I guess I’ll give MN9 a pass then 🙂

MN9 is worth playing if you want to experience a massive train wreck for yourself, otherwise I’d just go play Shovel Knight again.

Is that level worth installing the backer-copy I received?

Regarding No Man’s Sky, I’m not entirely sure why people were so hyped up about it, and why people hate it so much now. It was always clear that it was generated in the same way as the old Elite games, and the more modern Elite Dangerous. It’s just that Elite Dangerous has a working multiplayer and actual gameplay, with a robust trading system and PvP for those who are interested in it. Halfway through the hype-train-journey, people seem to have forgotten that Hello Games has… 12 employees? Elite Dangerous on the other hand is made by a company with 260 people. Obviously, the game by 12 people won’t have the same depth and content as a similar game made by a team more than 20 times the size. NMS is a indie game with AAA advertising budget, while Elite Dangerous is one of the these days increasingly rare A-games.

The transitions from planet to planet is just so good. That ease and excitement of traversal to another discovery of a whole planet to potentially explore and experience is fantastic, but It’s all downhill form there.
Since NMS proponents love to claim that exploration and discovery are where NMS is at it’s best, how doest it to compare to other science fiction ? Well, Atrociously. The best science fiction in other media has been the enticing curiosity of fictional discovery of other aliens and their cultures. Discovering primitive aliens would be really cool, discovering and engaging advanced alien civilisations would be immense. Add on the mirror of those well written discoveries to our own humanity comparison and you have self inspection examination too. NMS has none of that. It completely ignores what makes science fiction so interesting before it, says screw all that, and take my boring ass universe algorithm instead. This is less science fiction and more Math-fiction. If that sound awfully boring fiction, thats because it is.

It’s a game that asks, even begs for the player to endlessly use their own imagination, but it has none of it’s own. So blatant is the algorithmic fakery of : fauna, planet similarity, lack of advanced civilisations or cities, types of stars, geography…that it’s the most unconvincing, unbelievable and unnatural fiction setting I’ve ever seen. More a case of Potemkin universe that will drive away my “immersion” asap.
But forget all that, don’t those pretty colours hide all those problems ?

So with the algorithm in place…the offered gameplay is the worst I’ve suffered in a long time. Atrocious shooting mechanics, a survival system that will annoy like no other in it’s mundanity, the most unsatisfying OCD loop of resource collection thats tacked on to keep you keep-on slow walking ( or is that sleep walking ) just to slowly upgrade the increase speed at which to do the same loop of collecting shit.
It’s the fakest arbitrary need for survival danger system thats really used to only endlessly annoy and appeal to addictions. The gameplay is horrendous.

If I keep playing this repetitious, fake, frustrating game, in the attempt to hopefully view the next planet of algorithmic hype that will be reached just over the next horizon, that will only drive me into my own personal hell and drive the score ever closer to 0. Lucking for Hello Games that I quit at giving it a 3/10.