Recent reviews by Spafbi

Decorations...this is for base builders who want a bit of bling. The one cool thing about this pack is that the mineral lamps in this pack don't require power after being crafted. Sure, they're not as bright as powered lights, but the mineral lamps don't put a drain on your power network. And, yes, those lamps can be turned on and off - it's space magic!

It's a more challenging map, and that makes it fun! Don't start on new characters on this map unless you want a real challenge; level up the characters, first, then do the missions on this map.

This is an interesting outpost map. While the cold is still a minor threat, it's fun for chill (no pun intended) base building gameplay with few other threats.

This is a really pretty outpost map. It's great for chill base building gameplay with few threats.

I'm really enjoying the game. Excellent base building. Good balance between danger, challenge, and enjoyment while on missions. It's not a perfect game, but the developers are listening and making improvements rapidly.

I really enjoy the art style, the action-oriented fights (you have to aim instead of selecting a target), and crafting. Overall, it's quite enjoyable.

Loot grinding, Sure. But I don't find it too tedious. Lots of action, great lore and story lines, and a feeling of character progression. Quite enjoyable.

I love Miscreated. I like it so much that I not only run three servers for this game, but I've also bought four copies of the game (once for each person in my home)!

This game is a great post-apocalyptic survival romp on a fictional Pacific Northwest coastal island. There's great PvP action on most servers, PvE on some servers (some are better than others in this area), and even a few roleplay servers.

What can you do in Miscreated? Scavenge for food, clothing, and weapons. Fix up cars, trucks, and four wheelers to drive around. You can kill mutants, get chewed on by a two-headed dog, hunt wolves for meat, and hunt other players. You can explore caves, a fishing village, other settlements/neighborhoods on the island, an airport, and even a city. Not in the mood to explore? Then place a plot sign to claim you own corner of the island and build a base.

I personally really enjoy teaming up with other players to do basebuilding, scavenging, or even to take on groups of other players in some excellent PvP action!

So what is there for players to complain about?

• There's not enough loot! Actually, there is; you just need to learn where to find it. And it's a survival game, so food, drink, weapons, and vehicles are supposed to be hard to find. IMO, it's too easy to find loot, but I also have over 3000 hours of experience in the game telling me where to find things and can get geared up in ten minutes in my first time on a server.
  
• Bugs! It's a beta and there's a small team of dedicated developers behind this game; they work on the game around the clock. Even so, there will be bugs. Some players might think the developers are ignoring certain bugs, but it really comes down to the fact that some bugs are more easily squashed than others. And with the game now in the beta stage of development, the bug fixing effort will pick up considerably.
  
• Some players think that the developers waste time by putting in minor features rather than fixing bugs. The truth is that, like most development teams, the developers each have their own areas of focus and responsibility; just because one developer or artist has a few cycles to add something small to the game does not mean the issues bugging players are being ignored.
  
• Hacks - most reported hacks aren't. By far, most hack accusations are in reality just bugs, and the hacks that do pop into existence get squashed by EAC fairly quickly.

Should you get this game? YES! ...just watch out for the brutes - and I'm not talking about other players...you'll know what I mean when you meet one. ;)

UPDATE: Below is my original review, followed by an update.
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This game is not for everybody. It's virtually endless exploration and discovery. Yes, the procedural generation system makes for many similar planets and objects - but nature tends to do that itself, too. There is no story, but there is lore. Between the endless exploration and lore, I use my imagination to make my own story - and I am really enjoying it.

The PC version has started off with some technical difficulties, of which I am sure the developers will be tackling. I have an Nvidia GTX 770 2GB paried w/a G-SYNC monitor, but at first I experienced terrible performance. I made several tweaks to my system (enabled OpenGL triple buffering, disabled G-SYNC, and utilized Geforce Experience to configure the graphics settings for the game) and performance increased. I then updated to the 'experimental' patch and got another boost in performance.

