It's a pretty fun game, but it's got a pretty high learning curve. I have 3k hours on this game and I'm still bad

Bought for my friend but he didnt get the 5 alpha packs

I don't usually write reviews for games, but I know a lot of people have been on the fence with buying this game because of how expensive it is. I've played games like minecraft, space engineers, kerbal space program, spore etc. All of them never really did it for me. I wanted to spend less time on creating the thing I'm flying, and more time exploring and building other things/ surviving. I remember when I played spore I was begging for someone to create a mod that allowed me to get out of my spaceship on different planets and walk around the cities and explore the planets themselves. Yea it had a hollogram thing but it just wasnt the same.

I digress, this game really hits that spot for me that none of the other games did. I really enjoy being able to explore different planets, pilot my ship in and out of space whenever I want, interacting with different alien races.

I think it's easy to be tempted into flying into a planet quickly checking out what resources it has, maybe mining a few, and then leave the planet to check out the next one. Then people complain that the game gets boring after a while, when they aren't seeing the point. You can fly at high speed in your space craft for 20 minutes straight and still not be to the other side of the planet. There is so much exploring that can be done just on 1 planet. The past 2 days I've spent all my time on 1 planet, excavating important resources for maintaining my ship, interacting with the alien species, finding monoliths, learning the language of the species to build relationships with the race. This has led to me finding an ancient pool of resources/technologies from a tribe, finding a downed spaceship that had hyperdrive installed on it, and gaining artifacts worth tons of cash. This is all just on 1 planet. I feel like I'm playing out a sci fi movie on 1 planet and I still don't feel like I'm done.

I think if you are a disciplined explorer/survivor enthusiast, you will thoroughly enjoy this game.