As a reviewer, there are only a handful of games that give me trouble when it comes to finding a proper stopping point. It’s incredibly difficult sometimes to find the end point of a game when there may truly be no ending to it.This is the case with No Man’s Sky.
No Man’s Sky is an experience where seeing everything is an impossibility. Not just in the confines of a review timespan, rather in terms one’s own lifespan. To give you some perspective on what I’m saying is the game is similar to actually exploring our own universe in relation to restrictions. We don’t have enough years in our life to explore every possible planet out there. It is just impossible, well, unless you’re an alien. Just assuming on that part, though.
Anyway, back to reality/earth/this review. No Man’s Sky brilliance lies in the experience of endless exploration and how far you want to take it. While I can’t say that everything promised to gamers was met by Hello Games, I can firmly say that the concept they set out on developing/creating was realized. Exploration, interaction and travel decisions are the main focus in this adventure. It’s the driving point to the game and it’s the reason you want to buy it. If you’re not interested in that reason, then you might want to pump the breaks on this. This title was not built for the Call of Duty mentality, where running and gunning is a necessity to keep one’s interest (nothing wrong with that, but this isn’t that particular cup of tea). Granted, there are other smaller reasons that help support and motivate the gamer to continue the journey in NMS, but No Man’s Sky’s focus is set firmly on providing you with a relaxing space simulation that plays the part as long as you want it to play it.
With that said, let’s get this thing going.
The game starts off on a default planet where you have crash landed. It forces you to go through a non-linear, non-obvious tutorial of the game through a series of onscreen instructions on how to work the navigation menu and repair your ship. You’re thrown into the fire right from the get-go, which is a bold move for a game that can get complicated quick, as this one does on occasion. It does start you off with the need to survive, which is one of the many reoccurring elements of this experience. On the way to repairing your ship, you’ll probably take in the beautiful landscape and begin to discover the need for two things: Gathering elements and crafting material.
I’ve never been a huge fan of crafting in any game. I’m all about story and the bells/whistles usually come in a firm second. Somehow, and I’m not exactly sure why, No Man’s Sky has me crafting like crazy. The simplicity of the element availability and the clear instructions might be the reason for the crafting attraction. Regardless of the reasons, it certainly is the key to progression and survival in this title, thus also the addiction that provides motivation to keep going. It works perfectly with the exploration of this title. For example, having your character thrown right into that mix from the beginning is a great way to understanding crafting’s importance to the rest of the game. Gathering things like iron from rocks that helps to repair damaged parts of the ship, such as its launching mechanism, provides importance to the exploration and survival process. Knowing that you can leave the planet and begin exploring other places provides added incentive to find, mix and craft elements. Now, once the launcher is repaired, the game forces you to locate plutonium, which is the key item to fueling your ship’s launching mechanism. Once that element is found and implemented, you might have to start building on the ship to make it faster, possibly by using a recipe you found in the wild or from an alien lifeform that requires a series of other elements. There’s a lot going on with crafting and gathering from the beginning of the game until the end. Again, it’s a huge part of the game’s enjoyment.
Now, the game, if you pull back and look at its most basic structure, is repetitive. Sometimes you’ll feel that way during the gathering/crafting process. It happens and it’s a fair argument for the naysayers out there on the interwebs. They’re not wrong. For a massive game like this to thrive/survive, you’re going to run into repetitive items/planets and things you might have seen so many times that you’re absolutely sick of them (looking at you iron). You go from location to location, be it solar system or planet, and you’re bound to find similarities that look like lazy game design, but the scope of the game keeps that in check. Discovering new recipes for items or improving your situation through crafting and creation of material will expand the game’s fun and possibilities. It’s a part of the game that works and is the reason why someone would want to keep going from solar system to solar system. As Forrest Gump put it best, “…you never know what you’re going to get”, which provides the will to keep moving forward and exploring. If that is your cup of tea, then you’ll certainly enjoy it. There are a lot of sick people out there that enjoy crafting/creating in games and they’re going to eat this up.
