The result of the chaos
(This
review is spoiler-free!)
No Man’s Sky is finally here, after
all the problems and setbacks. So what’s my verdict on this experience?
Well, it’s far from perfect, but I
enjoyed my time with it.
What’s amazing about this game to me
is just how little most people, myself included, seemed to know about it in the
days leading up to release. Knowing I was going to buy it, I only looked at the
absolute basics about the game, avoiding lengthy gameplay demonstrations and
the like. So imagine my surprise on day 1 when I finally bit the bullet to
watch Jim Sterling’s video of the game, only to find that it was a survival
game.
Now, these are a real hit or miss for
me. I enjoy playing Minecraft’s survival mode every once in a while, although
it never really holds my attention for too long. However, I played an hour of
Subnautica, and got so bored that I couldn’t even be bothered to continue.
Unfortunately, survival, the main
aspect of No Man’s Sky, isn’t great. The opening few hours of the game are spent
foraging for crafting materials to fix your crashed spacecraft, and it couldn’t
be more agonizingly boring. Although each planet is randomly generated, they’ll
always have the basic materials you need to fix your ship, just in case some
new player starts there. Exactly where to find said materials are is another
question.
My first planet had radioactive air,
requiring me to manage two different life meters when I barely had enough
resources to manage both one and fix my ship at the same time. I spent the
first 2 hours of gameplay running up and down horribly ugly mountains coloured
like mounds of elephant poo, searching desperately for resources, all the while
being bored to tears. Not a great first impression.
The other huge problem is that your starting
inventory is smaller than a real life hiking backpack. You can only carry an extremely
small amount of gear at once, and what’s worse is that tools necessary to
survive also take up inventory space. If I had a unit for every time the game
told me my inventory was full, I’d be able to buy the fanciest ship in the
galaxy.
Fortunately, when you finally fix your
ship and launch into the cosmos, the game takes a leap in improvement. No Man’s
Sky is at its best when you’re exploring a colourful planet either from the sky
or the ground. The sense of discovery and exploration you get when discovering a
new planet or system is fantastic. I had lots of fun just wandering around new
places, admiring the visuals, creatures, and colours. At least, that’s what I when
I didn’t have to worry about collecting meaningless bits of ore to refuel whichever
tool of mine was currently malfunctioning.
No Man’s Sky feels the need to
constantly swarm your HUD with an onslaught of updates and notifications, more
often than not getting in the way of your experience. Whenever your life
support or toxic air filter goes down by at least 25% (which happens a lot, might I add), you’re greeted by a
robot voice who alerts you to what’s going on, as well as a bit of text right
in the middle of the screen. Similarly, whenever you accomplish something new
or get an achievement, the entire game grinds to a halt just to congratulate
you. You can’t interact with anything until the game’s finished giving you your
literal 15 seconds of fame, and in the early hours when you’re accomplishing
something new quite often, the game feels the need to pat you on the back and
slow down your quest way too much.
Going back to how great the
exploration is, I feel that I must need to congratulate Hello Games on their
accomplishment of creating such a massive universe to explore. There’s so many
planets here, it’s insane. Just one look at the galaxy map and how many planets
reside in there, and thinking about how small the team was that made this game
is, it’s kind of crazy. Good job, guys.
And now for the news you don’t want to
hear. Every planet is, aside from the weather and colour scheme, essentially
the same. I hopped around a sector, visiting each planet, and I came off
feeling that there wasn’t a single planet that was unique in any way, aside
from the initial excitement of “ooh, a snow planet!” They’re all littered with
the same types of resources (there’s rocks of every colour imaginable, but they
all turn into iron), and while it’s cool to see a large t-rex looking creature
walking across the horizon, the animals are ultimately just there to look
pretty. As far as I can tell, they don’t serve any other purpose, and more
often than not, it’s clear that they’re cobbled together from a large pool of
animal parts, resulting in some Frankensteinian beast. You can name the animals
(and plants, rocks, planets, solar systems, and anything else you can think
of), but once you realize that no one will likely ever visit this area of the
game and admire your discoveries, naming things sort of loses its luster. Still,
I enjoy naming the planets and quadrants. Naming things in video games is a
sort of a weird, simple joy I’ve had since I was a child, when I always named
all my different animals in Zoo Tycoon, so that’s fun.
Still, despite the planets being
arguably the same over and over again, you get a real sense of accomplishment
whenever you discover one, and going on a quiet stroll in a new world can be a
lot of fun. If you’re the type of person who picks a direction and just walks
that way in a game like Skyrim, you’ll love No Man’s Sky. When you find a
planet that isn’t just brown and grey slabs of mud endlessly, and actually has
trees, water, and other cool natural features, the visuals of No Man’s Sky are
very tranquil. The graphics don’t exactly push the PS4 to its limits (they look
like they’re from the PS3, but given how many planets this game needs to
render, it’s easy to forgive), but for what they are, I really like them.
The two other big features No Man’s
Sky touts are the trading and combat segments. Let’s just get this out of the
way quickly: the combat is awful. Both space and land battles are extremely
stacked against you, the aiming is horrible, often forcing you to flail around
wildly and hope you hit something, and you’d be better off just accepting your
death and then recovering your loot from your grave after respawning. That is
all.
As for the trading, this is where some
of No Man’s Sky’s visual novel aspects come in. Every once in a while, you’ll
bump into an alien of varying species who’ll either give you some gear or trade
you something. You don’t speak their language, but you can learn it through
various magical stones strewn across galaxies. I really like this! It’s kind of
frustrating to have to pick blindly which option you think will make the alien
happiest, but the idea of slowly learning their language and becoming friends
with them is really cool.
There seems to be some sort of lore
going on in the background, but it really feels like the type of story that
thinks it’s a lot smarter than it actually is. Hello Games is clearly taking
some influence from old sci-fi novels here, but your character’s occasional
musings as he zooms around this candy coloured universe are more than
pretentious. When presented with a triangular monolith, he goes on and on about
how it’s opened his eyes to the truths of the galaxy and how it’s revealed many
secrets to him. However, to the player, the monolith is nothing more than a
stone structure. It’s a Class A case of telling instead of showing.
And that’s No Man’s Sky. It’s a lot
simpler than I was hoping it would be, and there are several things about it I
dislike, but overall I had a positive experience with it. I’m sure I’ll go back
to play some more before too long, and discover even more planets. I think that
it might be better to rent this game before you buy it and see how you feel.
And if you ever run into a planet
called Panika, you probably shouldn’t land on it. There’s a crab there that
doesn’t like people messing with his stuff.
FINAL SCORE
7/10
Good
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