I stopped playing this game a few days ago now as I felt the repetition of the game loop (which alas is really short and it is lies at the core of the entire game-play system) started to really creep in, which gave away to boredom and eventually I lacked any interest in carrying on. Plus, by that time I discovered and done pretty much all that NMS Next had to offer and all that remained was to rinse and repeat the same experiences as nothing new was left to discover.
In my personal opinion I think NEXT is a excellent update to NMS offering a much closer product to what was initially promised by Hello games. Judging the game by playtime alone, I played the original vanilla NMS on release for about 8 hours before I stopped playing (loving the first 4 hours or so, then starting to feel the mundane & repetition creep in over the next few hours and was bored to tears in the last 2 hours before putting it down for good or at least until NEXT came out). With NEXT I played the game for 88 hours (80 hours minus the initial 8 hours on release) according to steam and I would easily say that for at least 60 hours I had plenty of joy & delight with the game. After that, as before, the mundane & boredom started to creep in (although I did have the occasional fun moments when I dropped into random people's game who had not seen another player before, got some funny and delightful reactions) and the last 10-12 hours I started to ask myself why I was still playing this as I already completed all the goals & campaign (atlas, center of galaxy etc). So now I have stopped playing this game but I certainly have no regrets of spending 80+hours on NMS after its initial abysmal release and I think Hello Games have done a really good job recovering from that awful debacle. If only they released the game in this state initially or waited another 2 years for fully releasing this game, NMS would have gotten top praise from nearly all PC gamers and in time, would hold a legendary status among PC space survival games instead of the tainted one it has now and will always have. But still, well done to Hello games, if they carry on like this and keep bringing out content patches, NMS could become one of the best space/explore survival games out there as there is plenty more they can and should add to NMS in the future.
So all in all I would certainly recommend NMS Next (esp at 19.99GBP) to anyone who fancy trying a good survival space game. Just bare in mind, at its core NMS is primarily a resource gathering & survival game set in space, all the other bits (exploration, discovery, tech upgrades, trading, space dog fighting, multiplayer) is build around this rather short game-play loop, which means that for some people it can mean countless hours of fun & enjoyable game-play but for others it will sooner or later become a pointless grind (IMO it just a matter of time but this is true for all things). But still,with NMS NEXT you could easily get a good 50/100+ hours out of it before you really start to feel that grind (however, you could choose creative mode which removes a lot of the grind but I personally felt that creative mode also spoils much of the game-play due to the way I mentioned how the 'grind'/game-play loop is very much at the core of this game, remove that and you remove much of the possible joy you can have with this game).
My 2cs.
PS. A quick word regarding multiplayer, although a nice feature (and was initially promised) in the game's current state, multiplayer does not really connect well in the sense, there is not a great deal you can do with other players. The only way currently multiplayer is fun is when you're all at the same point in the game ie perhaps all start a character together at the same time. Even then it does not always work well, you mostly end up scattered and missions aren't group based it seems, only the host can do missions and no-one else can or join in the same mission, at least not from the test and games I ran. This hopefully will become much better and more integral in future patches as there is so much more potential to do stuff with other players.
