Recent reviews by adhoc42

The game itself is a pretty interesting production line simulator, fun for anyone who enjoys operations management and optimization. It gets more interesting as the game scales up and has you flying between different planets, and automating your production on a cosmic scale. However as of this moment, the game does not support cloud saves and I lost my progress too many times to continue playing.

This game is screaming for a split screen mode. yet it's nowhere to be found. Huge disappointment for an otherwise solid title

Flashback to 2005, with Todd Howard talking about Elder Scrolls Oblivion: "See that mountain in the distance? You can climb it if you want."
Why would I want to do that? Since then, I realized it didn't matter if I wanted to or not. The fact that I could is what made all the difference in giving us immersion and feeling of freedom.
Flash foward back to present day. Starfield, a game all about stars. Do you see that star in the distance? Can you go there? Nope. You can only fly around the orbits of planets. All other space-related content is hidden behind menus and loading screens. Todd Howard forgot what made his games special.
The game actually has all the assets for interstellar travel in its 3D map. They could have easily used them to make an instance for manually traveling between stars, and they can certainly enable manually traveling between planets in a solar system. But the soulless streamlining of the gameplay railoads us to focus on the questlines, losing all the freedom and immersion in the process.

Be warned before you try game, this is a bare bones experiebnce without too many glaring flaws (hence still positive recommendation), but the most painful feeling of missed potential.

I paid for this game to play the singleplayer campaign. Then the game was made free and the campaign was removed before I managed to finish it. I feel scammed!

Needs more paintings. After a while you have to start buying paintings that don't really interest you to level up, because you keep seeing the same ones over and over again. Perhaps a "don't show again" button for individual artists could help. I also wish you could reopen your gallery without having to physically return to it. It would encourage me to visit other people's spaces more. Overall I think it's a lot of fun to build a gallery and get creative in it's appearance, unhindered by real world limitations.

There are approx 200,000 million trillion stars in our universe. Meanwhile in No Man's Sky, there are approx 473,025 billion stars. In other words, No Man's Sky covers 2.365125e-9 of our universe's stars. That's 0.0000000002365125, which is quite a lot. No Man's Sky is the only game in which it makes any sense to draw this kind of comparisons. It is also the only game in which the size of the game world eludes my grasp. I cannot comprehend it, and that's what I love about it. The way this is achieved is rather simple, every new solar system is a variation on the same set of parameters that determine the number of planets, their geology, moons, as well as the economy, etc. In effect, traveling through this universe, you just keep reshuffling the parameters of one solar system-sized game world. However, the illusion works as long as it is able to keep surprising you. The illusion makes you feel that No Man's Sky is not just a game, but a universe simulator. Once the campaign ends, you will likely have seen a big chunk of what NMS has to offer, but with the recent updates, there is potential to continue enjoying this magical sandbox indefinitely.

The narration is the main part of the game, which is about the relationship of the narrator and his friend, the game designer who made the levels. It is left to interpretation whether the story is fictional or not (I believe it is). I finished it in one sitting of 90 minutes and I do not feel compelled to return to it, but the experiences and the message of this game are memorable. The game explores the communication between an artist and the audience as well as the struggle of creative work. The level design is very pleasing visually despite the dated graphics and it includes a handful of fun surprises.