I bought this game basically on a whim because it has some cool pictures and the reviews were good. Gotta say I'm glad I did. I haven't played No Man's Sky or Space Engineers so I can't really compare against them. The first time I landed on Akua, I was amazed at how good of a job the developers did to make an alien environment. I really did feel like I just crash landed on an alien planet, rather than some kind of Earth. The first time I saw an alien creature I was just "WTF is that".

One thing I like is that the developers are consistently updating the game. I am pretty cautious when it comes to paying money for an incomplete game, but this game is already worth the money, as my 100 hours can attest. Since the last time I played this 1-2 years ago, they have added more biomes, added a solar system random generator, improved view distance, increased the size of the planets, and removed the barriers on the poles. They're definitely moving in a good direction with this.

This is one of a handful of games which seem to do a good job of rendering forest environments. Understandably this is difficult to achieve because of all the vegetation, grass and shadows. The game does seem to have some performance issues sometimes (entering a forest sometimes halves my FPS), but I'm willing to accept that for an alpha, with the assumption they just haven't got around to fixing it yet. However it does seem to be a significant problem for some users.

It's important to note that the opening phase is much longer now, I think mostly due to larger planet sizes. It takes significantly longer to get up and running now. And when you're playing on hard you're gonna be spending a lot of time just trying to have enough food to survive. I think this upsets some people but I think a big weakness of sandbox survival games is that once you get too comfortable, you tend to get bored, so I think that this is their attempt to address this a bit. Whether that's good or bad is up to the user I guess.

This was also the first game that got me into taking screenshots. The game just looked that good. Few other games give me that feeling of wanting to explore like this game does. There have been countless times when I've been travelling somewhere and saw something in the distance and I just thought "Let's go and see what's over there". Most games end up being a repetition of basic patterns. For example in Minecraft, once you've seen one forest, you've seen them all. Empyrion manages to be different somehow. Of course there is ultimately a limit, but this game merges the various environments in a way that creates many interesting combinations.

There's still a lot of work to be done with this game. Combat right now is basically backpedalling and shooting. There's not a whole lot of animation either. But certainly there is a solid base to build up from.

This game does vegetation very wellIn my most recent game, I was taken by surprise when some radioactive fog rolled in. Fortunately I survived by sheltering insideEven something simple like a sunset can be amazing in the right environmentThis planet just screams "you don't belong here"