It’s pretty amusing that this game went from over hyped to an absolute dumpster fire to probably one of the best space games ever made. One hell of a comeback story.
Honestly to me it’s more promising to see a game studio stick behind their game like this rather than having the initial game be good. A good studio will still have bad games, but knowing that a studio will stand behind their bad game and work on it until it’s good means a lot.
I got it off GamePass back in November 2020 for my One S and played it a lot. Work has kept me busy so I’ve had less time but I have bought it twice since then - once for PS5 and then when I bought my Series X.
It’s been worth it. I don’t play multiplayer much and I’ve missed most of the Expeditions but I enjoy it a lot every time I play.
You can follow the quests or not. I honestly enjoy exploring the different planets. The graphics are good. On my PS5 save, my home base is on a planet where the grass glows when the wind sweeps across it at night.
I’ll sit and just watch it throughout the game night.
I don’t see why it’s suddenly the best space game… The core mechanic seems to be the same as the original. Mine materials that are the same on every planet, so you can build space ships and better miners that take more materials and do it over and over again.
When I was playing on launch day, I had a really good first impression but it turned into disappointment, since all the planets had the same minerals. May as well stay on the first planet forever.
That is pretty reductive. Like, it’s a sim. You could describe just about any sim the same way. “You just do this thing to do that thing”. How is this any different from any other game?
I’m not saying it’s the best space game, but I had fun when I played it and it definitely didn’t just feel like I was mining materials just to mine more materials.
The problem is that NMS is very repetitive and bland. Learning alien words takes for-fucking-ever, finding freighter upgrades is one of the worst time sinks in the game, combat feels more tedious and padded out than that of Everquest, looking for “that one cool ship” or “cool looking weapon” is pure RNG and lucking out on it not coming as a C class, upgrading inventory space is either a system jumping time sink or “planetary exploration” time sink.
Nearly nothing you do in the game gives you a sense of accomplishment and, after 4-8 hours or so after first starting playing, you’re unlikely to look forward to any specific activity because “it’s fun”. There’s a lot “to do” but very little motivation to, like why even bother being the mayor of a settlement?
Even on permadeath the game offers no real challenge once you’re off the starting planet.
Yes, though it’s a cheap “new game plus”, without even feeling like a “new game”. Once you manage to get to the center, you’re thrown in a new galaxy in a random planet and have to get back to your ship, only some upgrades you’ve installed on yourself and your ship might break. Yet you can immediately call your freighter and any exocraft.
There’s also Artemis’ questline, with an interesting concept but overall underwhelming delivery.
Story spoilers
Artemis is stuck in a simulation, just like you, player, are stuck in one. The whole universe is a failing simulation created by Atlas.
.
interaction with other players?
From my experience, which pretty much ended around 1 year ago with the game, player interaction could be summed up to:
finding someone else’s buildings during a community expedition
finding someone else’s buildings in a quicksilver quest
someone giving you free stuff while you’re idling in the anomaly
Apparently there are guilds now? In any case, I never saw anyone looking for group, because the game has nothing that only a pair or trio can do, or do faster/better than a solo player, other than base building
From what I’ve found online, the “center” of your galaxy is just a portal that sends you to the edge of a different galaxy where it’s different but more of the same.
The irony is how much Starfield copies from NMS, often the bad things and as a worse copy, like scanning stuff on the planet surface, jump range limitation, space “exploration”, shitty performance
I think a lot of people are just very, very pleased with how well it’s being supported compared to its initial launch and how this game company has become an outlier in the industry. They conflate their love for the company’s business practices with the game’s mechanics. So while the game may be great, many subconsciously give it a boost because of its legacy.
Every planet doesn’t have every material you need for crafting everything. But a single solar system likely has most of it. There are key elements on every planet that are meant to make sure a player never gets stranded. I guess one could argue for that to be a game mode though if it isn’t already where you very well could end up on a planet and have no way to survive.
A lot of people like the gameplay loop from day one but the initial lies about how multiplayer worked was a driving force behind the unhappiness. Once that was fixed it was a shallow experience but a lot of people would have been content with it. Instead Hello Games keeps supporting it and putting out new content updates. There are still a lot of features and improvements people would like for the game and those very well may see the light of day with the passion Hello Games has shown for improving it. That’s why so many people think favorably of them. There are a ton of other bigger studios that would never show this level of dedication and community support.
