No Man's Sky

The Good

• Beautiful graphics and visual design
• Fairly laid-back spaceflight -- much less stressful than, say, Elite: Dangerous
• The ability to have your own freighter and design the interior, and to dispatch missions from it
• Base-building is pretty decent though clunky (but to be fair, most games' base-building is clunky, and often clunkier than this)

The Bad

• Shallow game depth -- "a mile wide and an inch deep"
• Space combat is essentially a minigame
• The story is pretty whatever
• Lots of grinding, only to realize you're really grinding toward nothing

The Bottom Line
That's pretty much how I'd sum up the feel of this game, after the initial wow of the graphics and atmospherics is done: grinding toward nothing. This is a problem with many survival games with either no goal, or a goal that is barely discernible. It's a big system with procedural content that really is designed to be played "forever" until boredom sets in, with little framework to give it real structure. I'm really tired of these types of games.

The Good
It gives you the feeling of seeking out new life and new civilizations and exploring space more than any other current game. That is its focus, and it's not about space combat. There is some shooter combat but it's not the focus of the game. The base building is great, but again, not really the purpose of the game. The story is cool, and all the different forms of life and planets you can visit make it feel like a real space exploration game. They continued to seriously work on and improve the game every year since its release and it is now a complete space exploration game.

The Bad
Space stations are all the same with the same layout. When it was first released it didn't meet the expectations of the player base.

The Bottom Line
Unlike a lot of other games that focus on either space ship combat or first person shooter combat, this game is about the awe and wonder of traveling through the galaxy in your favorite ship and exploring new worlds and new life while following a mysterious story line. The seamless exploration of leaving a planet and traveling to other planets, entering their atmosphere and the harsh environments is great. The variety of life and planets is awesome. So far no other game has come close to the feeling of really exploring and traveling through the unknown universe.