Recent reviews by Voxel Buster

Good workshop integration. Seems like separate TmodLoader 64 bit is not necessary any more either. INSTALL ALL THE MODS.

Not made by Blizzard

kill monsters, become powerful archwizard. that is all.

also you can change the transparency of vfx so you can actually see what to dodge. 10/10 feature.

Worth every penny. NK has shown consistent improvement with every new installment of BTD and this is no different. Love the new maps and mechanics and the ability to play custom maps is a game changer.

JOIN THE HELLDIVERS

SPREAD DEMOCRACY!

edit: They screwed the pooch again with the new update forcing people to link PSN accounts. This makes people in some countries suddenly unable to play the game. Additionally the PS link is messed up and doesnt work half the time.

Additionally, Sony is probably the least secure company in human history, with like 6 data breaches in the last 15 years. You'd think they would learn.....

edit 2: the community won. Sony pulled back on PSN, so I can recommend the game again. But I will leave this here as a warning to new players about the antics this game has been through.

Paid for premium for life when it was a thing, got scammed.

Created account, immediately locked out. Not worth the trouble.

UPDATE: Whatever changed in the last version completely broke dedicated servers. This is a major issue for anyone who wants to play multiplayer but doesn't want to be limited to 4 players/wants to be able to turn off the game. Not only was the periodic save corruption not completely fixed, my old server save became corrupted and it seems like all of my save backups were incompatible. I now have to start my game from scratch. On top of this, it seems like the game is saved in a different format depending on the platform (linux, windows, etc.), so migrating my server to my desktop from my linux server is a no go. I like this game, its fun, I will probably restart at some point regardless of this issue, however I cannot recommend it anymore to new players due to the unmitigated technical issues at this point. Pocketpair has had enough time to fix the serious issues and they are moving very slowly.

PREVIOUS REVIEW:
This game is really fun. It does a lot what Pokemon should have done a long time ago, and captures the market segment that Pokemon is missing (older demographic, PC players). If you've seen people complain about it being a ripoff or AI generated, ignore them, they don't know what they are talking about. Of course some of the creatures look similar to their Nintendo counterparts, and they definitely take inspiration from them, but its not plagiarism (and even if it was, I wouldn't really care, it would just be Pokemon on PC; somehow true fan games get a pass but this doesn't).

Anyway now that we got that out of the way, here are some of the things I love about the game:
- 111 monsters to catch, and mechanics to incentivise catching them more than once and actually seeking out their habitats
- Solid (albeit sometimes a little clunky) RPG combat system that integrates guns later in the tech tree
- Speaking of which--massive tech tree
- Difficulty is *very* configurable, so if you don't like drop rates, catch rates, etc. you can change them.
- Community servers (and dedicated server software has a native linux build)
- In-depth, but not ridiculously complicated crafting system
- Funny interactions between monsters

That being said, this *is* an early access game, and there are quite a few bugs to mention at the time of writing this:
- Many many graphical/physics glitches (almost all of them are minor/funny/not game breaking, although there is the occasional getting stuck in the floor; they have a manual respawn button for that)
- Sometimes very strange pathing of worker pals, and they can get stuck if you don't build your base to prevent it.
- Pals on servers that run 24/7 can and will get stuck while you're offline, causing them to not be able to eat and get depressed.
- MASSIVE memory leak on the dedicated server software, forces you to restart it every few hours
- Hostile pals forgetting how to attack (funny mostly)
- Really nasty bug where your save data can get deleted if the server does not shut down properly (I implemented my own periodic backup solution to prevent this from being an issue, if you plan on making a server you should absolutely do this)

There are definitely more that I missed, but those are the big ones I have noticed. Despite the bugs I think the game was money well spent, and am looking forward to changes the devs will make to improve the above issue and add more content to the game. My friends and I have been loving this game, and will for sure continue to play it.

Cut the trees, plant more trees, build the dams out of trees

I am torn. NMS is a really good game. The problem is it's pretty niche. Its another fairly grindy space exploration game, not unlike Elite: Dangerous or EVE. The environments and aesthetic are way cooler though in my opinion, you'll always be able to find planets with trippy rock formations or funny wildlife, or just screenshot worthy scenery.

The space combat is.... meh. If you have a halfway decent ship and a pulse you can swat pirates like flies (there's no PVP which might be a problem for some people coming from E:D or similar games). With the exception of combat though, every part of this game has so much depth, from base building to mission chains, and even upgrading all of the tech on your exosuit and multi-tool. There's just so much to do.

The reason I don't recommend this game to most people (and my main frustrations with the game) is that there is a number of serious issues that have been unresolved for seemingly years that the devs won't (or can't) fix; and while it's cool they are constantly adding new content, sometimes serious bugs break the immersion and drag down the experience. To name a few:

- Alt-Tab in fullscreen just doesn't work, it kills your framerate and you can fix it by tabbing again *sometimes* but usually you just have to restart the game. (This bug has existed for years, maybe since release judging by community forums)
- Multiplayer features are pretty broken, downloading other players' bases rarely works (also long-standing bug), even though the devs market this as a core feature, pretty frustrating
- Weird save issues with bases or freighters where structures get misplaced and you have to reload your save
- Pretty lacking accessibility features and keybind options. I initially wanted my ship flight binds to be the same as E:D, but that's basically not an option in this game. You can't effectively use a HOTAS or rebind which flight axes go to which keys. No performance display option. This is really only a minor annoyance to me, but for players that need to massively tweak their settings to really be able to enjoy their game, this is a huge problem.
- Weird graphical bugs with ships or the space anomaly, not game breaking but definitely immersion breaking
- Missions sometimes track incorrectly, have to teleport out of a location and back in to fix it
- Inventory does not open on the last tab you were on; not a bug probably, but still extremely annoying

With all of these issues and how niche the game is, I just can't recommend the game to the average player. Additionally I hope that bringing them to light in a review like this might get HG to address some of them (probably wishful thinking but I can dream).