I agree, they did the right thing and much more. But the game still doesn’t feel very fun. It’s missing a reason to do things beyond just exploration and seeing new randomly generated animals and colors.
I was hoping for it to have some Elite qualities where you would travel with rare cargo to make money, but it doesn’t even have any rare cargo or any demand for unique minerals on planets…
It’s not fun, which is the main problem. The devs have built a universe to explore but hasn’t accounted for that humans don’t think different shapes and colors are very interesting when it’s the same otherwise.
The popularity speaks to the contrary; a lot of people want to exist in a universe they get to see neat things. There are quest lines to help push players forward if they want, they just aren’t required and are easy to ignore. I don’t think resource scarcity is meant to be a major aspect of the game but I can see why someone might want it to be.
It was genuinely fun when i started and had to hunt for materials and actually had the threat of death, i hid in a cave to recover heat protection and had to do that a few times before i entered space and then the game all but ended
What, like Minecraft, still possibly the most popular game on Earth? I mean, all you do in Minecraft is mine the a couple of minerals that are the same on every seed, and use them to make better tools to mine minerals faster, and grow the same crops so you don’t starve, and do it over and over again.
not trying to be cheeky—i wrote up a long part about modding capacity and level of sandbox freedom etc., but i am sure you’re already very aware of that lol
so taking it as just vanilla: at the end of the day mining in minecraft feels relaxing and satisfying to me while in NMS it feels like a chore. i absolutely hate mining out ore deposits with a mining laser.
(breaking plants and minerals is kinda fun though)
like minecraft really nailed game feel
obviously this all depends on personal preference anyway, but if players have to do the same thing over and over again, then it needs to be very enjoyable in and off itself to do so.
Theres no suddenly about it. They took the well deserved heat after launch very much to heart and spend the next 8 odd years crafting it into the best space game out there imo. Best VR game too.
Its version 4.61 and, essentially, at least its own sequal. Its nothing like the launch day game.
Fwiw, you can get deep discounts CCU chaining ships. Ships can also be unofficially “sold” and “bought” after the fact. It’s done through gifting. For example, you can get the Hammerhead at the impound for less then half the price. The impound is also one of the higher priced sites to. There are also unofficial ships sales on reddit to that have even lower prices.
Edit-Looks like a time limited sale, nevertheless, SC-trades on reddit has some Hammerheads for around 500.
Right? That kind of money goes toward a component of a PC that would have multiple uses—or, hell, for some people, a whole-ass PC, jesus. Not just one part of a game (pronounced like a gun is in Wayne’s World)
Man the grind is rough in Elite Dangerous if you want to participate in PvP. Material grinding is so painful, i wish they never added engineering, or only had 2 levels of it instead of 5.
Im still waiting for ship interiors too.
Ahh, reminds me of grinding for reputation so I can get the Cutter and Corvette. I still keep Elite installed and still waiting to get the will to start that game. Odyssey really left a bad taste on my mouth.
Yeah. I liked Odyssey for wandering around my carrier’s interior and really very little else. The combat is absolute dogshit, and that wouldn’t be half as bad if pretty much every on-foot mission type did not inevitably downright require pissing off some faction or another, which then forces you to get involved in combat. The gunplay is pants, and I can’t fathom why there are so few hitscan handheld weapons in a universe that’s all about laser beams and railguns and shit. And then when you’re done with the annoying combat you have a ton of bounties stacked up you have to deal with.
At least the mercenary missions let you just shoot people for the sake of shooting people. But if I wanted to bounce around in low-grav and shot guys with silly weapons I’d just play Borderlands.
That reminds me, I probably need to grind some cash to pay the upkeep on my damn carrier.
Ha, sure thing, turbo. More like great way to tell everyone I’m better at managing my money than some o’ y’all, doing the bare minimum of not spending hundreds [with an ‘s’!] of dollars on a make-believe spaceship in an unfinished video game.
I really hope you forgot the /s there because, wa-how.
Lol great way to tell everyone you think 400 bucks for a video game cosmetic is a reasonable thing to buy, and that everyone who can’t/won’t do that is broke. Its a bad look, this is cringe stuff that someone who’s never worked for their money would say. Real money, old money, doesn’t participate in this kind of behavior. Wastes of air like you usually live off daddy’s money raging on the internet because you never learned how to develop real social connections.