As for the actual elements and how you collect/store them, it all starts with a nice weapon – your mining and boltcaster (looks like a gun from Halo). The item mines rock and breaks locks, as well as shoots/kills robots/lifeforms, so be very careful with it (and watch out for wandering drones). Anyway, to collect elements you simply mine them by using the weapon and the elements will come to you as they break apart from their surface. The weapon can overheat, so be careful with that, though a recipe or two out there can prolong that from happening. The weapon’s existence in the game provides some sort of small action element to the gameplay, especially when drones or beings attack you. Mostly, though, the item will be used for mining purposes.
Speaking of mining, one of the worst frustrations of this game is storing those mined elements in your inventory. When you first start the title, you’re given limited slots to put the elements in. As soon as you fill up those slots, the game will allow you to keep mining, but won’t store any of the elements. You’re basically destroying good elements at the point. During exploration, you’ll find small mechanical shacks that will expand your inventory slots, usually at a price. The shacks are a Godsend to the gameplay and will save you quite a few curse words and annoying moments. Actively explore seeking these structures out on planets, as they’re pretty much everywhere.
Continuing with elemental menus, the menu system is incredibly inconvenient when it comes to using it. Organized? Yes. A pain to navigate through? Most definitely. While collecting isn’t much of any intellectual effort, outside of basic math and logic, you don’t get the same simplicity with the menu system’s structure. The menu is broken into three main categories: Exosuit elements, spaceship elements and weapon elements. You can move elements from exosuit to spaceship, especially when slots are in short supply, but the constant revisiting of these menus slows the gameplay down immensely — and you will visit this menu system many, many times. Honestly, this is the constant annoyance throughout the game that never goes away, even with additional slots (that just slows down how many times you get to visit them). An optional solution to help out things with this issue is the purchase of a new/bigger ship, which provides you with more cargo space. You can get cool ships with loads of space out there for a pretty penny, but be careful, though, because if you like something on your current ship (a spec’d out warp drive for example), it may not be on the new one, which means you’ll have to find/create it again for the new digs. Use your eyes and head on that part.
To help ease your decision-making, as well as the creation process of materials for your ship/suit/weapon, each trading station in space or trading post on a planet comes equipped with a galaxy wide universal trade center. This allows you to dump gathered elements to the universe at a price and also buy elements needed without having to return to a planet’s surface. It saves time and frustration, as well as gives you the opportunity to gather credits to purchase things, such as new ships. The monetary/trade system in place is simple, though the price of elements seems to fluctuate from solar system to solar system. For example, the price of gold in one place might be more than another. It seems to push/pull when the solar system has planets that are caked in gold or where gold is scarce. It’s interesting and I would love to see the algorithm behind it, though I’m sure Hello Games will not give up that information. If the trading posts don’t do it for you, running into aliens in the space station airlocks also brings about the opportunity for trade or for purchasing the alien’s ship outright, at the right price, of course. Anyway, that’s a bit about the monetary structure and the element trading system. It all works well and doesn’t get in the way of the gameplay, rather it adds to it, and it’s yet another motivating factor to keep playing the game.
Shifting focus just slightly, along the way on your exploration of the NMS universe, you’re going to run into alien beings who can either help, hurt you, or just downright ignore that you exist. They are scattered on planets and almost always guaranteed to run the space stations. For me, they help to make the repetitiveness of this game almost non-existent. Each instance of meeting or finding these beings, they will put you through a choose your own adventure scenario. Your response to them will dictate their hate/love for you, which will also affect how they deal business with you. These responses will also affect your progression with locked containers/doors and such scattered through the game. The more you succeed with the aliens, the better you’re going to be…especially when you run into special space stations out there (not saying anymore). If the aliens hate you, you’ll piss off their entire race, though slowly. If they like you and your response, they’ll help you out in various ways. Sometimes you’ll receive a recipe from them for a particular item or perk; sometimes you’ll receive an item from them. If you’re lucky, you’ll receive a language lesson from them that helps you translate what they’re saying. Didn’t I mention that above? *scans writing* Well, no time better than the present. You can’t understand alien lifeforms until you learn their language. There’s a lot of guess work in place at the beginning of the game, but as you start to uncover the lingo, the barrier becomes less burdensome. Anyway, learning about a new culture helps factor into the enjoyment of NMS. At the very least it gives the game some more dimension.
