Honestly, I’ve played Facebook “City Sim” games with more depth and interactivity.

They bring literally nothing to the table except a time and resource sink with no real return or fun.

Nothing you build can be interacted with or do anything unique, except the “Starports” which require you to pay materials to build a roof, but then just turn out to be a single “Alternative” landing pad that random ships can land on, and have no roof in sight

Nothing you build creates related items that can be harvested, or sold. Markets are completely empty and don’t house traders. The hazard control building is literally just an empty 1×1 box that doesn’t do anything or cause your settlement to act differently if their are hazards. Every building is filled with storage items and nothing else. No unique living quarters.

All the buildings are literally just made from the players base building kit and are incredibly uninspired and pop up with no structure or thought to pathways and lane flow. Citizens just amble around doing absolutely nothing except looking at data pads, hovering 4 feet above the places they try to sit, and have the least inspired Sims style mood indicators that also cant be changed or interacted with and have no actual meaningful purpose.

The output materials your base generate are randomized, un-customizable, and have nothing to do with the building you build or the citizens you hire and they accrue incredibly slowly at rates that make worthless for selling or building.

My base has a Jelly Donut Farm as a status modifier. Is there a farm? No. Is there a restaurant? No. Is there a chef npc somewhere I can talk to to buy donuts from? No. Does it switch Settlement production rewards to donuts for me to sell or eat? No.

Settlements are ugly, hollow, shells that sit around and wait for arbitrary decisions that cost you both resources and hours of your life as it can take up to 4 hours per tier of a building to complete, with each building having 3 tiers. 12 entire IRL hours and decent amounts of resources to build a landing pad that isn’t even a unique asset, that I can plop down in 6 seconds in base building mode for like 25 pure ferrite.

It feels so under-baked, it’s basically raw.

But thanks for the base building overhaul I guess… even though its incredibly buggy now, it was a semi-thoughtful overhaul but still left the base building at “Pretty much pointless after a certain progression and lacking decorative assets.

To set the stage – I was one of those people that brought No Man’s Sky day-1, and absolutely hated it.

I was heavily into Destiny at the time (D1, year-1 vet), so NMS didn’t really gel with me, it was buggy, there was very little information on what to do, and seemed practically no point in the game apart from wandering around aimlessly (from what I could tell with my limited initial assessment).

So, a couple weeks ago I gave it another try. Whilst I don’t know if I’m viewing the game with a different mindset, or whether Hello Games have added so much and tweaked so much that this current iteration is unrecognisable from the initial release, but what I do know is that I’m having a heck of a blast with it.

I like resource gathering and base building, and whilst games like Fallout 4 and Starfield are OK, NMS appears to be leagues better and the systems far deeper. So much seems to be thought out before hand, which is a nice change when you are used to Bethesda games.

I’ve also found that this is a game that it is easy to get lost in. I’m 75+ hours into this playthrough, and I’m only about to start the last Artemis mission, as I keep getting distracted with other interesting things to do. As a “new” player it is amazing how much there is to do. Having just got my first freighter I’m tempted to get into frigate missions as the concept of building up your fleet looks really interesting, but that will probably have to wait as there is so much I want to do first, including finding a better freighter, grinding out the frigate mods needed to fully equip it, and not least actually hiring some frigates.

So much to do, so little time.

Happy days.