Game is buggy and has game breaking glitches. LIKE!
Tech tree being blank and you need to restart the game.
Some times tech does not show up in said tech tree.
Clip into the ground and appear somewhere. (That was a weird one)
Dialog not activating untill you turn it off and on.
Dialog activating and freezing your character for a long time. (not sure how long)
A weird bug where a drone decided to clip through my walls and ******** the core. (weird)
The tutorial being useless or down right broken. (its kinda impressive.)

Summary:
I never made it to space because i would run into a game breaking glitch that would ruin somthing. I would LOVE if this game worked because i love the style and concept but kinda hard to enjoy somthing if the game breaks every hour randomly.

Have loved this game for 10 years now, well over a 1000 hours. However, I really wish the devs would spend the time fixing bugs rather than changing the avatars for crafting materials every 6 months. The NPC AI is shocking guys (to name just one bug) and ruins what could be a masterpiece.

IMO if a well funded dev took the idea of this game and released a totally new, more polished version, it would be massive and rival the big hitters out there (ED, SC etc).

In its current state, I can't recommend the game I'm sorry to say..........

plays like a 2005 game that is bugged

Started out as a good game but quickly found quest breaking bugs at almost every quest that dont allow you to continue along the story line.

what in the actual ♥♥♥♥, why is the starting location trying to kill me

THIS PIECE OF SH!T GAME WONT EVEN LOAD ANYMORE .... it was never finished, its non-stop unstable, and WORST PART IS i think the game would be great if devs paid it any real ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ attention ever. ♥♥♥♥ this game.

this game was good like 8 years ago but since then they've ruined every aspect of this game. Just play No Mans Sky instead

Where to start with this game... if you want the TL;DR then it is simply one of, if not the, most buggy, unpolished, underdeveloped messes of a game I have ever played. If you want to know specifics, read on.

1) Combat in this game is some of the worst I have ever seen. I am not being hyperbolic when I say that Wolfenstein 3D from 1992 has more strategic and engaging combat than this. The combat in this game makes Minecraft look like a masterpiece of enemy design and strategy. There are no words in the English dictionary that can describe how bad it is, but let me try to explain.

The enemy design comes in 2 forms-

Melee enemies are all the same thing, they don't have any interesting AI or tricks up their sleeve, the only difference is skins and hitboxes. They just beeline it toward you unless they get stuck on some terrain along the way (more on this later). The combat vs these involves backpedalling and shooting until the things are dead. Their animations and hit detection are awful. Fighting these things is extremely boring and repetitive.

Ranged enemies are just overtuned hitscan AI that will snipe you in 1ms with 100% accuracy if a single pixel of you comes into view. In short, there is zero strategy or skill to fighting them. You literally stand there and trade shots until it dies or you duck into cover to heal (or die). It's a numbers game- do you have more damage and armor and supplies than the enemy? Yes- you win! No- you lose!

In summary, if you are looking for a game with interesting combat- or even combat that is remotely digestible- this game does it the worst possible way fathomable. I defy you to design a game with worse combat.

2) The AI is horrible. It's like some drunk highschool student threw this together a couple days before the deadline and called it good. Enemies get stuck constantly. There is no variation. NPCs have no life at all, they stand there and that's it. Unless there's a scripted event, they won't even attack wildlife or vise versa. Enemies have 2 actions- move toward you, or stand and shoot.

3) The animations and models are Unity Asset Store flips, and they range from serviceable to making me wonder if I'm playing Morrowind from 2002. It belongs in the tech demo pre-alpha, not in a game that's 10 ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ years in development. Embarrassingly bad.

4) There are Places of Interest (POIs) littered throughout the planets, and they come in three forms-

Filler fluff. These are some crashed vessels and buildings copy+pasted all over the galaxy that offer nothing other than menial loot, and are really not adding anything to the game other than some artificial feeling of "ohh look how populated every planet is!" These are 99.999% of POIs.

Settlements. These have a couple quest givers or merchants, nothing else is happening or is interesting about them. Some of them are just... there? They have nothing. You go there to get quests and never return for any reason.

Mission areas. The level design in some of the ones I did are very good, I can tell some work went into these. It's too bad that the combat gets an F- and it makes going through them just a complete boring slog. What was even the point guys?

