Recent reviews by StickJock

After over a decade: If you want to build a spaceship and fly it, this is still the best game to do that.

Suffers from design vision issues at times and massive feature creep/content islands.
Gameplay is fun and there's always progress to grind out.

It's more of an open beta than an early access, it is very barebones and needs a lot of work. Clearly released under pressure from up high as a form of monetisation. As a PvE game, it shouldn't be F2P-P2W with an online requirement, but a purchased game that runs offline with optional online co-op.

The game designers identified what makes a survival game enjoyable, the first couple hours of actual survival, and packaged that into a longer-term progression tree where you need to start new prospects/games with the same character to develop that character's survival skills. The core gameplay loop is excellent.