Recent reviews by NoRezervationz

Why is this game still unlisted in 177 countries? Unacceptable, Sony!

♥♥♥♥ company. I cannot recommend it!

Edit: Haven't played since May 2024. Uninstalled.

After 271.8 hours, I cannot recommend this game.

Starfield is as wide as an ocean, but as shallow as a stream in most places. There are glimmers of depth, but it's overshadowed by the lack of good mainline story missions, completely empty planets, and it lacks content diversity. I'm feeling burned out.

I've done everything there is to do and now they want me to go into NG+ and do everything again, or not and skip the most interesting parts and just power through. There's just no real variety in this game, and NG+ is just a repeat of the same stuff, maybe a bit different each time but those differences aren't monumental. I can't see repeating the same missions, "finding" the same artifacts and temples 9 more times as being diverse. It feels like a very lazy time-sink for something that supposedly had a very long development cycle.

As lazy as this game has been thrown together, it should've been $30. I can't recommend this game because it's just not fun.

Like many others here, I played the beta. I had a few hundred hours in when I quit. I quit because NQ does not consider their player feedback important when making decisions.

The biggest reason I quit was the frustration of having my entire small factory rendered useless in one patch. They put schematics into the game, and at the time, you could only buy them for millions from market bots. For those of you familiar with that time, I was very vocal in the forums in my opposition to this change. Thankfully, this has changed and you can now make schematics for a few thousand quanta each to start, though it can still get really fracking expensive. The price does scale up with the tiers and complexity of the products, but it's a steep climb in the grind.

Now, I did get some free time to play after launch without Steam. I've spent about 30 hours of free time in game before getting it on Steam and here's my opinion now.

Pros:

• Hands down the best voxel building system. It's this game's strongest and most mature feature.
  
• The flight mechanics are quite good. I like that it feels like I'm entering the atmosphere and going to burn up or crash if I do it wrong. I've done both. lol
  
• I tossed a coin to see where to put this one. The mining mechanics have improved, but only slightly. I spent hours in the mines kilometres below the surface of any given planet, manually finding and digging up ore. The problem with this is that it was finite, and once gone, it wasn't coming back. So you see the issue with new players coming in and having no resources? Yeah, that's where it was heading. Now we still have surface rocks to mine, but they are finite. We now have automated miners to gather very small amounts of ore in containers. While this is better as they are passive while you're offline, the amount of ore they pull is trivial. This needs to be adjusted. Edit: They just made it worse. You're stuck with a crappy calibration if the mini-game screws you. FFS NQ, stop screwing over honest players for a few bad actors.

Cons:

• Player driven economy without many players. It's currently really hard to find buyers willing to come to Haven, so you have to travel the Alioth to actually sell anything. By the same token, if you want to buy more than just the basic parts, you're SOL. This may change over time, but I think right now orgs are gearing up for industry themselves, so the more advanced gear will be hard to come by for a while.
  
• It takes too long to get to different markets other than Alioth 1-10. If you're early game and not careful, you can buy something .87 SU away, then you have to travel for 30-40 minutes to get there, grab it, then trek it back the amount of time. I suggest learning to make Nitron fuel first and foremost. This will be your best friend for a while.
  
• Industry is incredibly slow now, and that's by design. It sucks if you just want to jump into building, but can't because you have to build or buy everything.
  
• The skill tree is designed to keep your subscription money coming in by time-gating skills. Oh, you want to build better stuff? That'll be a month of training. This system is shaped after Eve Online, which in and of itself isn't a bad system. The bad part of NQ's implementation is that you can't speed up the process at this point. At least with Eve, you can buy injectors from their site or other players.
  
• Parts have 3 lives and then die. If you crash your speeder 3 times the first day, the parts that broke are toast and can't be repaired anymore, so they need to be replaced. Make a blueprint of your speeder the first thing you do and store it at your Haven/Sanctuary tile. It will suck, but at least you can eventually rebuild it.
  
• The bugs. There are STILL reports of player ships blowing up for no reason, teleporting into a planet with no way to retrieve it, and just random deaths happening while on ships. This game is in worse shape than Star Citizen when it comes to bugs. You've been warned.
  
