mistermumbles: I just stumbled upon that a wee bit earlier. I also didn't skip the spoiler for the end-goal. My god, what a shit game. Yeah.... no, thanks. Next!
I had to pause it at the spoiler. A friend that owns the game brought his computer over for a LAN party and left it here so I've been playing it on his machine. I agree with Angry Joe so far up to the spoiler point. At first the game was exciting a bit on the first few planets. Exploring was kind of fun up until trying to find the last elusive things to get 100% then it felt a little forced. After churning on the next couple of planets I got bored with the scenery on them as they were more bleak so I decided to head off to the space station finally. The space station was a major disappointment for me. They have this entire huge space station in space so that ships can land for 30 seconds to sell stuff without any other aliens being visible at all ever except for the one that runs the station?
Trading is super boring, it's the exact same list of items practically every time with almost no variation, and the prices appear to come from a fixed list of prices for each item either being minus a small amount over the so called average price, plus a small amount over average, or have a yellow star and be almost twice the price. Doesn't take long to figure to try to spot the pattern of which items get the yellow stars the most often, then just buy them up when they have no star (plus or minus pricing), then sell them for double the price. The Dynamic Resonator seems to come up the most I've found and it is one of the higher priced products, as well as the Dimensional Matrix, so you just wait until someone is selling them for regular price range, buy them all, wait until they get a yellow star and sell. Rinse, lather, repeat. Seems like each station has its own formula as to which products will be popular there. Super boring. And who decided to put the station bar on the 2nd floor with the stairs to get up there way off to the side where nobody in their right mind is going to walk to. I bet every single player walks up the stairs there 0 to 1 times then jetpacks it the rest of the time. So they have this huge station in space with one single alien attending to it, and no other areas accessible, no other functions, no aliens socializing.
The whole game has next to zero interactivity between the player and the aliens except for the multiple-choice guessing game riddles you're given most of which have no hints as to what the right answer could be - even after you learn all the alien words you get few if any clues. That whole experience gets boring fast too.
One of the things I hate about the game the most, is every single popup dialogue in the game comes up at a total snail's pace. It takes 15-20 seconds to slowly type out the nonsense alien conversation text, then 10 years to display the 3 choice menu, then you have to click and hold the mouse for 10 minutes for the circle to complete and register. What a terrible user interface. The other thing I hate is that when you activate those save game devices outside of each base it completely takes over your computer with a useless animation for like 10 seconds and does not process your keyboard/mouse input until the animation is complete. Ditto whenever those stupid letterboxed in-game achievements occur. "Wooohoo traveller, you just walked 15 steps! <disconnect your ability to walk/move/shoot for 20 seconds while you're getting riddled with laser shots from sentinels>. Then 60 secons later "Your journey has made it to 20 steps traveller, congratulations on the amazing feat of achievement! We were surprised when you walked 10 steps but now you made it to 20, we'll rip control of your keyboard and mouse, shut the HUD display off and let you get shot at by sentinels again in another 60 seconds when you reach 30 steps!" ad infinitum... What an absolutely atrocious user interface!
Then in the inventories you can't read the names of the upgrade items easily because they're too big to fit the small boxes they put them in, so they make them marquee bounce scroll from side to side. Makes it impossible to quickly scan the entire list to spot the upgrades you want. What a terrible user interface!
Like Joe, I enjoyed the first few hours of the game experience but it went downhill after that, and got super tedious and repetitive quickly. Every planet looks almost exactly the same with minor procedural variations. Once you've seen like 10-15 planets your brain has figured out all of the possible variations you're likely to see for the rest of the game. Once in a while you stumble upon a planet with some strange plant or animal shape you never saw before but it's an "oh cool" that last s like 20 seconds then back to endless mining of minerals to upgrade your stuff so that you can mine more minerals.
And of course the trading stations only trade specific things, not everything you actually need, so you're forced to mine minerals which gets super boring quick too. I mined some Iridium deposit right into the ground and it just kept going down more and more deeper then into a cave, through that cave floor deeper and deeper until it opened a hole into the planet and I fell into an invisible planet interior and could see garbled fragments of the upper planet above me while drowning in radioactive water. Awesomesauce! :)
I'm getting pretty bored of the churning of the game now and figure it has nothing more to offer, but it's one of the few rare games that I've gotten bored with but I still want to see the ending and any "secrets" it might have so I keep playing anyway.
What sucked is all those "you need AtlasPass v1/2/3" areas and I never could figure out how to get that pass. I stayed in the first two solar systems doing extensive upgrading, exploring with no AtlasPasses to be found, and by the time I finally got the v1 pass the loot it gave me was crap I can already make super easily via recipes myself, so it was more or less useless to me and just wastes an inventory slot.
I maxed out my Exosuit at 48 slots just flying around looking for drop pods visually until I ran out of money then going and mining and doing the trading trick I figured how to make lots of cash fast on the space platform, then more suits etc. My mining tool maxed out at 24 slots quickly too and I found the best way was to just buy them up also whenever they're avail for sale.
Ships on the other hand - are ridiculously priced for what you get. You'd have to mine resources or engage in ultra boring repetitive trading for like 3 real human days just to save up money for one ship that is only 1-3 slots better. No thanks, it's better to just upgrade the ships by finding them crash landed on the planet either via transmission signals, or by spotting them on the ground when flying over. So my ship is at level 39 now, not sure what the max is but I am guessing it is 48 also.
So basically soon I'll have maxed out the suit, ship and multitool and have had all of the upgrade blueprints for eons now, so everywhere in the game is even that much more boring because I pick up blueprints and whatnot that I already have, win free multitools that are worse than what I have already etc.
My plan now is to just do the quickest churning to max out the starship slots as quick as possible and then just repetitively hyperwarp as far as I can, reload, warp again, reload, warp, etc. until I finish the game.
At this point I want it to either be an incredibly amazing ending, or an incredibly terrible one. I'm expecting the latter.
It's a real shame, this game had a lot of promise potentially. The concept was cool, but the execution was terrible. Now the most exciting thing I'll get from finishing the game is the ability to unpause the Angry Joe interview and see the rest of it! :)
