I have a friend who is still apologizing for the game, even though he got bored of it after

5 hours. I don't know how many times I've heard from him that it's a good game if you
smoke weed or get drunk and play it. You know you've hit a low benchmark for fun when
having to do drugs is required to enjoy a game.
The sad thing is that even if you forget all of the lies by Hello Games and how they
completely misrepresented the game and continue to do so (just look at their Steam
page, it still shows the E3 videos which are nothing like the game) and even if you knew
nothing about the game and expected only an relaxing space exploration/survival
game, it doesn't deliver anything close to a satisfactory experience unless you're
drugged out of your mind. There is literally zero reason to explore past the first 5 hours
and zero reason to go to the center of the universe, which is the biggest letdown I've
ever had in gaming.

It doesn't actually feel like a real universe, there are no planetary physics and
gravity is the same on all planets. There are no actual solar systems. The planets don't
rotate around a sun but are stationary, sitting together in a blob. The moons don't even
go around the planets.

All of the various wonders of the universe (neutron stars, supernovas,

pulsars...etc) are entirely absent.

There are no stars, they're just part of the skybox but you can't fly to them.

The 18 quintillion planets that was so heavily marketed isn't impressive when you
realize what that actually means: if you took 11 things and come up with 50 variations
for each, that is close to 18 quintillion combinations. Most planets are entirely the same
but with different bumps and colors, they have the same objects on them and largely
the same resources. Once you've seen the first dozen planets, you've seen them all.

There is no actual differences between the ships, except the number of inventory
slots. There are no ships specializing for say speed or combat.

You don't have a sense of scope / scale to your journey. In the galactic map you
can see other stars but there's no sense of where you are in relation to the center of the
universe. Likewise you don't have a way to track where you were. No mapping or
history, waypoints or other ways of tracking your progress. There needs to be a way to
see how you're progressing and also give some meaning to how far you've gone.

You can't actually fly between these systems or go into say the dark space or
outer asteroid belt. The only way to travel between them is to open up the map and
click warp, which initiates a loading screen animation and loads up the new planets.
There is no deep space. You feel like you're in an instance with 3 or 4 planets that are
mostly the same, then you load up a new skybox with a new set of similar planets. It's
nothing like say Space Engine, where you actually do get a true sense that you're in a
real universe.

You can't even fly your ship. You can't fly low across a planet as there is an
invisible boundary and you can't crash your ship. The controls are terrible, it has none of
the complexity of other space flight sims.

You can't manually land your ship, you simply press a button for it to autoland.
Tons of other maneuvers (like entering a space station) are entirely autopilot.

The asteroids which are everywhere have insane pop-in issues, they only show
up like 50 meters in front of you.

The freight ships don't move, they just sit there passively forever. They add zero
gameplay depth.

The space stations are all basically the same.

The planets are littered with outposts, all identical and with a single NPC alien
standing still and staring into the wall.

The NPCs are entirely shallow, there is literally no point to even talking to them
since they never say anything interesting and simply give you something random you
likely don't need. Even the automated quest giving NPCs in Bethesda games that hand
out those Radiant AI quests would be a massive improvement.

All of the monoliths are the same, it's nothing but a chore to chase them down.
The words you learn don't add any depth to your interactions with the aliens, since they
never have anything interesting to say anyway.

There are no actual biomes on each planet. Each planet is the same no matter
where you land.

The animals are build on 14 different skeleton designs, with a bunch of random
animal parts scrapped on top of each section to maximize the number of permutations
and there is no attempt to make the animal make any sense in it's environment or have
anything unique in it's behavior. The animals have no evolutionary history and their
behavior is incrediby shallow.

There are no tall trees like were shows in E3, they're all saplings. There are no
large forests, no large creatures. There are no large valleys, huge mountain peaks, no
giant volcanos, all terrain is uniformly similar across planets.

The grinding which makes up most of the game is not only boring, but frustrating
due to the completely messed up inventory management.

The interface is absolutely atrocious. It's amazing that it can be messed up this
bad, the fact that we need a mod just to remove the requirement that you have to hold
each click for a second speaks volumes. You need to load up a menu to do anything,
and the menus are terribly designed and completely unintuitative.

The game is a technical mess. It looks like ass yet runs with all sorts of framerate
issues.

The traveling on foot is insanely slow and tedious. There should have been a
buggy or car, or at least some sort of fast jet pack like in Tribes.

It fails as a survival game since nothing in the game leaves you threatened. Each
planet is seeded with abundant resources, and the few things that do attack you are
easily defeated. Compare to minecraft where there's a very definite risk / reward system
to exploring a deep cave system. Nothing really threatens you in a meaningful way.

The different minerals and resources don't really matter. Since most of the
upgrades to explore the universe are yours within the first hour / two hours all the rest
are kind of nice add ons.

There's no challenge to exploring. There's very little combat and what combat
there is is very boring.

Inside a solar system there's no way to decide if a planet is interesting or not

without actually visiting it. There should be some 'classification' of the planets e.g. class
M, class X, etc that allows you to say a certain type of planet might be safe vs unsafe.

All planets are accessible right from the start of the game. I was excited about
the idea of acid planets, radioactive planets, cold planets ... I was thinking that in order
to explore a radioactive planet you'd need to craft some special gear. There was a pretty
obviously gameplay loop where the dangerous planets had better minerals / ruins /
whatever but were very hard to explore. Instead every planet is basically just a copy of
the others.

The constant need to recharge things, which don't really serve a purpose. It
makes the game very grindy without any positive feedback. Instead of feeling free to
explore the world around me I feel annoyed that if I see something cool it means 30
seconds of tedium while I mine the abundant plutonium. I end up not landing and
exploring because of how annoying it is that to take off again I have to enter a menu
and recharge my ship.

None of the aliens interact with each other or have any sort of AI other than 'walk
around a bit'. There's nothing to sit and watch. An occasional ship will fly overhead but
they don't do anything. You never really see a battle take place or the ships acting in
any sort of interesting manner.
This is a textbook case of why hype culture is cancerous to gaming, it leads to
companies looking to hype as many people into preordering then sitting back and
releasing a shallow, broken game. This game is completely empty and lifeless, with
nothing to do but go around looking at things you've already seen copy pasted for the
millionth time.