No Man’s Sky Review
I’ve seen things you wouldn’t believe…unless you too have No Man’s Sky.

First things first, for clarification. Being a nerdy gamer about sci-fi and space, this game right off the bat appealed to me simply because it was sci-fi and in space. Growing up watching Star Trek: The Next Generation I have a love for being in space and exploring, seeing sights no one else has seen, meeting aliens and just trying to survive in space.
From the get-go about hearing about this game it peaked my interest, “we want to make you feel like you entered the world of sci-fi,” was there “tag line” for this game. That was an interesting take on advertising a game since other games, regardless of type, are “blow up this guy, find this thing then blow it up, and also blow up whatever you feel like. EXPLOSION!!!” And before you go “are there no explosions?” yes there are explosions. I just mean in the sense that usually a game is advertised as an action movie and you’re the titles hero. Mass Effect, being my favorite game series, is an example of that: “Chase the bad guy, explosion, get the hot girl, save the day.”
With all that being said, as many times I saw trailers or people saying “OMG THE HYPE TRAIN!” all I kept hearing was that line “entering a sci-fi world” regardless of what I watched. I don’t follow hype, I mean I see where it’s going but I’m not like “AHH I’M ON THE TRAIN, GO FASTER!” Don’t get me wrong, I’m human I can fall for it sometimes but I tend to look at any game and see it as “is there something in this game I want to do? Will I like doing said ‘something?’ Can it keep my interest past 30 minutes to an 1 hour?” From what I saw, the answers to all that was “Yes.” But as you will see later, that’s about as long as I liked it.

I shall call him Kellog

So with all that being said, when I first started No Man’s Sky…ignoring the default 30fps limiter which I instantly changed upon finding it…I honestly felt like I was in a sci-fi movie/world/what-have-you. My ship disabled and needing repairs, having to walk around and scavenge for parts to fix it with the ultimate goal being get off the ground and into space. This whole opening is not only to give you the sense of “you need to help yourself” but also the basic tutorial. “Find this to fix this, activate this to do that” and so on. It is defiantly not you typical tutorial since it’s not holding your hand and you can indeed start on a horrible, hostile planet where everything, including the weather, is trying to kill you and die very quickly. I was fortunate to start on a simple slightly warm planet that let me walk around with little worry minus the random “dog squirrels,” yes dog squirrels is the best description I could come up with, that would come along and bite me. Without any upgrades running is truly short and pointless and shooting takes forever. Once upgrades are put on, you feel like you have an overpowered pistol that could blow up a small moon. “Death Star pistol” if you will.
Meeting your first animals, again minus the dog squirrels, I had that “David Attenborough” moment where I wish he could narrate in my head what I’m watching cause a lot of times it felt like I needed it. In all honesty, I wish he was there just to pronounce the default names of…well everything in the game cause they’re really long names and they’re hard to retain that I just don’t anymore. It’s easier just to say “hey that place” or “dog squirrel” or “flubber squid” or “deer turtle” or anything you think it might be.

David, please narrate this.

(Minor Spoilers)
I haven’t finished the game, taking my time but the basic story is there is some kind of “power” or “entity” somewhere that has left “bread crumbs” along the way for a “traveler” (you and others before you) hinting to what “this” all means. Each and every planet has Sentinel robots that guard said planet from being harvested (resources) and generally want you to leave the planet alone in every way. Depending on the planet, they vary on how defensive they are. One planet they might completely leave you alone to other planets shooting you on sight with there biggest guns. No one knows where they came from or why they do this, one race respects them and tries to work with them, another wants to blow them all up. Either way the overall story is that you (can) be drawn to figure out what is going on and the overall story of trying to figure out what’s at the center of the galaxy and what this “Atlas” is that has left you clues.
(End of Spoilers)

The game always opens with you flying through the galaxy and seeing what other people have discovered. (The faint text on the left)

Of course the above story doesn’t need to be followed at all. You can go straight into space and start blowing up asteroids or stay down on the planet and just mine everything in sight to make money. Or instantly start blowing up any ship you see because why not your a pirate right? But I would suggest following a little bit of the story not just for the story but since as it progresses you get upgrades that really help you survive and fight and trust me: YOU WILL NEED IT.
The game is focused heavily on exploration so if you’re expecting anything like jumping into your ship and instantly fighting the dark side or fighting with battalions of aliens to fight off the “evil” sentinels, you’re looking at the wrong game here. To sum up this game, it is an “exploration/survival” game. Yes you will fight off pirates, yes you will fight off giant walker robots who are pissed you’re stealing there planets resources, but if you know what’s good for you, you will try and avoid that cause in doing so you are using said resources just to stand toe-to-toe with said things. And if you want to get out of your starting system/planet, you will need those resources.

The vistas are very beautiful.

The overall game is good, it’s enjoyable. There is no rush to get something done other than your own rush you feel when playing a game. The only time limit in the game is when the sentinels catch you and start calling for help. If you don’t kill them or escape there sight in time they call for tougher units to kick your ass. Extreme planets will hurt you very quickly if you haven’t upgraded your suit but luckily your ship doesn’t get hurt while on planets so you can explore around it while an ice storm quickly eats away at your suit then jump into your ship to recharge everything and then do it again.

When you have no room even on a bigger ship

There are no actual “missions” of any kind to pick up, even side missions. It’s strictly up to you and what you want. Once I had my gun and suit to a decent level of upgrades, I wanted a new ship and my only mission then was to make as much money as possible to get an upgraded ship because my starter ship was just…lets just say not enough for me. Get use to your computer saying “No slots in suit/ship inventory.” That will happen A LOT! And when you’re mining gold you hate hearing that.
When you die, depending on where you are…killed in your ship or killed on the ground…you loose resources on you but you get all upgrades, gun, and ship back as they are. You just simply have to go back to your “grave” to pick up what you lost. So it’s a very forgiving game in that sense.

