom line, unforgettable. Even four years ago this was leagues ahead of everything it famously promised (and, yes, underdelivered on) at launch - let alone the exemplary beast it is now. Systems complex enough to be engrossing over long periods of time, yet accessible enough not to need to sink ~50-60 hours just to get the proper feel/hook for it - as these games normally tend to do. I'm honestly perfectly okay with saying that this has the market cornered on RNG that is directly married into the core gameplay experience - it's such an exciting variable here that constantly affords so many unique, bewildering new discoveries. One of the most enrapturing, drop-dead BEAUTIFUL gaming experiences ever created - pure visionary atmosphere that I hold as the highest standard for all space games moving forward. Sat down for a month and just totally lost myself in this during COVID lockdowns - sometimes high out of my mind on edibles - and it was one of the most transcendent, defining moments of my life. All that was lost can be here still, it all depends on you. It hurts but that's okay, time affords new birth through the inevitable. You made a real game, Jack.

There's an overwhelming amount of things to do in this game with simultaneously being not enough things to do. For as fun as the game can be at times, I often found myself without a sense of a goal or feeling any meaningful progression despite the immense amount of options for things I could do and gradually led to a lack of motivation to keep playing. The biggest offender was that finding better ships and multi-tools is effectively a random event, and it does not feel particularly rewarding to just happen upon them.