Staying with learning a new culture, you’ll periodically find monoliths, which are giant slabs of well carved rocks, that carry ancient information about whatever planet’s civilization existed there first. Sometimes you’ll have riddles that require you to choose an answer for a particular situation and sometimes it will simply offer the opportunity to gather information. In regards to the choosing part, sometimes you’ll encounter a ghostly being (you don’t see them – it’s all text driven) from the monolith, which will be creepy as hell, even in text form. For example, there was a monolith on one of the planets I explored that had a Gek (a beaked creature that looks like a frog and bird mated) spring out of it without its beak and it was screaming. I had the choice to run, ignore it or help it escape the monolith, as it seemed trapped. I helped it escape and…I was punished by the monolith. Apparently the ancient spirits keeping it in had no intentions of letting it go. Anyway, punishment usually comes in the form of life damage or simply not receiving anything (objects/language/etc.) from the monolith. Once you make a decision during this process, you cannot return to undo it. It’s a permanent process that really requires you to think carefully. There are some really bad consequences for getting the situation wrong and also some really wonderful rewards for being spot on (a new mining tool for example). Again, think before you choose.
The monoliths are the catalyst for the entire exploratory adventure, and something I’m giving zero information to you about, so take them seriously and seek them out. They are a huge part of the story and they will help you towards your journey to the center of your galaxy (end goal, by the way).
As for the other gameplay elements of No Man’s Sky, we’ll start with flying.
Half of the experience you’ll have in No Man’s Sky is directly from the cockpit of your spaceship. You’ll fly to bases in and out of space, such as trading stops that are huge structures flying above planets, then you’ll fly into the atmosphere of surrounding planets to explore and traverse the landscape. Once in awhile you’ll have to contend with space pirates who want the elements you have collected from the planets. You get a lot of flying with a little bit of dogfight to boot. This portion of the game gave me a sense of nostalgia, as it brought back some Wing Commander feelings that I haven’t felt since the late 80s. Flying, dodging and focusing on radar/screen, while maneuvering to avoid enemies, objects and finding clear a path to warp from solar system to solar system just made me giddy as hell. The flying is nearly perfect. Nearly.
There are two issues I had with flying. The first, and this is more of a frustration, is launching mistakenly off of a planet. If you press R2 too long when launching from the surface of a planet, then you’ll be ejected into space. No biggie, right? Well, no, it’s a biggie. The problem I have found is that when I’m trying to maneuver from resource to resource on a planet’s surface, it’s rather tough to find where you were if your ship gets pushed quickly into the sky. For example, I was on the hunt for a specific element last night to repair my warp engine and I found it on a planet I was exploring. The element called Iridium is in short supply when you do find it, meaning you have to collect a whole bunch to get enough to craft or repair anything, so jumping from one batch of Iridium to another is a must, as well as a dangerous procedure. You have to constantly re-launch the vehicle over and over again to get enough of the element, which provides a higher chance of losing a particular location that contains that rare element. It’s frustrating and no matter what I do, it keeps happening. So, be cautious with this portion of flight and willing to accept your launching fate when it happens, and it will happen.
