Firstly I've have got to admit I have a long history with Elite, played the original in 84, spent about four years playing Frontier: Elite II on the Amiga and currently playing Elite Dangerous on a Series X.

I briefly played the PS4 version of NMS for an hour and got a refund.

Anyway, I've been playing the Switch version mode in TV mode and handheld mode, everything's been generally good! Super impressed with the performance, I'm over 100 hours in and have experienced minor issues with a couple of softlocks and lag on a few occasions (in areas of lots things being drawn to the screen at once).

I've got everything down in terms of game logic and progess, although things are a bit confusing at the start, but follow the tutorial (story) for a while and you soon get to grips with the absolute mountain of content this game has been updated with since release (all free).

I find the interaction with the npc characters and the delivery of the story quite refreshing, interesting concept and very broad considering this is a huge procedurally generated game world.

Graphics are fairly solid, if a bit low poly and "okay" textures, draw distance is a bit limited but there's a lot going on here so there's gotta be sacrifices for performance.

Sound effects are good and the soundtrack is suited to the games setting, it nicey adapts to whats going on the screen… a lot the tunes are pretty chill, feels almost like minecraft sometimes.

Referencing the old school, I would give this 92%

Edit: I have no idea of how well I'm doing but I've got plenty of money and a few basic farms running. A nice exotic S class ship and my frigates are running missions. I quickly became confident enough to ignore the quests and just focused on exploring and making money. Like minecraft in a way, i grind, build and gather resources.