As far as Steam is concerned, I've spent 208 hours in the game. As far as NMS itself is concerned, I've spent 157 hours. I assume that the discrepency is because of how long it takes to load the game and to warp between different locations, which Steam counts as play time and NMS doesn't.
The game is a lot better than the reports of it suggested it was when it first came out. It's actually very reasonable now. It's like a single-player MMO: you do come across evidence of other players, and if you go to a multidimensional space station called the Anomaly you can actually meet them, but most of the time you're on your own.
The basic gameplay is that of a light surival game. Gather resources to make things so you can gather other resources to make more things. There is a story to it, but it's not all that imaginative (although some players love it). The newbie experience is somewhat fraagile, though: the way the tutorial works, you're told your next goal and the direction it's in shows up on your screen. That's fine except that it focuses on the last goal you were given. If you inadvertently acquire another goal before completing it, that other goal will be the one you're directed to follow. You can change it if you know where to look in the interface menus, but as a newbie you don't know that. This explains why I spent hours walking across the terrain of a mean planet looking for a resource that turned out to be on another planet over the horizon; I should have been looking for a different, easy-to-find resource to fix a spaceship so I could then go to that other planet. Wonderful.
The big selling point of NMS is its procedural generation. It has vast, vast numbers of visitable planets and moons, all of which are different. they do in general look and behave differently, too: there's much more variety than I was expecting, which was a pleasant surprise. OK, so the planets never seem to have rivers, they all have the same gravity and cities don't appear to have been invented, but the critters and geography are nice and varied. The range of resources was low, though; it needs more of those.
The controls are easy to get a handle on — much better than with Elite: Dangerous. It's very console-oriented, however, and I was playing on the PC. All the main functionality was loaded onto the keys surrounding S. I could have changed them to match my mouse buttons, I suppose, but you usually have to hold them down and that can damage them. Frustratingly, I found it quite easy to click/hold on something I didn't intend to, so sometimes discovered I'd made decisions that I hadn't intended to make. I also found that I was on occasion asked to make decisions about the direction of the main story that had non-obvious consequences. I'm certain that some of them did the opposite of what I wanted them to do.
Mutli-player missions are available at the Anomaly. I only did one of these and I soloed it; the rewards are all cosmetic and I wasn't interested in them in the slightest. Only one person spoke to me the entire time I played, and that was someone trying to spread the word of Jesus. I didn't respond to their message. Hell beckons.
The reason I stopped playing was because at that point I could have anything I wanted. All I had to do was to go to a space station and ask the NPC guild leader for freebies, then go to the next space station and do the same. You can return to the space station a bit later and they'll give you the freebies again. The only downside is that you have to warp to the next space station (which takes time as it has to load that space station; you get to watch a Star Trek-style warping lights show while it does it). By repeatedly doing this, you can get all the stuff you need to progress as far as your patience will allow: capacity upgrades for your weapon, spacesuit and spaceship; upgrades you can sell for a currency called "nanites", that are used to purchase crafting recipes and class upgrades for your weapon and spaceship; tokens to upgrade your freighter. Ordinary currency, called "units", you get from sending spaceships on missions every day. I had well over 800,000,000 units when I quit and nothing much to spend them on; ditto tens of thousands of nanites. There's no gameplay to any of this: you just go to the NPC guild leader (of the explorer, trade or mercenary guild — there's one guild per space station) and once your reputation is high enough they give you free stuff. In terms of building reputation with the guilds, I focused on exploration because I didn't find either of the other two until after maybe a hundred hours of play,and I was only second-highest rep level for those two. This is nevertheless enough to get the free stuff I want from them.
That'sall there is to it, then. Still, at least the game wasn't trying to use cheap psychological tricks to keep playing.
I upgraded all my gear to the top tier. My freighter was only third tier (out of 5), but if I'd spent more time picking up freebies then I'd have got it higher before long. My settlement (yes, you do get to run and manage one) was second tier; to improve that, I'd just have to log in each day and make the decisions asked of me. I suspect that it might have been easier if I'd chosen a settlement on on a planet that didn't have an ambient temperature of -50 degrees Celsius.
There are three species of NPC plus some one-offs at the Anomaly. These NPC species correspond to trade, exploration and mercenary biases, but I did meet plenty of them of all kinds. You get to learn their languages from them a word at a time, which is a nice touch, albeit a tedious one. What particularly irritated me about this was that to interact with an NPC you had to click/hold on it, then skip through its opening dialogue (which might require two or three clicks) and then choose from a menu. That done, you have to click through the responses and then the menu closes. That's fine except if you want to do more than one thing off the menu, such as giving them a present as well as learning a word. If you do, you have to go through the whole palaver again. Also, you can only give them one present at a t time. I had maybe 40 or 50 gifts to give out that I didn't bother with because it would have taken me 15 seconds for each one.
Oh, the game would hang on me sometimes when I left a spaceship or base. That was annoying. So was falling through the architecture and getting killed by cosmic rays.
Overall, though, I was quite impressed with what I found. It's an inoffensive game with lots to do and I didn't find that it suffered from the usual procedural-generation problem of "trillions of different places, all the same". I prefer Conan Exiles for MMO survial gameplay (well, I did until they dumbed down the construction), but I can see myself returning to NMS in the future to see how it's developed further.
Now to decide what to play next. I'm thinking maybe Fallout 76, but as I haven't played any Fallout games or watched the recent TV series, I may be at a disadvantage.