The second frustration with flying is dogfighting. The gameplay design from the cockpit when it comes to flying is spot on where it needs to be when aerial fights begin. Locating enemies, targeting them and shooting them back into space dust from whence they came is where it should be in terms of design and control. The caveat to this perfection is when your shield goes down on your spaceship, which requires you to recharge it with an element in your menu system. I have found myself having to push the touchpad on the game controller, choose my shield, replenish it with an element and continue the fight. The problem? Well, the first problem is the time it takes to do it. The second problem is that the fight is still going on while I’m in the menu recharging my shield, which takes damage as I’m recharging it. To alleviate some of this frustration, NMS allows you to upgrade your shield through recipes and the creation of perks, but you still run into the same annoying problem with the menu getting in the way of the gameplay. Ultimately, the shield issue was manageable after a while, but it would be nice if I could just hit square or another button to punch that shield back up and use my element in macro fashion.
Flying aside, the actual exploration part of the game is a wonderful experience. When you’re on a planet, you feel like you’re in a different world. The planet girth in this game is gorgeous. You get a real sense of depth with these planets, uniqueness with their own set of planet attributes (some poisonous, some radiated, some just fine), changing weather situations pose issues on occasion and unique encounters with the beings that come with planets. It’s impressive to see the amount of random, yet planned detail that each exploration blooms. For example, there is a cave system on nearly every planet you explore. The amount of depth that shows up with most of these places is amazing. Some just keep going and going and run you the risk of getting lost or separated from your ship. Maybe that was just me, but eh. The only gameplay element missing in this exploration experience is the PlayStation VR headset. I was talking with another writer and we both agreed that would have taken this game to an entirely new level. Also, I’m pretty sure it would make people throw-up. Regardless, it would have been fantastic.
Beyond simple planet exploration, the game offers players the option to travel the universe, which contains an untouchable depth. When you use your hyper drive for the first time, you’ll fully understand how big this game is and how much time you will need to spend in order to take a lot of it in. Again, your lifetime probably won’t do it when it comes to getting through this game. It’s that huge. Anyway, seeing the star chart and your ability to jump from one solar system to the next and have the ability to get lost in direction is nothing short of amazing. It’s so big and completely mind blowing that Hello Games created this thing.
Coming back to planets, what surprised me the most about the game’s locations is how much detail Hello Games could include in the experience. While I might have an optimistic viewpoint on less ambitious titles on the PS4, I knew when I first saw the demo of this game a couple of years ago that there wasn’t a snowball’s chance in hell they could maintain their ambitious graphical plan without putting it on PC (which they did, but I’m sure they didn’t stray too far from the console version). I would have loved to see a herd of dinosaurs and wavy grass with bugs flying everywhere on all/any of the planets, but I’m sure the system would have handled that as well as the Super Nintendo might have with Sonic the Hedgehog — not at all. So, there were some visual sacrifices obviously made between that demo and final product, but the final product is still gorgeous. There are moments on some colorful planets where you get that wavy grass with smaller, spaced out (no pun intended) animals that hop around. You get those things and they add to the wonderment of the title. They certainly create a sense of smallness to the solar system you’re exploring. They help to magnify the size and scope of the game, especially when you make it back to outer space and look down on the world you just came from, as well as reinforce how vastly huge Hello Games has made the entire title. So, expect the graphical detail to be somewhere in the middle in comparison to the original plan, but the scope to spring from that effect of making the game much bigger than it might be.
Okay, before we go further, let’s just skip to the question that is most important to a majority of you — Is this game worth your hard earned money? Is it fun? Like I stated at the beginning of this review, all of this depends on what you’re expecting from it. For me, if I had paid for it, I would have been satisfied. It was what I expected it to be and little bit more. I was prepared to cast off into the giant Hello Games universe and prepared to explore alien planets over and over again. I didn’t expect the crafting to be as interesting or involved with the main gameplay, but I was pleasantly surprised by that portion of it. When I get home from a long day of work, I can pick this game up and just relax and explore. That is enough for me to be happy with it and it fulfills my expectations of it. Now, if you’re looking for an action title that is intense and puts your survival skills to the test, like maybe a KHOLAT does to an extent or a game like The Long Dark, then you’re going to be disappointed. Exploration with survival in the mix, not intense survival, is the purpose of this game. If you want that, then you’re going to enjoy it.
Anyway, let’s get to the summary, so I can get back to gameplay.