There is one current bug which is affecting my gameplay: about once and hour, my game will slow down and stutter - when this happens I get to a save point and restart the game. After one such stuttering event, I restarted and appeared under the planetary map. Firing actions would trigger both ship and FPV shooting effects. I had to swim and jetpack up, then use grenades to punch through the map floor to resurface. I had to try several times to get that to work and allow me to resurface. Unfortunately, my ship was off planet when I resurfaced. I just hunted for one of the devices which summons my ship to be able to resume normal gameplay.

Taking all of that into consideration, I would still recommend NMS to other players. I see the developer making active attempts to correct the performance issues and have confidence they will soon succeed in eliminating most issues. Once performance issues are out of the way, I think most players looking for discovery and exploration will enjoy this game very much.
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UPDATE

Okay, first, my "hours played" as reported by Steam are greatly inflated due to the game's ability to pause in the background. I had it open while working and played during lulls in work, so please don't think I spent such inordinate amounts of time in this game.

Performance - mostly okay, but slows down a bit on 'water' planets. Every now and then a transition will trigger a 5FPS mode which requires me to restart the game to get my performance back.

There are tons of planets and systems in this game. I love this! What I don't love is that, other than planetary coloration, there are a few planet types, each consisting of a single biome - I know that by definition there are more than this, you'll basically see only barren, forested, ocean/island combos, and icy. How about multi-biome planets?

At first the animals are entertaining to see. But after visiting a bunch of planets, I found that variations in animal behavior is very minor - they either walk around aimlessly, or make a b line at you and attack. Why did the animal herds and unique behaviors seen in the trailers disappear? Variations in their physical appearances are low, too.

I can't stand that every interface or alien interaction consists of several wasted seconds of transition time and holding my interactions hostage - this needs to be removed or at least sped up considerably (an option, maybe?). It's cool the first few times, after that it is a kill my desire to keep playing.

The PS4-oriented interface needs to be modified for PC gamers - show us more onscreen at a time, and let us create hotkeys for common functions (getting blasted/injured to death while I have to navigate gamepad oriented interfaces simply to add more energy to weapons or shields is pretty lame - we already have a reload time on the blaster).

After the first hundred planets, or so, I decided to make run for the center. How about let me jump as far as my fuel will take me instead of an arbitrary limit? Once my hyperdrive stuff was fully upgraded, I can't recall using more than a third of my fuel in my farthest jump. Oh, and navigating the star chart sucks - I can see the selected path to the center, but why can't I select a star mid-chain and be able to continue navigating from there instead of having to do the blip-blip-blip-blip-blip-blip selection process starting only from my current location to get there? It'd also be nice to be able to select one of my previous discoveries and be able to navigate back - right now it's darn inconvenient.

How about making some rare technology easter eggs to be found just laying around on planetary surfaces. Yes, I know there are wreckages to be found having blueprints, but there are so few blueprints and so many wreckages.

Too many aliens! Every planet has a bad rash of aliens scattered around. And every system has a space station and plenty of space tourists floating around.

I do like the lore found scattered around, but it's not enough to keep this game glued together due to the lack in variety - 18 quintillion of the same five planets is fairly boring.

New summary - I would be more pleased with this game had it been a $20 game, but $60 was a bit much for blandness. Yeah, it's hard to live up to the hype it generated, but it doesn't even live up to the trailers. It doesn't look or play like the early trailers. As for the 4 PS4 trailers, here's my summary of those: Explore - cool, but only for the first few planets and jumps. Trade - not much to trade; sell your excess for units...whoop! Fight - except for fighting sentinel ships in space (virtually never-ending if you start), fighting on planets is non-challenging. Survive - Woohoo...time to recharge your shield or suit.

Lack of multiplayer sucks - sure, discoveries are shared, but that's the extent of it. I sure do hope some worthwhile mods come out.

SPOILER
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SPOILER

And simply starting at the edge of a new galaxy after reaching the center is pretty much anti-climatic. All your blueprints and language learned are still with you. Sure, all your equipment is damaged, but repairing it is not an entertaining challenge. Then it's all more of the same.
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