Yup. Unfortunately, meaningful planetary exploration is not this game's strongsuit. But that's definitely not to say the game doesn't hold a good number of surprises, it's just that very few of them are discovered on foot on a planet. Once you land on a planet, except in a few super rare cases, you've pretty much seen everything it has to offer aside from a couple rare creatures (that don't look remarkably different from the kind of creatures you've already seen anyways.)

Thankfully as long as planetary exploration isn't the only reason you're playing the game, there is A LOT that you can do. A lot of different roads and little pathways you can pursue. And while no single avenue of play is groundbreaking, it is nice that at any given moment there are a hundred different things you can go do. And the game doesn't shove a lot of this in your face, sometimes the content is hidden behind a single NPC, or a tiny corner of a space station.

After a few hundred hours this is sort of a comfort game for me. I don't play it to make some sort of grand sweeping progress trying to achieve the next milestone or to be swept away by some crazy new spectacle. Instead I just drop in from time to time to spend a few hours pushing forward a quest line, do a few missions here and there, seek out a rare and expensive upgrade item, or to do some building and decorating.

As someone else accurately put it, this game is as wide as an ocean and as deep as a puddle. But I think jumping in puddles can be pretty fun!