This is a thread I created for people to share their opinions on, review, and discuss video games. I'll get us started, no?

[hider=No Man's Sky, The First Three Hours]

No indie game could possibly live up to the hype that No Man's Sky got. Hell, most Triple-A games can't live up to that hype, let alone a studio of ten people. 

With that out of the way, let me say that No Man's Sky is not the game I was expecting. I didn't read too much of the promotional materials, or watch all of the trailers. I really should have. If you didn't read some of the dev's interviews, it's totally reasonable to go into this game expecting EVE Online with a greater sense of scale and exploration. I was expecting to be helped or harassed by other players once I got into space. I was expecting sprawling space stations populated by aliens to explore.

That is not what No Man's Sky is.

No Man's Sky is a survival game before anything else. You need to collect materials to power your environmental shielding and life support systems. You need to collect materials to fuel you ship. You'll be constantly juggling around inventory space. You have life meters and life support meters and hazard shielding meters. It's a survival game, like Rust or DayZ or One That Doesn't Have Zombies.

This was most evident for me when I docked at a space station. After being pulled into the superstructure by a tractor beam, my ship landed in a hangar. I got out of my ship to find two doors, on either side of the hangar. One was locked, requiring an Atlas Pass. The other was open and it led to a single room, with a single NPC, and a Shopping Terminal. Space Stations are nothing more than vendors with a single NPC interaction.

It's not all a disappointment, though. For one, this game is huge. The planets are all to scale and you can go anywhere. I've climbed mountains and went cave diving. It's all there. Even in space with your badass Alpha Vector Preorder-Bonus Ship, you feel small when you look at the asteroids and the planets and the space stations. It's nice. The exploration in this game is fantastic.

I'm disappointed, but I've still enjoyed my time with the game. I'm going to play a lot more, and I look forwards to the updates that Hello Games has planned. [/hider]