Recent reviews by No, Man's Sky

Man, I hate aliens so much, it's unreal.

If the following is tl;dr, I recommend the game and would give it a 6.5/10 (with 5 being an average game only worth buying for serious fans of the genre and 10 being a near unattainable pinnacle of its kind) so definitely enjoyable but with a lot of room for improvement. If you were looking at this game like it's an idle game, look elsewhere - it's not. The Dev has also basically gone silent and stopped updating the game.

Minimum spoilers ahead. This is mostly criticism but it's always easier to see the negative side of an experience - I still highly enjoyed the game and would recommend it to others, as my 48 hours of playtime should attest to. At the end of the day, it's only $7.50 AUD (a little under 5 freedombucks)

The game is very simple at its core but regardless engaging. The gameplay is just about generating a variety of resources through combining different methods and exceeding limits to purchase permanent upgrades that then generate more resources that then let you purchase new upgrades, rinse; repeat. That isn't a bad thing - it's pretty engaging and fun to increase your stats and unlock new resources and ways to manipulate them (though as a Runescape player I might be too fundamentally addicted to seeing numbers go up to be an unbiased source in this regard).

There is nil story to speak of at this point, which is a real shame if you ask me - there is no actual goal you're working towards and the assumption that some form of story / goal would emerge was a big driver behind my continuing forward, with me ultimately being disappointed on that front. I get that the developer might want to get the mechanics behind the game down before delving into anything like that, but it just seems like a fundamental misstep - In my estimation even an unfinished story would hook players in and get them to come back when the game updates to learn more.

It feels like it would be relatively easy to (for example) spice up the descriptions / flavour around the accumulation of the resources you are getting. The game is called 'Orb of Creation' and seems to imply you are basically at the helm of bootstrapping yourself up from a literal empty void to a universe and world of your own making. There is little actual payoff though - imagine if once you were solidly into the Space / Herbalism stage, you could start to create living creatures which would breed and generate their own resources? Or if the descriptions made it clear that once you reached 100 Space, you had created a house-sized empty space where once there was void? When you reached a 1 million space, you had a large city-sized amount of empty space, beyond which was just the void?

Even without a story, some kind of hook like that would add a lot to the experience and I'm somewhat confused as to why the developer has made literally no attempt to bring anything like that to the table despite having some robust and well-crafted systems with some impressive math/scaling involved already in place. Far and away this is the greatest weakness of the experience - once you get to a certain point and have unlocked all the upgrades (probably about 10-20 hours depending on how quickly you get certain aspects of how to combine your available tools to make the numbers BIG) there is nothing left.

There is a (free) indie game called Singularity: Endgame which came out 20 years ago and has a very similar style / gameplay loop in some ways - however it had a real story, actual goals / sub-goals which motivated you, super engaging descriptions and serious 'breakpoints'. By this I mean massive leaps in your power/resources, such as (after careful planning, gathering resources and going out on a limb) expanding your digital consciousness from a couple rented data servers to a warehouse filled with custom supercomputers.

Orb of Creation simply does not have a similar flow - you spend an almost equivalent amount of time thinking about & achieving a comparatively small incremental gain in a few areas instead. I think this is a shame and it would be more engaging if it was formatted differently. In my opinion there is serious bloat in the permanent upgrades from the Wizardry tab. Roughly 30% of the traits simply apply a modifier to a different trait, which is simply confusing / annoying - just pure bloat. Why add that many upgradable traits which just increase the power of different traits? I think at least 2 of these could just be consolidated into existing traits or added as one of the sidebar upgrades.

Other than this, the game could use loadouts for Alchemy (this seems like an easy fix but really would help). I still think the game is very enjoyable and well worth the price - I guarantee you'll get between 3-10 hours out of it minimum, which is more than enough. If you don't get at least 3 hours of enjoyment, let me know and I will gift the first person to do so and beat me in TF2 MGE a <$50 game of their choice (apologise, I've been drinking, but I will honour this).

Flawed, but fun and overall worth it. The below contains a lot of criticism, but the negative aspects always stick out in an experience - if the following is tl;dr, I recommend the game and would give it a 7.5/10 (with 5 being an average game only worth buying for serious fans of the genre and 10 being a near unattainable pinnacle of its kind) so pretty good, but not great.

It's impossible to discuss an automation / management game without mentioning Factorio - If you ever had a friend who was interested in Factorio but felt it was too much, this might be a good one to recommend. It has no pressure like Factorio does with constant biter attacks. Unlike Factorio, it has a much more involved story. You could also compare it in some ways to games like Don't Starve, with the light-based mechanic for expanding your workable/explorable area (though it has little else in common with Don't Starve).

If you have already played something like Factorio, you are likely to find the much more limited automation options in this game frustrating at times - single item belts, no inserters or similar options, splitters are 2x2 rather than 1x2 and slower than belts + require a fifth tile to move one item to at a time, (resulting in some real spaghetti solutions to ensure throughput) no programmable automation tools like filter splitters, circuits, robots, multiple options for power generation, etc. No trains and the spacing out of resource nodes also means a lot of tedious and slow routing of resources between the bases/hubs. The game is not the most optimised, at least personally I noticed huge slowdown in the mid-late game. The game could use larger / more noticeable graphics for what factories are producing as a minor nitpick. Others have already mentioned bugs such as bees not producing properly when you are away.

The lack of any real pressure (there are no attacks on your base, despite the presence of broken walls/gates priming you to consider this) can mean there is little to break up the gameplay loop or incentivise real optimisation, as the items needed to progress (being one-off deposits into the main base) don't really need to be automated a lot of the time - the only thing past basic resources that I felt any serious need to automate were the power-generating items (and even then I had several hundred lightbulb capacity spare, despite the fact that bugs / slowdown consistently reduced my capacity frequently, especially every time I loaded into my main base).

In fact every time I put significant effort into automating something (assuming it would be an essential intermediate good for something later) which was necessary to deposit to progress, I regretted it as I turned out to not really need it for other things, (at least up until I learned this lesson and stopped automating anything to any real degree until it proved to be necessary as an ongoing input for other needs).

On the plus side, the aesthetic is really great and (while I felt the writing and choice of tone wasn't always commensurate with the potential of the story) the overall experience was really fun. The music is very immersive and overall experience is engaging. Serious fans of the genre have almost certainly already played Factorio, in which case I would recommend something like Mindustry. If you've already played both and/or you're interested in a less stressful experience, this game is a good option.

The only game in its niche that I'm aware of and well worth it, I highly enjoyed it. The only nitpick I had was the lack of tying your performance to the game in a meaningful way. There's no fail-state I'm aware of and it's pretty easy to make decent progress every shift - the amount you make is very forgiving even at the start despite what you might think given the massive initial debt. Upgrades to make your job easier are tied to a secondary currency which is unlocked just by salvaging higher percentages of a ship correctly, so there's no real game-affecting choices outside of what upgrade to pick next and you're incentivised to painstakingly salvage 90%+ of each ship correctly, which can be a drag (especially when unlocking new salvageable ships which are essentially larger versions of old ones)

Voice acting was great, visuals are pretty stellar, writing is a bit ham-fisted at times, cool worldbuilding, overall unique and engaging gameplay loop.

Join your union / 10

While having some odd issues like not teaching you the puzzles properly and (IMO) way too much visual noise on walls and such, this is still an amazing game and very worth playing, especially for fans of the immersive sim genre whom are too young to have experienced the OG during it's heyday. Highly recommend.

I miss you, RO2/RS. You are leagues better than RS2 will ever be. Fug AK's, mosins are where it's at.

Tekkem

I am a Vikang

It's good

I hate this game