• NQ's support is terrible. It's run by and investment firm now and money is really the only thing they care about. News flash: If there are no players, the cash flow dries up. Stop messing around and make the game that was promised.
  
• If you are a solo player, this is not the game for you. It will be extremely slow and frustrating, and you will HAVE to find an org to get to where you want to be. I went ahead a bought most of my factory from the market. It's a real challenge, bordering on ludacris how it works now, but I'm still trying...
  
• It's quite grindy. You will spend hours and days waiting. You will wait for schematics and wait for things to finish being built. This can range from a few minutes to at least 18+ hours. And holy hell is it expensive! You will need a steady income, and a lot of it. It's unnecessarily long to make anything above Tier 1 Small device. Investing in your Industry talents helps, but be prepared to wait. A lot.
  
• Last, and certainly not least, as others have mentioned, it's a monthly subscription. In the US, it's $15/month, then scales with very small discounts being given the more game time you buy at once. At this point, unless you like slow Minecraft in space, it's not really worth it.

This is by no means an exhaustive list, and I'm sure I'm missing plenty, but others have probably touched on.

Am I going to stay playing? Maybe, if I can afford it and NQ decides to play nice.

Besides the sub, I'm also generally a solo player because I don't have time to play most of the week as I work 4 10 hour shifts, so most of my play is on weekends. I'll need to find an org that's ok with this. My old org let me in, so I've been hanging out with them, mining and building. The other part is I have some pretty deep trust issues with NQ and have no trust for the money motivated investment firm now running them. I'll give it an honest 6 months, If things don't substantially improve in that time, I'm definitely out.

Update 11/17/2022: Certain aspects of the game are fun. I like flying the ships still. I like the challenge of building a ship too. I don't like the convoluted industry with 5 or 6 variations of equipment to make 5 or 6 variations on parts. It makes a lot of clutter. I much prefer upgrading equipment ala Satisfactory. I wish NQ would spend more time fixing bugs and optimizing the game than trying screw everyone out of any kind of real fun. If there were game loops besides a couple of missions every 18 hours and endless grinding for resources.

I'm honestly trying to like this game.

They got rid of the Star Trek channel. Boooooo!

After playing a few hours, I'm torn. I both love and dislike this game...

The good:

It is so beautiful. I love the feel of this game. Flight feels pretty good, and I'd love HOTAS support. I like the added charm of the pickaxe for mining asteroids. I love the fact I can run off my ship and just jetpack wherever I need to. I could sit here all night and list the things I like.

The bad:

I HATE the tech tree. It can burn. It is far too time consuming and resource intensive. For each set of new and upgraded items, you must craft to gain the necessary "points" to buy the next tier. Did I mention there are 4 types of points? The items you craft give so few that you will burn many, many resources on useless items just to get that next step. If they brought down the price for each set of items, it wouldn't be as bad, maybe downgraded to annoying. This really needs to get fixed, and if they do wipe for 1.0 release, I quit. I'm not doing it again.

As others have mentioned, the tutorial needs a lot of work. They need to include more in it, and give better information on what the missions are. You can't be too picky here though. I'm pretty sure they'll be fixing it, and a lot of the other things throughout Early Access.

The so-so:

Normal ship building is very very complicated. They have tried to offset the learning curve by implementing an "Easy Build Mode." In this mode, you can use pre-built modules to build ships. At least in theory. It's currently bugged and things fall off of ships as they leave the work area. It's been a past-time for me to go and scrounge for parts around the area. If you get this game, stay away from it for any store-bought ships until they get it fixed.

Speaking of bugs, expect a lot. Expect crashes. Expect some things to not work quite right or stop working altogether. This is a fresh out of Alpha testing Early Access. As long as they don't go the same or similar path as a fairly alpha "beta" game, I'll stick with it.

Like I said, it's a mixed bag. Bah, I won't keep you. Would I recommend it? Maybe, for now, if you can live with the things I've typed here, then yes. I'll revise this as time goes on.

Not worth $30 at this point.

As of this review, I have amassed 1,965.8 hours since late August 2019.

The Short:
Do I recommend this game? H*LL YES! I f*cking love this game!

