blasphemies incoming.
i told you i wanted to like this game. i desperately do, because on paper it's close to the game of my dreams when i was a kid, so i kept suffering it these last days. and i'll tell you that after 10-15 hours of absolute nothingness (double that if you're playing survival, or maybe even triple it, i didn't dare try it) at some point the game opens up, and between the base, the upgrading, the freighters, the missions, the treasures hunting and so on, it somehow offers some entertainment, something to do.
it still looks like a beta, with lots of incomplete, barebone stuff tacked on the basic structure because otherwise it'd have been a screensaver (and an ugly and repetitive one at that) and a casual comparison with starbound utterly devastates it, but now it offers something to do at least.
planets are still retarded, all of them already populated, none of them barely believable. in starbound every planet is a surprise, you never know if or when you're going to meet cliffs, seas, outposts, cities, jungles, or even absolutely nothing, and even underground biomes vary. nms's planets are all the same, have all you need, go only up to 20m above sea or 20m underground, offer no kind of secret or surprise, exploration is discouraged both by this and by the constant need to recharge environment immunity, and let's not forget all the countless means of teleportation: after unlocking 4-5 systems you don't need to use hyperspace anymore, you just teleport from one base to another. for free.
ruled exploration out, upgrading equipment should be the reason to play: the suit can be improved and there are even two ways to raise its available slots, a bit flat but it's there. there's nothing like that for ships and the only weapon. even worse, both not only differ in number of slots but also in inherent boni, so you either have the infinite luck of finding just the perfect thing you were looking for (impossible, quite literally) or suffer forever knowing you're working with suboptimal equipment. why? you have the system in place already, why not use it?
every single part of this is a half-assed job, but at least it's half. at launch there was nothing. i can see an interesting game in two years from now if this bunch of baboons keeps working on it.
ps: what really puzzled me is the lack of mods. a game which sold millions and millions of copies should have quite a lot of mods, shouldn't it?