5) Quests. There is some attempt to tell a story and build some atmosphere in the game. I am not sure if it ever gets "good" or if it's just some uninspired writing to push you forward. What I can tell you is that most quests are just MMORPG-style fetch quests with broken enemy spawns, RNG droprates, and just feel like a chore. People will just cheat and spawn in the items to complete them since the hours it would take to hunt down and kill the same boring enemy over and over is simply not fun. The quest design in this game is lazy and all the mechanics surrounding them (i.e. combat) make them a slog.

6) Bugs. Good lord, are there bugs. Most have been in the game for years, even since release, and the dev team is either too lazy or incompetent to fix them. Enemies spawn in walls and shoot you. Enemies spawn out of thin air right beside you and start attacking. Ships and/or players falling through terrain. Enemy AI just stops working. Game crashes and your ship is stuck in the air way out of reach, or straight up just despawns and bye bye to all the work you put into it. The list truly does go on, but for brevity I will digress- feel free to search the internet yourself for a laundry list.

7) Instability. I know for a fact that most people aren't experiencing these, but it has to be said that some people are. I went through every troubleshooting guide and diagnostic I could possibly fathom. I wiped my entire drive and reinstalled Windows. I was going crazy thinking my computer was about to be bricked, there must be something wrong. NOPE. I can play fully modded Space Engineers with crazy space battles and breaking the speed cap by about 1000% with zero crashes, I can play Elden Ring on full settings with zero frame drops or crashes, yet this game crashes because I am literally just sitting there in my ship?

It seems most people playing this game have old computers, but this game- whether it's how the multithreading is coded or what- seems to just not like new hardware. There is some sort of incompatibility issue that I can only assume comes from lazy programming and not keeping the game up-to-date. I have no idea why I couldn't get it to run for longer than an hour without crashing, but I am so over this game anyways I couldn't care less to find out. If you have a new computer and you happen to buy this game to try it out- if it starts crashing then just refund it immediately. There is no fix. The game is coded by monkeys. Devs will not give you any useful information or diagnostics, they will shrug their shoulders and just say it's on you.

8) Ship building is... meh? It's not bad, but it's just very simplistic. There are no logistical considerations like in SE, you just plop whatever anywhere and dump into it. Items just magically transport across the ship. There is no control over how your logistics work either- you want ores and guns and materials to be separated? Yea, that isn't possible, enjoy sorting it yourself or searching through a giant heap of crap that doesn't even have a search bar. I would call it serviceable, but if you're getting into this game just to build cool things and fly them around then SE is just flat out better in every way.

9) Exploration. This game is the embodiment of "an ocean a million miles wide and one inch deep". Yea, they have virtually unlimited procedurally-generated planets in a very large solar system. You can go to ice planet #1 and have functionally visited every single ice planet in the entire universe. The universe is boring and repetitive. The planets are populated with POFs- Points of Fluff. There's no point in visiting any planets other than to get fetch quests or maybe find some minerals.

There's many more things wrong with the game to be honest, but this is already a giant essay that I doubt any other human soul will bother reading through. I just had to get my feelings "on paper" and get it out there that this game is a steaming pile of garbage. One of the worst experiences I have had in gaming in probably my entire life.

I love this game but it doesn't love me back.

I played the crap out of this game back in circa 2018 when it was in early access and loved it. The base and vehicle building was and still is incredible.

I tried it again in 2020 when it came out of early access and the number of bugs was the same or worse and I couldn't keep playing. I'm trying it again now in 2025, for its 10 year anniversary, and the number of bugs has outpaced the number of admittedly awesome features, while the unpolished Unity jank remains as strong as ever.

This game is worth your time if you're a masochist with an imagination that can do a lot of heavy lifting and can live with debugging the game's many issues being a common part of the experience. Even then you may just wind up with a corrupted save that can easily wipe out all of your progress if you're not making your own meticulous backups.

I keep coming back to this game hoping it's grown into what I always wanted it to be. But now I'm a decade older and realizing that's never going to be the case, and that I have to make some decisions about how best to spend my time.

I can't thumbs-down a game I've played for this many hours, but prospective buyers should be informed of what they're getting themselves into.

So far it's a fun game