Seeing beauty like this sure helps you get lost in the moment.

Space combat I am not entirely a fan of. It must be because I’m so use to Elite Dangerous’ way of space combat that flying in an arcade way as No Man’s Sky feels “off” to me. It’s not bad, I’m just not use to it. So with that being said, I suggest putting upgrades to defense because you’ll need it. You’ll be spending most of your time just trying to get the front of your ship pointing at the bad guy which feels really slow and cumbersome but that might be I don’t have any upgrades to maneuverability. Also once you’re in a combat, you have no choice, you must fight because you can’t run away or jump away. Running away may be possible if you get upgrades but from what I’ve seen whenever bad guys are near you your ship is slowed so you can’t run away until they’re dead.

Above was written at the time of playing early on, the rest is later on.
Now for all the bad, it goes down hill from here, prepare yourself.

The elephant in the room: as far as I’ve seen there is no multiplayer. I didn’t even know about that possibility until a couple weeks before the game launched. I thought all this time it was single player so I liked the idea it had multiplayer and thought “hey cool, someday my friends and I can play together” but now that is all a ‘fantasy land’. And seeing them go on national television and say ‘there is multiplayer’ only for that to be a complete, total bullshit lie and a giant middle finger to all the people wanting this game and indeed a giant middle finger to the entire gaming community who were ever directly promised something to them and never got it because ‘they were just selling the idea of the game, not what it actually had.’ You can not like a game because you don’t like how it runs, or plays, or just what you have to do in it or genre of game, but when you’re promised something again and again and again but it turns out to not be true…I can’t explain how much of a giant middle finger that is to everyone. They could defend themselves as they did just before the launch and say ‘it might not be the multiplayer you want’ (PCGamer article) when all this time before it’s been “yes yes yes” is extremely confusing.  But then it flatly doesn’t say “no multiplayer at all, stop thinking it has multiplayer, we made that up completely, it doesn’t have multiplayer, IT DOES NOT HAVE MULTIPLAYER, times a million,” it says ‘it’s very relaxed, don’t think of it as such, it’s not the game you imagined.’  When the perception of the game, and the promise of that has been around for…how long?…you can’t just get rid of it with some simple words.  If it had no multiplayer, YOU SHOULD’VE SAID THERE WAS NO MULTIPLAYER.  It’s like custom ordering you’re car on the internet and it saying “it will have everything you need” then the day before delivery they send you a message “it’s not the type of car you’re thinking of” for the car to arrive at your door with no tires or engine.  When you complain they say it’s your fault for thinking a car they promised comes with everything came with everything.

This is the closest thing to a mission you’ll get. It’s optional, you don’t have to, but a free ship is a free ship.

The PC version is buggy, it’s advised until a patch comes along to fix it, to set your framerate limit to 90 FPS and V-Sync on if you want it to run at 60 FPS (if you have a 60fps monitor that is) because if you set the limit to 60, it will be less than that because of engine restrictions. In other words, when set to 60 the game tries to keep it under 60 (between 40-50), while when it’s set to 90 with V-Sync on it will “naturally” restrict itself to your monitors refresh rate without the engine trying to keep it lower than that. The game does chug on whatever settings you put to it, from what I can see it seems to be my AMD CPU (who knew) causing some problems right now which they’re addressing. And there does seem to be some kind of memory leak because between 1 and 2 hours of playing it will “hit a wall” out of no where and run at less than 15 fps which of course is unplayable and will require you to restart the game to fix.

Told you, flying eel fish

I personally enjoyed the game, at first. But once I realized there was going to be nothing different at the next system except slightly different looking animals, the same aliens, the EXACT same multiple choice options to find something from a interface, the same “already found” upgrades that I keep getting, and upon looking up the basic plot, the painful “restart” of the story to make the whole game give you just another giant middle finger to go along with the no multiplayer aspect. If you’re just looking to walk around and enjoy the scenery and not focus on the limitation then I’m sure you can enjoy it, I got so annoyed/mad after awhile that I uninstalled it. Having every once in awhile to engage pirates and kill them or die with no way out is very annoying especially when you have to constantly go back and forth between fighting and recharging your shields, there is no hotkey to do it automatically. No one comes to help you, and if you’re trying to help out some local freighters and one of you’re shot accidentally hits them, they’re just as happy to shoot you along with the pirates with no “that was a stray bullet, no worries I won’t shoot you” or “I’M SORRY” button to make them forgive you.

But with all that being said above, the promises lied about and ‘overhyped-ness’ of the game has defiantly killed it.  It may have launched as the biggest of the year, but I have a feeling the only mentioning will see of this game in the future is “remember that game they said would have stuff and didn’t?”  The only plus about all that is that luckily the game can be modded and maybe the modding community will give us things to make the game worth buying after all this fiasco. The autosave system is a pain since it only saves after you get out of your ship or find a “save beacon.” So if you’ve been walking for miles and miles on a planet then fall through the map (like I did) and reload last save and you end up on the station you were at an hour ago, you’re shit out of luck since there is no direct “save” or “save on exit” option in the menu.

I would suggest only getting it when it’s on sale, defiantly not worth $60 but defiantly worth uninstalling.  Now if only Steam offered refunds regardless of playtime, that would be nice.

BECAUSE GORILLA DOG WAS ALL I COULD THINK OF…

Written by: Ozzy

Dreamer, optimist, sci-fi lover, Trekkie, caring supporter, loves GOOD music, loves a good story, laid back, has a thing for Aussie accents, and an avid gamer for fun.