Recent reviews by Dank Memes

Bethesda's incompetence and arrogance have been placed on full display for all to see. This DLC is the nail in the coffin for their game design. Without significant change in leadership, I have no faith that ES6 will be good after the absolute turd that is Starfield. The first DLC of a Bethesda game resulted in a paltry 10k bump in player counts that is already sharply falling off. Even Bethesda boot lickers like Mattplays do not like this DLC.

Emil and Todd, please retire.

The last time anything disappointed me as badly as Starfield, my dad died.
Refer to any critique on YouTube for the 1hr+ lists as to why.

The only thing about this game that isn't flawless is it's PC optimization and some broken pvp builds.

Conspiracy theories dev thinks it's acceptable to spread misinformation in their patch notes.

Derek Yu
Derek Yu
Derek Derek Derek Yu
It's good, buy it.

Its 10/10 just buy it.

No mods? No positive review.

Paid DLC in an Early Access game. No.

(FURTHER STATEMENTS AFTER ORIGINAL REVIEW)
I really want to love this game but the fps dips are immersion breaking.

My specs:
GTX 1080 @2100Mhz
i5 3570k @4.3Ghz
16Gb @ 1600Mhz Ram

So, the game looks great. Especially since it's procedurally generated. The gameplay as far as I could tell is comprised of mining for minerals, upgrading your equipment/ship, interacting with aliens that have random appearances,etc, and that's about it. On launch the game is capped to 30fps for some God forsaken reason, but that is easily fixed in the options menu. With every setting maxed I was getting a steady 60fps at 1080p, my gpu usage hovering around 70% and my cpu usage around 50-60%. Weirdly enough cores 1 and 2 were bouncing around 60-70% while cores 3 and 4 were only at around 25-35%. Then I started moving around.

When moving in No Man's Sky I experienced very obvious issues with the optimization of loading in the map. This wasn't map generation related because the problem occurred even when I was backtracking to my ship, over land that had already been covered. Every minute or so my cpu usage shot up to 100% across all four cores at maximum frequency, with my gpu usage remaining relatively unchanged. This locked up my keyboard and mouse inputs, causing my character to move uncontrollably in the direction I had been before the spike occured, leading to me falling off a cliff, ruining my aim at an attacking sentry, and nearly getting me killed. These spikes were also accompanied by frame rate drops from a steady 60fps all the way down to a very choppy 30-40fps range. The spikes only lasted anywhere from 2-10 seconds, but their frequency and interference with control of my character makes the game absolutely unbearable.

But it gets worse. After about 90minutes of fooling around with settings, walking around, mining, lagging, etc, I managed to repair my ship. Time for what should be one of the coolest features of the game, right? No. It made the lag spikes significantly worse due to the increased movement speed. So I'm, trying to fly around, getting anywhere from 25-40fps, and I can't even tell if the controls are really ♥♥♥♥♥♥ or if the spikes are destroying my ability to control movement again. I managed to land after about 30 seconds of struggling, and just stopped there.

This game has a lot of potential to be amazing. I've been told they intend on implementing base building in the future, which just adds on to how good this game could be. The FOV only goes to 100, which is better than some games, but is still to low for me and makes the screen feel claustrophobic. I feel like I can't really even comment on the game itself because the disgustingly bad performance issues prevent me from even exploring the game aside from walking around, feeding some weird aliens a bit of iron, and mining ores.

I want to love this game, but if they don't fix these performance issues within a week I'm just going to get a refund. This is an unacceptable failure of fundamental game developement. I can't comprehend how this got past QA, if they even do QA. Because it seems that they don't.
(END OF ORIGINAL REVIEW)

So after trawling through the Internet and applying various fixes I've spent even more time playing this game, I'm no longer able to return it to boot but I think I'll try anyway.

I'll start with the smallest issue, the FOV. Apparently you can manually adjust the FOV in a text file that is used to store your graphics settings, so I explored this and wound up finding that you can. The fact that they artificially restricted the FOV to merely 100 is senseless, as I cranked it up all the way to 140 with no issues.

Now on to the fixes I applied to make my game slightly more stable. And I say SLIGHTLY because the game still hitches and the controls get stuck frequently, with the same 100% cpu usage. And don't try to tell me it's my cpu or my gpu, people with overclocked 1080s and the shiniest overclocked skylake i7 have identical issues.

The first thing I did was uncapping my framerate rate and disabling vsync. Surprise, surprise, my framerate jumped up to 90-150 depending on location while the hitches down to 40fps or less continued. The huge difference in framerate from normal to when the game hitches helps to offset the nauseating effect fps dips have, but it is still extremely obtrusive to enjoying the game.

Next I did was redoing the overclock on my CPU. Big surprise, nothing changed. It is still very stable and scoring just fine on benchmarks.

Then I downloaded beta developer drivers from Nvidia, which seemed to have changed nothing. No surprise, since the whole problem stems from how inefficiently this game handles cpu usage.

Finally I disabled gsync, which is a hidden option in the earlier mentioned video settings folder. Why this is enabled by default baffles me, why it's a hidden setting makes my confusion even worse. This did nothing for my experience but it has supposedly helped others.

Oh and the game renders at 720p and then upscales to your native resoloution. What is this console ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ on the PC platform? ♥♥♥♥ off.

As some random person on the Internet said, this game is as wide as an ocean, but as deep as a puddle. The game feels dead, there is no life to it aside from one alien you might find in a building or cramped spacestation that has no variables on its internal structure. The wildlife has uninspired AI, running around aimlessly, and occasionally attempting to kill you in some haphazard way. The UI is horrendously designed, the inventory system is a clearly inspired by Destiny, which while it may work for consoles, sucks eggs on PC.

The way you upgrade your ships/multitool is nonsensitlcal, cumbersome, and intentionally designed to waste your time. I can forgive upgrading your exosuit inventory space since it makes some sense, but to upgrade your multitool or ship inventory size you have to replace it with a new one! To make it even worse you can't even move over the upgrades from your old one, you are forced to reacquire the materials for anything the new one didn't come with. This is blatantly lazy design, forcing you to waste your time gathering the materials you've already gathered, just to get your new ship/multitool back on par with the old one plus a few new inventory slots. This system is unforgivably lazy. It needs a complete overhaul to bring it anywhere near modern rpg/survival games.

They could've at least implemented the ability to modify your ship. You can't even change the damn color! Every ship is the same functionally with a slightly different outer appearance. Some legitimately look cool, but you'll just wind up replacing it in an hour for one with better inventory space. They could've gone so far with customizing ships in looks, movement, and weaponry, but they opted to slap on cookie cutter appearance and performance. Essentially the only use for currency is to buy a ship to replace your ship with and occasionally buying something off the robot slapped onto a wall. Lazy, lazy, lazy.

This whole game is meaningless wandering with shallow experiences abound after the last hour or two. Do not buy this game if you're not in the mood for looking at slightly different plants or rocks all day. I'm not even taking the horrid performance into account yet. Sorry, Hello Games, if you truly cared about this game you wouldn't have released such a broken and shallow dumpster fire.

But wait, there's more! And it's so long I don't have room to put it on steam. Here's a comprehensive list of what was promised or shown to have been in the game, but wasnt. Shocking! Even better is the original poster of the list was coerced into deleting his post and account somehow. Shady as hell.
https://www.reddit.com/r/NoMansSkyTheGame/comments/4y4i3a/wheres_the_nms_we_were_sold_on_front_page/

Don't buy this game. It's like Spore and Arkham had an inbred monstrosity. It should've been shot in the crib.