Reviews VideoGame / NoMansSky

VideoGame No Bloody Point

To begin with, I never had any interest in No Man's Sky prior to its release. I am not part of the crowd of people who had a lot of hopes about this game, only to have them dashed by a released product that failed to live up to it. I am not one of the people demanding the game's creators be sued for not giving us something identical to the trailers and previews (Bioshock Infinite would deserve that sooner, considering how much that game changed in production). I bought the game recently, after it received a raft of changes from the creators, which will inevitably make my experience different from the people who picked it up at launch.

So No Man's Sky is a space ship game about a lonely soul and their busted spaceship, stranded in an alien galaxy, faced with figuring out all the mysteries of the universe. That's compelling to begin with, except the concept doesn't match the reality. You never feel much like an explorer in this game, as nearly every planet appears to have already been visited and populated with structures, aliens, and millions of really fucking annoying robot drones who attack you if they ever spot you doing something "illegal". What counts as illegal in this game is mining, picking things up, or killing wildlife. The problem is that those activities are basically 95% of how you interact with the game. Gameplay consists almost entirely of passively pointing a mining laser at things until it bursts, giving you the resources. It has way less of a tactile quality to it than, say, Minecraft, where at least you have to swing your tools to make them do things. You need to collect resources to sell them, build hubs, or upgrade your ships. But you are only really doing any of those things for the sake of it, and unlike (again) Minecraft, there is nowhere near the level of player expression permitted with the limited building and mining concepts. You can't make cool looking, unique structures, just prefabs with the scarcest of personalisation.

The spaceships are kind of cool, but the game bungles a lot of basic features around them; fuel constantly runs out but can be easily replenished, turning fuel management into a tedious chore. You are given a huge, cool frigate to own, but mine bugged out and refused to let me land on it within minutes of me being gifted it. I still haven't found a way to make my collection of spaceships land in it, and I suspect one was never implemented.

There is an overarching objective to the story, in which you are trying to figure out where you are from or what you should be doing. The devs should have thought less about the where and the what, and more about the why; as in, why should I be interested? No Man's Sky is a badly implemented, prettier looking, Sci-fi version of the much better game... Minecraft. That game offers all the mystery, exploration, creativity, soothing repetitious activity, and wonder this game fails to.

VideoGame Needs work

There were a ton of technical issues at launch but that's to be expected with any game of this size on release day. After patching, I can play the game and it runs fine on my machine.

Aside from that, this game has problems IMO. Specifically:

• This might be an issue with the core concept of the game meaning it's unlikely to change, but...are we truly exploring? It seems like every planet already has outposts on it, and the sentinels seem omnipresent. I was hoping I would be the first person to see some of the planets in the game but that doesn't seem to be possible here.
• You can't do a search of the galactic map. So if you happen to jump a number of times away from a planet you have explored and you want to go back to it, good luck.
• No planetary map, which makes it difficult to backtrack to a particular area you want to revisit.
• Creature AI needs work. None of them seem to do anything particularly interesting other than mill about or attack on sight.
• Need a bigger variety of creatures. More insectoids and carnivorous plants would be cool.
• The inventory management puzzle. We need either more slots or items should have larger stack limits.
• Aside from inventory size and cosmetics, ships are practically identical.
• You burn 25% of your launch fuel every time you take off unless you're on a pad or in a space station. Twenty-five percent. How inefficient is that? So that is one of your few slots that will always be taken up by carbon or plutonium or what-have-you just to allow you to take off!
• It would be nice to find alien settlements with more than 1 or 2 inhabitants, or even towns (not asking for massive cities as I know that's not the direction the devs wanted to go, but small towns would help with immersion I think).
• I have seen a blurb on the official website stating that they might be adding player bases. This would be an excellent addition to the game.

All that said, this game is not terrible. I do like exploring and finding new species, and I've seen some lovely vistas and had a few fun fights with sentinels and pirates, but without more depth it started to get old fast. It needs a few quality-of-life improvements and some new activities/quests in order to live up to its potential.

ONE YEAR LATER: New content (like base building) has been added but basically none of the points mentioned above have been addressed.