** PLAYED ENTIRELY ON LINUX -- IT'S NATIVE **

AMAZING, larger-than-life space life game with "space legs" that puts you initially in a small ship to let you progress through quests, deliveries and affiliations until you are rich enough to buy other ships, then a fleet, then a space station, then a complete space sector where you can rule. It's a complete mishmash of genres, too many genres to list (spaceship / economic simulator / RTS / "city" builder / etc.), some even say it has "RPG" elements.

This is my favorite game ever. From all my games. It is incredibly rich and complex. The reason its score is low is because as with any complex game, it was released with a staggering number of bugs -- but that was almost 2 years ago, and Egosoft, its makes, knows very well how to fix bugs, having time.

As it is "larger than life", rich and complex, any description of the game and mechanics I would write here would be pointless. Just take my word that this game is worth ten times its price. At times you'll want to play just to enjoy the scenery. Other, to machine complex economic theories on how to get ahead of your competitors. And others, to take part of enormous space battles, commanding stations, capital ships and fighters alike. There is no game like this one. No Man's Sky does not have the RTS and economic aspect. Elite: Dangerous does not have that too and does not even have space legs yet. Star Citizen doesn't, also (and it is in a different league, more of a MMO).

You can pilot any ship in the game, except the "robotic ships" of the Xenon, because they are like organisms.

The shortcomings of the game are few. You can't land on planets, only stations. There are very few minon non-game-breaking bugs. Does not support VR. That's what I can remember.


---{Graphics}---
☑ You forget what reality is
☐ Beautiful
☐ Good
☐ Decent
☐ Bad
☐ Don‘t look too long at it
☐ Paint.exe

---{Gameplay}---
☑ Very good
☐ Good
☐ It‘s just gameplay
☐ Mehh
☐ Starring at walls is better
☐ Just don‘t

---{Audio}---
☑ Eargasm
☐ Very good
☐ Good
☐ Not too bad
☐ Bad
☐ Earrape

---{Voice Acting}---
☐ Masterful acting for all characters and scenes
☑ Good/average acting for all characters and scenes
☐ Good acting but not all characters and scenes have it
☐ Just a few parts of the game have voice acting
☐ No voice acting at all

---{Audience}---
☑ Kids
☑ Teens
☑ Adults
☑ Human

---{PC Requirements}---
☐ Check if you can run paint
☐ Potato
☐ Decent
☑ Fast
☐ Rich boiiiiii
☐ Ask NASA if they have a spare computer

---{Difficulity}---
☐ Just press ‚A‘
☐ Easy
☐ Significant brain usage
☐ Easy to learn / Hard to master
☑ Difficult but gratifying
☐ Dark Souls

---{Grind}---
☐ Nothing to grind
☐ Only if u care about leaderboards/ranks
☐ Isnt necessary to progress
☑ Average grind level
☐ Too much grind
☐ You‘ll need a second live for grinding

---{Story}---
☐ Story?
☐ Text or Audio floating around
☐ Average
☐ Good
☑ Lovely
☐ It‘ll replace your life

---{Game Time}---
☐ Long enough for a cup of coffee
☐ Short
☐ Average
☐ Long
☑ To infinity and beyond

---{Price}---
☐ It’s free!
☐ Worth the price
☑ Worth 10 times the price because it's so good
☐ If u have some spare money left
☐ Not recommended
☐ You could also just burn your money

---VR Support---
☑ Does not support VR
☐ Has a precarious Side-by-Side implementation, no VR controls.
☐ Has a poor VR implementation.
☐ Average. Not amazing, but could be better.
☐ Very good VR, both controls, visuals and the game feels very tactile.
☐ This was made for VR in the first place - perfect!

---{Bugs}---
☐ Never heard of
☑ Minor bugs AS OF NOW
☐ Can get annoying
☐ ARK: Survival Evolved
☐ The game itself is a big terrarium for bugs

UPDATED: After enduring 42+h of extra gameplay, I finished the game. Still the same conclusion, with some added details.

THIS IS NOT A GAME. IT IS A WOKE BRAINWASHING TRAP DISGUISED AS HARMLESS FUN.

Look, I could cope with 2/3 of the important NPCs being young women with colored hairs. I could also cope with the unrealistic behaviors of these e-girls which ignore their evolved female instincts and assume risky attitudes which lowers their reproductive chances, when they are not disposable with a high risk/reward ratio like males (this should be taught on schools so we know our flawed propensities to better counteract them, but it is instead suppressed like hell).

BUT DOING AN WOKEISM EXAM IN THE MIDDLE OF THE GAME IN THE FORM OF THE ONLY ROMANCE-RELATED QUEST IS JUST AWFULLY DISHONEST AND DISRESPECTFUL!