It’s dirt cheap compared to something like horseback riding, shooting sports, cars, or scuba diving.It’s just that this is easy to criticize as you can see the price tag easily vs looking at half a dozen receipts for the other hobbies.
I mean sure, but at the end of the day it’s a pretend spaceship, that you don’t own in any meaningful way, in a videogame that could go offline forever at any point that they deem it unprofitable to continue.
I can’t be alone in finding even the “deeply discounted” prices to be somewhat unreasonable. This is horse armour with ideas above its station.
Fair enough. However, if you consider the entertainment value delivered over time, the costs can be very low. If you count it is as a 20$ a month movie ticket, you could pledge/buy a Hammerhead in around 2 years. The game and its users have been around much longer then that. It’s a game that can deliver hours and hours of entertainment each weekend. The price per hour would be low, and there are other hobbies much more expensive then this.
Even if the game were to shutter and you were to lose access to your ships, you’d still have that value delivered over time like a bunch of movie tickets. Also, you don’t buy ships. You pledge to support the development of the game. You can also buy a Hammerhead in game quickly if you know what game loops to target.
If you count it is as a 20$ a month movie ticket, you could pledge/buy a Hammerhead in around 2 years.
Jesus Christ lmao
Yeah man, I could enjoy a Blu-ray of my favorite movie for a comparable amount of time but that wouldn’t make me any less of a moron to buy a $400 Blu-ray.
A few hour Blu-ray won’t give you near the entertainment time that a game or comparable hobby will. You’ll watch it once, then maybe once again if you really liked it, then maybe you might watch it again a few years later.Then it’s mostly just collecting dust. In fact more so given the popularity of streaming.
Right. And a single ship in a single game of questionable status isnt gonna give you nearly the entertainment value that the 7-40 games you could buy for the same money are gonna give you.
Look, if you are happy with your purchase, thats cool. But to us this looks like a f-ton of wasted money.
Your comparison makes no sense. Watching a movie in a theater is much like watching a an actual play or a live concert, it’s a “group experience” that isn’t quite like watching a playback on your TV.
If you divide those 870 over 24 months (2 years), that’s 36 dollars a month. If you spent that money every month on games, you could get 1 or more each month and might luck out and get a HUGE “return of investment” if you calculate it entirely as money / time played. Plus, it’d be hours and hours of entertainment any day of the week, not only “each weekend”. Buying on GOG would also mean you get to “own them forever”.
You pledge to support the development of the game
Please act and reply like an investor instead of a fanboy, then. Just because you want to see the game come through doesn’t mean you have to defend everything RSI does to raise money.
beyond the issue of the price, this isnt comparable to a trip to the pictures once a month as movies change… and if someone spent stupid money on a ingame ship you dont think theyll buy another? these companies dont offer consumer friendly deals they instead hunt wales.
Don’t stretch it. Maybe it could be #10 in a top 10, but when you have the likes of Elite Dangerous, Space Engineers, X4, Freelancer, plus little known indies like Empyrion Galactic Survival and Evochron Legends, it’ll hardly be anyone’s top choice.
I mean, I generally agree with your assessment, but elite dangerous? I love Elite, but it is not a good game. Best thing to come from Elite Dangerous is the community.
Judging from a quick Lets Play watch, the game is a top down 2D space combat with 3D graphics. You can go down on planets, but it’s a small map and meant mostly to upgrade your ship and repair it. It’s a space game with big focus on combat, but with nothing remotely comparable to NMS, really. Despite the irritating sound effects, I’m actually curious to trying it out sometime in the future.
It’s pretty amusing that this game went from over hyped to an absolute dumpster fire to probably one of the best space games ever made. One hell of a comeback story.
Honestly to me it’s more promising to see a game studio stick behind their game like this rather than having the initial game be good. A good studio will still have bad games, but knowing that a studio will stand behind their bad game and work on it until it’s good means a lot.
It’s definitely cool, they could have pulled the rug and run away with the money.
we just have to do some work on the overhyping a game and preorder part, but its looking like i might pick up this game
I got it off GamePass back in November 2020 for my One S and played it a lot. Work has kept me busy so I’ve had less time but I have bought it twice since then - once for PS5 and then when I bought my Series X.
It’s been worth it. I don’t play multiplayer much and I’ve missed most of the Expeditions but I enjoy it a lot every time I play.
You can follow the quests or not. I honestly enjoy exploring the different planets. The graphics are good. On my PS5 save, my home base is on a planet where the grass glows when the wind sweeps across it at night.
