Recent reviews by DecoFox

Spent the hour and a half between 3:00 AM and 4:30 researching and desperately trying to understand the forces at work in a tadpole orbit in a skype call with friends. 10/10 rate my profes-- steam. A great 200 level game to KSP's 101, brought to you by N-body makes everything so much harder.

I've found it rather fun too, but beware it's every bit as complicated as it looks. You will learn things, and it's not as accessible as KSP. I'd definately reccomend it if you're an enthusiast and / or a KSP veteran in search of a KSP RTS.

I gave this game the benefit of the doubt. Unfortunately I gave it that benefit a little too long to refund, and I regret to say I regret that. I'd heard a lot of bad news by the beginning, but to be honest I wasn't looking for much in NMS I didn't think I could get better elsewhere (Star Citizen/Elite). What drew me to NMS anyway was character, or rather the character I expected. As much as I love space trader sims, I really wanted a space game to express the impression of scale and solitude provided by a good astronomy lecture or binge session of Cosmos, and I thought NMS might be the game to do it. Unfortunately life, sapient and otherwise, is so ubiquitous that even if it lived up to its perported diversity it couldn't manage to be awe inspiring. Contact with sapient life is guarenteed on a per system basis, and as such it's too common to be a respite from solitude and too bland to offer a sense of companionship if there had been solitude to begin with.

There was a lot of potential in the language system, and I was and still am happy to see a space game finally address the language barrier. Very engaging stories could have been told with that system, even procedurally. Two individuals with virtually no similarities physically so much as culturally meet each other and are the only two individuals for lightyears? Perhaps the only two examples of biological life for lightyears? They speak with one another with clumsy and sloppy symbols if only to communicate an emotion for the first time in months? There really didn't have to be much. As it was, there was too much. To be honest some of the random building encounters could even begin to communicate that sense, but after the fifth in a few miles let alone a few light years, and with so little to learn about each of them, I just couldn't find much of a reason to keep looking.

In conjunction with solitude, I expected scale. It's difficult to communicate scale without being extraordinarily boring; I understand that subject is difficult to approach, and that I have greater taste for long-haul flying than the average gamer. That said, there are a lot of stopgap measures that can go a long way to making a reasonably navicable universe feel as big as it really is. Elite is a good example of a lot of them. Having played both games, one of the things that works most in Elite's favor in that regard is the interstellar navigation system. In elite, star systems are spacially relevant to one another. You can even navigate between them in real time at high C numbers if you're patient. Generally you never end up flying between them in real time, but it's important to the sense of scale to know you can. It provides tangible evidence that the systems you visit are actual places, not just another set of planets in the same skybox. One of the simplest examples of such a measure is elite's hyperspace system, which you normally use for interstellar navigation. Ultiamtely, after all the technobabble, you teleport. You are, however, required to face your target to do so, and I've found that little rule means a lot more to a sense of tangibility than I ever expected. Unfortunately NMS falls victim to teleport syndrome, and visiting a new system doesn't feel so much like travel as it does a map switch.

I really wanted NMS to be the game to satisfy the part of you that, when out camping somewhere, looks up at the Milky Way and knows that each point of light is as real a place as the ground you sit on, and that collectively, even as they comprise nearly all you can see from Earth, the lot of them are virtually negligable in the local group, which is in turn virtually negligable to Laniakea. I wanted the awe of looking at hubble deep field photos and understanding that those bright lights aren't stars, but galaxies. I never expected great gameplay from NMS, but I expected to feel small. I'm sorry to say that I didn't.

Go mess around with Space Engine.