Last week over 200,000 people were playing No Man's Sky on Steam alone, so of course with that many players you are going to get critics. Here's an online list of things not in NMS:
https://www.vg247.com/2016/08/17/everyt ... -sky-list/
"Some of this disappointment is the fault of the consumer; there’s been a lot of wild talk and anticipation for No Man’s Sky features neither Hello Games nor Sony ever discussed or mentioned, apparently based on speculation."
1. Planetary physics-I'm prety sure this relates to the fact you can chop up the landscape, but things that no longer have a support don't fall to the ground. That's a real deal breaker for me (sarcasm off).
2. Ship classes with meaningful differentiation-I've only ever had my Vy'keen Fighter class and it...really is a good fighter. The Science or Trader class ships can be made to act like fighters too. That's part of the customizing ability. The player can then gut their ship and reconfigure it to be a really good Trader or Science ship. I can remake my Fighter the same way.
3. Faction reputation-It takes a lot of work to get to trusted Ally status, so I can't imagine that someone has done this and not benefited. It's more than likely that players want an instant benefit and can't wait to actually earn something.
4. Homogeneous resource availability-Some of the resources are recognizable on most planets. Plutonium are the red crystals, the blue monoliths are heridium, etc. Iron is iron. I don't see why iron should occasionally be the red crystals, but I'll give them this point.
4. Asteroid landings-I can land on a small moon and explore it. An asteroid is about the size of my ship, so I just slice it up into resources.
5. Space station and fleet destruction-True. You also cannot beat up alien children and take their lunch money. I suppose Hello Games didn't spend their programming time catering to the Stalinists.
6. Large fleets-Last night I was mining asteroids and the number of traders that showed up was in the dozens. I fought a lot of pirates to save them. So, how large do you want it?
7. Traveling freighters-The freighters do travel, a lot. I suppose this means maybe the player can't buy a freighter. You can buy a ship and configure it as a freighter.
8. Large scale battles-I'm pretty sure that the battles are getting larger with every jump, so...
9. In atmosphere battles-This may not exist so that players can escape bad situations. Get into trouble with pirates? Drop into a planet's atmosphere.
10. Roaming NPCs-I don't get this one. You already have lots of places to meet aliens. I don't need to look at a beautiful panorama only to have it spoiled by two NPC's taking a selfie.
11.Ringed planets-Technically, just about every planet has a ring of asteroids around it that you can mine. They don't form a ring that is visible from space or on a planet, that is true. IIRC, Jupiter, Saturn and Neptune have rings, but only one is really visibly pronounced.
12. Sand planets-There are 18 billion billion stars, so maybe there is a copyright infringement of Dune somewhere. Who can say?
13.Flying between stars...without a warp drive-Yeah, right!
14-Complex creature interaction with the environment-Again, I suppose the HG crowd wanted to create fabulous, picturesque planets where you don't have to watch the big creatures eat the small ones. You can feed animals. If you then follow them around, they may lead you to a small amount of rare resource (labled animal poop by the NMS players).
15. Rivers-True, also no waterfalls and I haven't found any frozen lake planets either, although lots of lakes and ponds and oceans. However, there are 18 crapzillion stars, so...
16. Points of interest-Well there most certainly are crashed spaceships, although not freighters. Lots of structures dot a planet, although I haven't found any cities. Maybe the space stations are the NPC cities and they don't allow entry to creatures that make a lot of ridiculous demands.
17. Hacking locked doors-I'm supposing that this refers to something other than the game mechanic of crafting a bypass chip and...hacking locked doors.
18. Radio chatter-You already get useful radio messages from your suit, ship, analyzer, alien terminals and so forth. However, the "Rubber Duck" will not be asking for a big bear report.
19. Interaction with other players-This was never a simple MMO game. Lots of youtube time has been devoted to interviews where Sean from HG explains what NMS is and what it is not.
Finally, No Man's Sky is more like playing a concert piano than a game with some Italian's brother. You don't jump up at some point and exclaim, "Aha! I beat you Chopin." You either enjoy doing something really well that is incredibly awesome, or you don't.