I’ll sit and just watch it throughout the game night.
I don’t see why it’s suddenly the best space game… The core mechanic seems to be the same as the original. Mine materials that are the same on every planet, so you can build space ships and better miners that take more materials and do it over and over again.
When I was playing on launch day, I had a really good first impression but it turned into disappointment, since all the planets had the same minerals. May as well stay on the first planet forever.
That is pretty reductive. Like, it’s a sim. You could describe just about any sim the same way. “You just do this thing to do that thing”. How is this any different from any other game?
I’m not saying it’s the best space game, but I had fun when I played it and it definitely didn’t just feel like I was mining materials just to mine more materials.
The problem is that NMS is very repetitive and bland. Learning alien words takes for-fucking-ever, finding freighter upgrades is one of the worst time sinks in the game, combat feels more tedious and padded out than that of Everquest, looking for “that one cool ship” or “cool looking weapon” is pure RNG and lucking out on it not coming as a C class, upgrading inventory space is either a system jumping time sink or “planetary exploration” time sink.
Nearly nothing you do in the game gives you a sense of accomplishment and, after 4-8 hours or so after first starting playing, you’re unlikely to look forward to any specific activity because “it’s fun”. There’s a lot “to do” but very little motivation to, like why even bother being the mayor of a settlement?
Even on permadeath the game offers no real challenge once you’re off the starting planet.
Isn’t there a “journey to the centre” and interaction with other players?
Yes, though it’s a cheap “new game plus”, without even feeling like a “new game”. Once you manage to get to the center, you’re thrown in a new galaxy in a random planet and have to get back to your ship, only some upgrades you’ve installed on yourself and your ship might break. Yet you can immediately call your freighter and any exocraft.
There’s also Artemis’ questline, with an interesting concept but overall underwhelming delivery.
Story spoilers
Artemis is stuck in a simulation, just like you, player, are stuck in one. The whole universe is a failing simulation created by Atlas.
.
From my experience, which pretty much ended around 1 year ago with the game, player interaction could be summed up to:
Apparently there are guilds now? In any case, I never saw anyone looking for group, because the game has nothing that only a pair or trio can do, or do faster/better than a solo player, other than base building
From what I’ve found online, the “center” of your galaxy is just a portal that sends you to the edge of a different galaxy where it’s different but more of the same.
Kinda like Starfield actually.
The irony is how much Starfield copies from NMS, often the bad things and as a worse copy, like scanning stuff on the planet surface, jump range limitation, space “exploration”, shitty performance
I wouldn’t call it reductive as much as I would… accurate.
I think a lot of people are just very, very pleased with how well it’s being supported compared to its initial launch and how this game company has become an outlier in the industry. They conflate their love for the company’s business practices with the game’s mechanics. So while the game may be great, many subconsciously give it a boost because of its legacy.
Every planet doesn’t have every material you need for crafting everything. But a single solar system likely has most of it. There are key elements on every planet that are meant to make sure a player never gets stranded. I guess one could argue for that to be a game mode though if it isn’t already where you very well could end up on a planet and have no way to survive.
A lot of people like the gameplay loop from day one but the initial lies about how multiplayer worked was a driving force behind the unhappiness. Once that was fixed it was a shallow experience but a lot of people would have been content with it. Instead Hello Games keeps supporting it and putting out new content updates. There are still a lot of features and improvements people would like for the game and those very well may see the light of day with the passion Hello Games has shown for improving it. That’s why so many people think favorably of them. There are a ton of other bigger studios that would never show this level of dedication and community support.
I agree, they did the right thing and much more. But the game still doesn’t feel very fun. It’s missing a reason to do things beyond just exploration and seeing new randomly generated animals and colors.
I was hoping for it to have some Elite qualities where you would travel with rare cargo to make money, but it doesn’t even have any rare cargo or any demand for unique minerals on planets…
It’s not fun, which is the main problem. The devs have built a universe to explore but hasn’t accounted for that humans don’t think different shapes and colors are very interesting when it’s the same otherwise.
The popularity speaks to the contrary; a lot of people want to exist in a universe they get to see neat things. There are quest lines to help push players forward if they want, they just aren’t required and are easy to ignore. I don’t think resource scarcity is meant to be a major aspect of the game but I can see why someone might want it to be.