SERIOUSLY. You've got this female companion called Parvati and she gets awkwardly interested in another female NPC because that one seems so confident, so masculine (the game doesn't use this word because it's haram on that frame of reference). And then you have that quest where you have to get them closer, and MANY of the cultural regressivism of these theories come into place, e.g. Parvati doesn't like the "physical aspect" of relationships, or in woke parlance, she's "asexual" but not "a-romantic", and b00lsheet like that. You follow the woke teachings, you get more experience points. You are not even given options a non-woke person would choose in most of the dialogues involving this "wokeness 101 exam", as it's typical of things that are attempting to mold your thought processes. So if you don't embrace their ideology, you fail this quest. No space for even thinking about disagreements. This game is truly dystopic, but when I bought it, I thought it would be in the lore, not the game itself.

This is not even mere propaganda. It's downright INDOCTRINATION. This is not only dishonest; it's vile, it's dirty.

You lose a LOT when you go this ideological route. Like, dystopic future with corporations and murder and everything bad that comes for it, but somehow even the most evil faction is racially and sexually diverse, there is no real prejudice for any traditional "oppressed" group, religion is treated as superficially as it can lest the game would be called "something-phobic", every disastrous circumstance, complex relationship and emotional tone is dumbed down to account for the shallow woke worldview. Something that could be science-fiction grade good lore was turned in something lower than cheap comics. A great opportunity was wasted with an expensive title.

I could go on and tell about the game itself, the should-be-amazing-but-aren't odd graphics (even with chromatic aberration turned off) [UPDATE: they get much better later on], the awkward point distribution system, the lack of balance and excessive inventory grinding, the fact that it gives you "walled" spaces to transition into instead of doing seamless integration, the awkward and dumb attempts at showing funny dystopic scenarios, but this title doesn't deserve my respect to do that.

Are there any good bits in it, though? A few, the lore about 'cistypigs' which are genetically modified pigs that grow 'tumors' on the body that ripen and fall, and then are harvested for these tumors like fruits to be eaten instead of being slaughtered, is nice. (Although it's odd to see plausible science inserted into a non-scientific woke setting) The companion abilities are a nice touch, the science weapons (unique special weapons with weird effects like shrinking the enemy for a couple seconds) are good but could be a lot better. The companions bickering with each other is very well done. Some of the quests are good, although many of the outcomes are just random (like in the first area, if you side with 'the good guys' everyone loses) so if you want to avoid frustration with them, you have to consult a guide. The gameplay is good at the beginning, but it saturates quickly, I'm not sure why. Some dialogues are excessively long.

The music is unremarkable. There are no great tracks to accompany the adventures. This is not a space opera. The economy is broken and unfair; to upgrade a weapon from level 40 to 41 you need in excess of 2 million "bits", for contrast the reward of an entire DLC is 5,000 "bits". You get very tiny amounts of money by looting, from 3 to ~50 "bits" in general.

But this game is not up to level to any of its influences. Borderlands? Yeah, that one was also woke as hell, but didn't try that hard to force you to agree with it. Fallout New Vegas? Nah, not even close. Mass Effect? It has similarities in the mechanics, but not in the quality. Bioshock? The aesthetics might resemble it at some places, but Outer Worlds is too boring to even be comparable. No Man's Sky? Absolutely not, besides this one being more story-oriented I have 600h in NMS but I don't think I can bear 50h playing this game (40h at this time, about 80% done) <UPDATED: Yes, I got to 82h forcing myself to go through it. Note that I'm a completionist and I don't even skip dialogues, I also read ALL the terminal messages on the game>). Bethesda games in general? This game is so story-oriented that all simulation aspects amount to nothing. They become completely irrelevant in the gameplay, unfortunately.

Also: the game's cultural advisors besides being super-woke really do not really like parents too much, specially fathers. There are several quests related to parenting, all of them done in a negative way. When you ask one of your companions about his father, she is just indifferent, saying they had nothing in common like if he was a discarded boyfriend. Another companion has parents living off their life insurance and even when she gets back they refuse to acknowledge she's alive to continue living in luxury. The Gorgon DLC has a bad mother and an almost never mentioned father as characters.

DO NOT be deceived with all the gaming press praising this game. It's a trap. They want you to make the woke exam that is in-game. Don't buy this game. If it's woke, let it go broke. They even try to provoke, to shove it at your face, with women with clearly masculine traits (like the mechanics with a big nose or the deep-voiced Gorgon villain which in the end is a woman), so that you get bothered by the extreme disparity from reality -- an occasion they will certainly accuse you of sexism.

UPDATE: a friend reminded me to tell about the game: "It's just not fun." But that's good! It makes the ideological conditioning less seductive!