One thing that really gets me with that game is that every single planet has only one biome. There are no poles, no jungles, no deserts; it's just one environment pasted over the entire planet and that feels weirdly wrong and is kind of boring.

You need to be the kind of person who likes crafting progression in itself. I enjoyed for a good while, chasing better upgrades, building a base and slowly building up a glossary to understand the aliens, but it's definitely not for everyone, and it's more wide than it's deep for sure.

Maybe it's because I got into it late but I actually liked the exploration between planets. While a lot of them are effectively interchangeable in resources, there's a lot of interesting environments and creatures that are created by its procedural generation.

I played it for the duration of 2 afternoons a week ago.

I really gave the base building a good try, but it did just feel tedious and misplaced. I wish they would expand on npc interactions and the language learning system instead