Long long ago, in a more innocent time, an upcoming title called No Man's Sky was announced at the VGX awards. They promised the sun, moon, and stars, and ultimately at launch delivered only a small percentage of what they had assured fans would be in the game. Many users sought refunds in response, and the game's review scores suffered, resulting in languid sales given the hype surrounding the game pre-release.
In a story twist that few expected, over the years the game's developer Hello Games has continued to support and improve the title with a tenacity rarely observed in the game industry in any era. One major update after another has included essentially all of the promised features, and then some. Many of the original criticisms of the game still apply, especially the way one world is generally much like another of the same type, but the trend has been one of consistent overall improvement. Active development has continued to this day (the "Worlds II" update was just released a few days ago) despite the studio also simultaneously working on their upcoming survival title Light No Fire.
For the uninitiated, No Man's Sky is approximately Elite: Dangerous crossed with Minecraft. It features a procedurally generated universe, with multiple procedurally generated galaxies, which are themselves filled with procedurally generated systems with (you saw this coming, right?) procedurally generated planets. Those planets are filled with generated plants, animals, and minerals generated from a mix-and-match grab bag of characteristics that leads to significant diversity. The Worlds II update significantly improved both terrain generation (which is now much more varied) and creature generation including the models, which could sometimes be a bit implausible. The game is crafting-heavy, and a significant amount of time is spent collecting resources. You can trade for them, but it's not necessarily more convenient than simply going someplace and picking them up, because of the way trade works.
Everywhere you go, the game has this same feeling of irrelevance of actions. Nothing you do has any real consequences; just jump a system away, and nothing you did before is relevant. Instead of paying a price premium far from the source of goods, they are not available at all just a single jump away, and economic activity doesn't affect neighboring systems. A functional economy is obviously too much to ask for in a game with a world this size, but no apparent effort is spent on even mimicking one.
The game only "remembers" long-term the changes you've made to terrain within the limits of established bases (of which you can have only fifty) and even then only a cutoff limit of those are displayed to other players who visit your bases, so despite your ability to manipulate the very shape of the ground, you have to locate ideal sites for showpiece bases. Base building is itself an unfortunate chore, because it works very poorly in general. For example, just try placing some half stairs inside of buildings so that you can build staircases that don't take up more space than necessary. You can't place them when the floor is already placed, and you can't place the floor once the staircase is there.
Speaking of terrain, even the new generators lack something that Minecraft has always had: a variety of biomes. With its creation of entire planets, this game had the opportunity to feature logically located biomes with differences between equatorial and polar locations, but that is a missed opportunity here. Entire planets are basically identical from top to bottom whether you measure north to south, or high to low altitude. A few creatures, plants, or animals might only occur within specific ranges of altitude, but far more are located everywhere, or nearly so.
As you play the game longer, you experience both more and less variety. Here's what I mean by that: while you will see more and more different examples of rocks, creatures, and plants, you will also see more and more similarity. The minerals are the worst example of this; outside of types of planet with very specific contents (which are identically designed but differently named on different examples of the same type of planet) you will see the same minerals with just different shapes and names (and not always different shapes) on just about every planet you visit. This is also very true of the plants. Animals have a bit more variance, with some planets seemingly lacking any predators while some have several, and so on. This was true even before the recent Worlds II update.
Sadly, I also have run into a long list of bugs, many of which have been with the game since it was released. Several of them are related to glitching or attacking through structures or terrain. Grenade-type weapons can knock enemies right through the ground or walls, where they might or might not become permanently stuck. Hazardous plants can attack you through walls, and if the terrain is thin enough, hostile enemies can shoot or even melee attack through it, or glitch through the ground into a tunnel you dug for safety. In my experience, this game is significantly buggier than average. I understand that they're trying to do a lot, but as usual it would be nice to see more bugs fixed before new features are implemented that exacerbate them. There are also a lot of user-hostile features of the interface and camera angles, especially related to vehicles. The wheeled vehicles in the game feel like a gimmick, and some of the others are very glitchy. The "Minotaur" powered armor in particular likes to glitch through terrain above its head while exploring subterranean tunnels, a tendency which was extended to players through a bug introduced or worsened in the Worlds II update which also broke interaction with aquatic items.
Despite these many flaws, I do believe that this game is worth playing. I don't think it's worth paying full price for it; I paid about $26 for the game during a Steam sale and I'm pretty comfortable with having spent that at this point. Players who bought the game ahead of time were generally very disappointed at launch, but I'd also be disappointed today if I paid full price given the large number of problems and deficiencies, some of which are full-on design issues and not merely implementation errors. In the interest of supporting this assertion, I present you with my list of irritations.
With all of those negative things said, I do want to come back to my earlier points about this game: They did eventually implement the vast majority of advertised features. It is fun, and it is worth playing. If you love space exploration games and crafting games, you will almost certainly enjoy No Man's Sky. But if you are easily irritated by quality of life issues, or expect a polished experience overall, you will find neither of those things here. You will also not find a deep gameplay experience; space combat is so trite and boring it is purely an irritation, trading has no consequences and it is merely a matter of buying low and selling high when you by chance happen to run across those scenarios. And some of the deficiencies of the game are truly irritating, like the need to do manual inventory manipulation. Really, not a single solitary sort button? What gives? But putting those things aside, there's still a fun experience to be had here, for a fairly significant number of hours.