Technical:
I see a lot of picky negatives here. A lot of "it's buggy" and "I had technical issues." Does it have bugs and glitches? Yes, but for me they aren't game breaking at all. Most of the crashes I've come across have been fixed have been fixed, and I have yet to find more game breaking bugs lately. Glitching can be fun and profitable, you just have to know the right combo and YouTube will usually have a video on it. ;)

Visuals:
This game is absolutely beautiful. It's a whimsical 50's and 60's style space sim, with vibrant colors and awesome ships! Even the hazard planets have a rugged beauty about them, but when you find that perfect lush planet that makes you say "I want to live here"... Holy crap! You MUST, and I can't stress this enough, buy this game!

This last update brought a lot of visual updates, including softer environmental textures. For example: Red grass is no longer glaring red.

Game Play:
There are three story lines that run simultaneously. You gain these within your first hour of play, and they're about 30 to 40 hours of play. The Living Ship update brought an additional facet in making you wait up to 5 full days to complete, giving you 5 parts to finish before you finally get your living ship. One of my few complaints about this game; there are some unnecessarily long wait times in this mission line.

Speaking of ships, you will come across so many types and shapes of ships, and you'll want them all, but you can only have six. That's right, six. The reason? You can have up to four friends in your game at once, and they need somewhere to park on your freighter. Oh, I'll get to freighters in a few minutes. It makes me sad, but I understand the limit. Most people will keep 5 ships and leave a slot open for salvaging ships.

Freighters are like a mobile base, with some added benefits. Not only can you build a functioning base on them, it's where all your ships are stored, and you can hire frigates to run missions for you. Yes, these work even while you're out of game, so that 28 hour mission you sent some out on will be done in 28 realtime hours. Part of the base building is growing stuff, and on freighters you use hydroponics bays. Growing stuff allows you to have the resources you need to build stuff, which are mostly high dollar sell items, but also components to modules and upgrades. Ok, you get the point.

Exocrafts (planetary vehicles) are nice and all, but have you driven a big robot lately? lol Part of the story missions will give you the majority of the exocrafts. I'll admit, I don't think anyone asked for the change that took away the exocraft's ability to protect you from the elements. I don't know who thought of this, but they need their head examined. Anyway, exocrafts are useful in finding landmarks like monoliths and distress beacons. The new mechs, once the environmental upgrade is installed, will allow you to brave through the toughest and harshest of environments. You can gather most resources with the mining laser and upgrades up to terrain manipulator. It's a bit clunky and drives very odd, but once you get used to it, you're a force to be reckoned with.

Closing:
I'm ending this here. I could write sonnets about this game, but you won't get the full feel until you try it for yourself. I bought this game at $30 and consider it a steal.

I've had this game since maybe a couple of months after early access started. I hadn't logged in in a while, and thought I'd stream the new map this past weekend. I ran around a PvE server for about 2 hours, and here are my thoughts and experiences.

Navigation is horrible and so is the new map. I kept getting turned around and never really got past the left side of the map, dipping into the "safe zone" a bit. I miss the old map and navigation. The "dot" doesn't tell me which way I'm going and is it even possible to get a compass?

I think the original spirit of the game is now lost. Crafting is now crappier. I couldn't even craft a bow, but lucky me found one. Crafting in general is much harder and you can't really craft a decent weapon anymore.

Zombies come in walker or runner flavors. Walkers can be pretty much ignored, and runners can be taken down in 1 or 2 hits with an axe. Used to, if you ran through a bunch of zombies, they followed you pretty quickly. Now, only the runners do. And whatever happened to zombies being a major loot source? It's pretty much crap now.

Honestly, I can't recommend it. The confusing navigation is enough to piss me off. ~133 hours now played and the last 2 hours ruined it for me.

I've had this game for a while and don't get to play it as much as I'd like; work and life, you know how it goes...

Anyway, 18 hours played. I bought this for the educational properties, and rightly so! It's taught me a lot. I'm still no mechanic, but when talking cars with the guys at work I can hold my own now. I can visualize the parts we're talking about and participate in the conversation.

Granted, this game is limited in scope like others have said, but if you're looking to learn a bit about cars, buy this game. The learning experience alone is worth the money!