Yeah maybe you are right. It’s just not the game I want it to be, but they do have players and it’s going well for them, so… :)
It was genuinely fun when i started and had to hunt for materials and actually had the threat of death, i hid in a cave to recover heat protection and had to do that a few times before i entered space and then the game all but ended
What, like Minecraft, still possibly the most popular game on Earth? I mean, all you do in Minecraft is mine the a couple of minerals that are the same on every seed, and use them to make better tools to mine minerals faster, and grow the same crops so you don’t starve, and do it over and over again.
but in minecraft it’s enjoyable!
not trying to be cheeky—i wrote up a long part about modding capacity and level of sandbox freedom etc., but i am sure you’re already very aware of that lol
so taking it as just vanilla: at the end of the day mining in minecraft feels relaxing and satisfying to me while in NMS it feels like a chore. i absolutely hate mining out ore deposits with a mining laser.
(breaking plants and minerals is kinda fun though)
like minecraft really nailed game feel
obviously this all depends on personal preference anyway, but if players have to do the same thing over and over again, then it needs to be very enjoyable in and off itself to do so.
You said what I wanted to say, so yeah, can only agree with everything.
Theres no suddenly about it. They took the well deserved heat after launch very much to heart and spend the next 8 odd years crafting it into the best space game out there imo. Best VR game too.
Its version 4.61 and, essentially, at least its own sequal. Its nothing like the launch day game.
wait till you play the game of life bruh.
no respawns though.
It’s the same shit game it was when it was released. It gained sprinkles though.
Meanwhile in Star Citizen.
And they’re all “in stock”. How lucky!
Whoa, false scarcity, virtual goods tied to an online service, and nosebleed prices? What’s not to like?
It’s not false, it’s artificial. Some ships are indeed only buyable for a limited time. Or for certain periods.
Semi interestingly to me, I literally created my reddit account to sell my ships nearly a decade ago. Do not regret that…
Fwiw, you can get deep discounts CCU chaining ships. Ships can also be unofficially “sold” and “bought” after the fact. It’s done through gifting. For example, you can get the Hammerhead at the impound for less then half the price. The impound is also one of the higher priced sites to. There are also unofficial ships sales on reddit to that have even lower prices.
Edit-Looks like a time limited sale, nevertheless, SC-trades on reddit has some Hammerheads for around 500.
Wow, only $400 for a thing in a videogame? What a goddamn bargain, sign me right the fuck up!
For the cost of that Hammerhead it had better also come with an entire computer to play the damn game on.
At least in Elite: Dangerous the only cost for ships is your time and/or sanity.
Right? That kind of money goes toward a component of a PC that would have multiple uses—or, hell, for some people, a whole-ass PC, jesus. Not just one part of a game (pronounced like a gun is in Wayne’s World)
Man the grind is rough in Elite Dangerous if you want to participate in PvP. Material grinding is so painful, i wish they never added engineering, or only had 2 levels of it instead of 5. Im still waiting for ship interiors too.
Ahh, reminds me of grinding for reputation so I can get the Cutter and Corvette. I still keep Elite installed and still waiting to get the will to start that game. Odyssey really left a bad taste on my mouth.
Yeah. I liked Odyssey for wandering around my carrier’s interior and really very little else. The combat is absolute dogshit, and that wouldn’t be half as bad if pretty much every on-foot mission type did not inevitably downright require pissing off some faction or another, which then forces you to get involved in combat. The gunplay is pants, and I can’t fathom why there are so few hitscan handheld weapons in a universe that’s all about laser beams and railguns and shit. And then when you’re done with the annoying combat you have a ton of bounties stacked up you have to deal with.
At least the mercenary missions let you just shoot people for the sake of shooting people. But if I wanted to bounce around in low-grav and shot guys with silly weapons I’d just play Borderlands.
That reminds me, I probably need to grind some cash to pay the upkeep on my damn carrier.
Great way to tell everybody you have no money.
Ha, sure thing, turbo. More like great way to tell everyone I’m better at managing my money than some o’ y’all, doing the bare minimum of not spending hundreds [with an ‘s’!] of dollars on a make-believe spaceship in an unfinished video game.
I really hope you forgot the /s there because, wa-how.
way to say “im a prick” without saying it
Lol great way to tell everyone you think 400 bucks for a video game cosmetic is a reasonable thing to buy, and that everyone who can’t/won’t do that is broke. Its a bad look, this is cringe stuff that someone who’s never worked for their money would say. Real money, old money, doesn’t participate in this kind of behavior. Wastes of air like you usually live off daddy’s money raging on the internet because you never learned how to develop real social connections.
