Justin Teixeira

Wow. Don’t believe the big outlet reviews praising this game. Ignoring the bugs completely - and there are plenty of them - this game is a regression of the genre in every way EXCEPT for the visual aesthetic and, occasionally, the musical score. Here are just a few of the things led to me requesting a refund (second time for me ever. The other was Cyberpunk) In no particular order: 1. No minimap. 2. No tooltips explaining any stat or modification on weapons/armor in your inventory. Solved in every modern RPG I can think of. 3. Trivial space combat. I sincerely feel that the original Wing Commander combat is superior. Hold your mouse on the enemy and hope they blow up before you do. No firing arcs. No countermeasures. No maintaining distances. No evasive maneuvering. Solved in the 90s I’m a game that ran in DOS. And in every space flight sim since. 4. The atrocious inventory management interface from Fallout 4 and older titles. Solved in most other non-Bethesda titles. It’s ok to borrow UX elements if this is the best you can do, BGS 5. Uninteresting things to find while “exploring” planets. They might as well be called “uninteresting rock pile A”, “uninteresting rock pile B” etc. These are things that aren’t actually interesting or immersive they are simply map markers that you are TOLD are interesting. 6. You cannot walk more than like 10 minutes in any direction on a planet before you are out of bounds. Thankfully you won’t want to due to how dull the environments are. I can’t tell if they limit how far you can walk because they know how boring and pointless it will be if you keep going or because of a technical limitation. 7. Precisely copy pasted locations on different planets at random landing sites. And I mean precisely. Imagine if you went on vacation to another country. You walk into the cottage you’ve booked and inside is an exact replica of your home. The room layout. The paint chip where your bumped a piece of furniture while moving in. Every book and random object is there and in the same place. Two clones of your dogs are there lying in the same place they were lying when you left. The silverware draw is left open by the same amount. Now imagine that but it’s entire pirate lairs or science labs in different solar systems. 8. The shipbuilder is awful. You can’t rotate most parts. It’s incredibly clunky. This has been mostly solved in Kerbal Space Program. 9. Traveling between locations within a system requires watching a - usually poorly animated - animation of your ship translating left to right across your screen for several seconds. AND THEN a loading screen. You’ll be doing this several hundreds of times if you want to scan even the main inhabited core systems. This problem was solved in No Man’s Sky (there’s a phrase I never thought I’d be saying 7 years ago) 10. Loading screen to walk into the interior of most teeny tiny buildings in the main cities. These are not cities of grand scale either. When you load into an apartment tower in the first city you can access ONE room. No other random rooms to break into if you want to be a scoundrel. No cool secret plots to expose. You can load(ing screen) into this apartment tower for the sole purpose of exploring a single two-room apartment. 11. There is no flavor text on items. I had to actually just look this up to confirm it wasn’t a bug or that I was somehow missing a key bind to bring it up. Nope. 12. There are NO ground or surface based vehicles. You cannot fly your ship in the atmosphere nor are there shuttle craft, passenger vehicles, mech suits, ATVs, or even a bicycle.