It’s dirt cheap compared to something like horseback riding, shooting sports, cars, or scuba diving.It’s just that this is easy to criticize as you can see the price tag easily vs looking at half a dozen receipts for the other hobbies.
Absolutely swimming in the kool aid
I mean sure, but at the end of the day it’s a pretend spaceship, that you don’t own in any meaningful way, in a videogame that could go offline forever at any point that they deem it unprofitable to continue.
I can’t be alone in finding even the “deeply discounted” prices to be somewhat unreasonable. This is horse armour with ideas above its station.
Fair enough. However, if you consider the entertainment value delivered over time, the costs can be very low. If you count it is as a 20$ a month movie ticket, you could pledge/buy a Hammerhead in around 2 years. The game and its users have been around much longer then that. It’s a game that can deliver hours and hours of entertainment each weekend. The price per hour would be low, and there are other hobbies much more expensive then this.
Even if the game were to shutter and you were to lose access to your ships, you’d still have that value delivered over time like a bunch of movie tickets. Also, you don’t buy ships. You pledge to support the development of the game. You can also buy a Hammerhead in game quickly if you know what game loops to target.
Jesus Christ lmao
Yeah man, I could enjoy a Blu-ray of my favorite movie for a comparable amount of time but that wouldn’t make me any less of a moron to buy a $400 Blu-ray.
A few hour Blu-ray won’t give you near the entertainment time that a game or comparable hobby will. You’ll watch it once, then maybe once again if you really liked it, then maybe you might watch it again a few years later.Then it’s mostly just collecting dust. In fact more so given the popularity of streaming.
Right. And a single ship in a single game of questionable status isnt gonna give you nearly the entertainment value that the 7-40 games you could buy for the same money are gonna give you.
Look, if you are happy with your purchase, thats cool. But to us this looks like a f-ton of wasted money.
They also underestimate how many times I’ve watched my favorite movie lol
Your comparison makes no sense. Watching a movie in a theater is much like watching a an actual play or a live concert, it’s a “group experience” that isn’t quite like watching a playback on your TV.
If you divide those 870 over 24 months (2 years), that’s 36 dollars a month. If you spent that money every month on games, you could get 1 or more each month and might luck out and get a HUGE “return of investment” if you calculate it entirely as
money / time played. Plus, it’d be hours and hours of entertainment any day of the week, not only “each weekend”. Buying on GOG would also mean you get to “own them forever”.Please act and reply like an investor instead of a fanboy, then. Just because you want to see the game come through doesn’t mean you have to defend everything RSI does to raise money.
beyond the issue of the price, this isnt comparable to a trip to the pictures once a month as movies change… and if someone spent stupid money on a ingame ship you dont think theyll buy another? these companies dont offer consumer friendly deals they instead hunt wales.
Among the best space games? What the heck are you comparing it to?
IMO it’s an okay giant sandbox but terrible as an actual game.
works in VR too
It is real purty in VR.
I can’t get it to work because my computer is too slow
Gotta upgrade them parts, ya friggin’ nutsack!
can I have $40
Sorry no can do. Also sorry for calling you by your name that way. I should have said “Mr. Nutsack”. My humblest apologies.
I am every type of nutsack do not worry
Just wait till star citizen releases. Anytime this century, just you wait.
Don’t stretch it. Maybe it could be #10 in a top 10, but when you have the likes of Elite Dangerous, Space Engineers, X4, Freelancer, plus little known indies like Empyrion Galactic Survival and Evochron Legends, it’ll hardly be anyone’s top choice.
I mean, I generally agree with your assessment, but elite dangerous? I love Elite, but it is not a good game. Best thing to come from Elite Dangerous is the community.
Armada for the Sega Dreamcast is also better than NMS.
How so? Honestly asking.
Judging from a quick Lets Play watch, the game is a top down 2D space combat with 3D graphics. You can go down on planets, but it’s a small map and meant mostly to upgrade your ship and repair it. It’s a space game with big focus on combat, but with nothing remotely comparable to NMS, really. Despite the irritating sound effects, I’m actually curious to trying it out sometime in the future.
It had 4 player local co-op, ship to ship combat, and actual meaningful progression and it came out in 1999.