No Man's Sky (2016)

I will just start that I think it's wonderful that Hello Games is still supporting and expanding NMS eight years after its debut without any subscription service in the background. Bravo!

That aside, I found NMS to be quite haphazard. It has resource collection, it has space combat, it has trading, it has base building, it has background lore and weird characters to talk to, towns to manage and it has many, many, many worlds....but.

The issue is I don't feel it gels together very well. A lot of the systems are very wide and varied (fishing! Gardening! Sending ships on missions!) but very shallow but they don't really connect to other things. I found the language learning cute but it became tedious. Same with jumping around planets to harvest various resources needed for more advances vehicles and buildings. After figuring out once how different materials are found, and how they can be used (brilliant exploration) having to go back to 15 times to planet X to harvest some Iridium (or what have you) is drudgery.

A lot of the side quests feel like busywork and the procedurally generated everything has a lot of samey-ness among the occasional refreshing bits (a planet where all the plants are wired beige spheres? Cool! After three of them? Boring). I much prefer a hand-crafted (or hand modified) environment that is interesting but smaller, like in Subnautica, to a practically infinite galaxy of repeating patterns. I also found that a lot of systems felt arbitrary and/or poorly explained. Again, this is probably a result of the game's long development period.

The main plot quests are intriguing, although they feel like later additions, as they "taught" me things I'd already done multiple times by then. No biggie. What is biggie is that after dozens of hours of play I completed a long story line quest that had sent me back to square 1. Maybe even square 0. At this point I got so mad I uninstalled the game and will probably never go back, not willing to repeat all those hours of running and collecting for a chance to see the main quest's end. The story and lore are strange and refreshing, if not really engaging.

Overall, I'm glad I'd played it, but I will never play it again.

I played this in 2016 and strongly disliked it. I played it again about every two years and warmed up to it. Now, with the fishing expedition in the Aquarius Update and everything else baked into it that I slowly explore i'm quite impressed how considerably improved this has become. It still has flaws, lots of bugs, lots of grievances, but there is just so much you can do in it now.

It's hard to have hate for a game like this, I don't know anything else quite like it (maybe Starfield, I haven't tried and almost started that instead but the fishing minigame had me) No Man's Sky is seriously industrious and enterprising attempt to perfect the classic Elite space-trading, combat, and exploration genre that dates super early in commercial VG history... What they've done here is very easy for someone like me to appreciate having played numerous games inspired in that vein... However, you can do so much more. Train pets, create alien farms (sort of), collect ships, command your freighter's expeditions, etc. and of course, go fishing for radcarp.

It makes me wonder when they'll stop but, I hope they never do. The multiplayer still is lame but the expeditions are fun, seasonal events that I keep enjoying returning to.

• Year played: 2021
• Playtime: just under 2 hours (refunded)

Here we go. This will be a long one.

So this game has a hell of a history with its notorious rocky launch and false promises, and like many I had kind of written it off. But it's been a couple of years, and I started hearing people talk about it again - saying that now it had a lot of the missing features that were promised on launch, and that it had really become a good game worth buying. It also just got a big new update adding creature taming and breeding, and had a half-off sale going on steam, so I thought it was as good of a time as any to jump in. I was really craving something to scratch the collect-craft-explore itch and was ready to put all preconcieved notions aside and sink my teeth into the game. But what I found was that there just wasn't anything there to sink my teeth into.

From the start, so many things just felt a little "off". You start the game by being shot through space, seeing planets whoosh by, in what I guess is a loading screen, but the game makes no indication to you of that. It just goes on and on for what feels like an absolute eternity. Several minutes passed and still no game, just space and planets. I have a pretty decent gaming rig and don't generally run into loading times this long, so I began to get confused and started trying to click on things. Maybe I was supposed to be doing something? Nothing happened. I tabbed out and started to google to see if I was doing something wrong. Nope. It's just a really, really long loading screen.

Eventually I got into the game and was plopped on a planet being immediately told that I was dying from radiation and needed suit repairs. I started collecting materials to do so, and after a few minutes thought the game would be more suited to a controller instead of mouse and keyboard, so I plugged mine in, but the game didn't recognize it. Okay, better save and reboot the game I guess. I popped open the options menu and found that I could not figure out how to save. There was an option for loading a save, but nothing for creating one. Fine, I guess that'll be introduced later on in the tutorial, I'll go without the controller for now.

I continued on for about another hour, following prompts by the UI to go there, gather that, repair this, and so on. All the while finding myself repeatedly taken aback by odd design choices and buggy behavior everywhere. The default field of view and motion blur settings were making me nauseous, so I kept trying to change them, but the game kept resetting them back to default when I exited the menu, despite saying it saved my changes. It eventually stuck, but it was frustrating nonetheless. The same thing happened again for the mouse sensitivity and some of the video settings that I tried to change.

Then there's the inventory and menu UIs, which are unintuitive and seem to be more interested in looking pretty than being functional. For starters, there's an irritating parallax effect, shifting around the thing you're about to click on just before you click on it, which I couldn't turn off. When I did finally figure out how to save (more on that later) and rebooted the game to try it with a controller, I was floored by how terribly implemented the controls were. In the game's menus, instead of typical controller-style selection, you're just given a cursor to move around with the joystick and it functions exactly like a (shitty) mouse. With poor precision on top of the parallax effect, this made it incredibly frustrating to click on anything, so I went back to mouse and keyboard.

But my frustration with the controls didn't end there. Everything in the game seems to be done by holding down a button instead of clicking once to interact or toggle, even when there's absolutely no need for there to be a delay. There's a setting in the menu to disable this for some things, but it isn't universal. Gathering materials is a matter of mousing over an object and holding a button to harvest - which in itself isn't particularly egregious, but where it gets really awkward is when you have multiple hold-to-activate things you're trying to do at once. It puts you in an awkward hand position and it's completely unecessary (not even to mention the accessibility issues with this). Further adding to the annoyance is that there's no easy way to tell if you've already scanned a particular creature without holding the visor down and getting close enough to hover over it. Minerals at least show their scanned status in the normal non-analysis view, but creatures don't, for some unknown reason.

Then we have the inventory, which is again packed full of absolutely bizarre design choices. The first and most obvious thing you notice is that while your inventory (or should I say inventories, because there are several) appears to be a standard grid, many of the slots are empty and unusable for no clear reason. The empty slots aren't all in a row or grouped together, but are seemingly randomly scattered across your inventory grid. At first I thought that maybe there was some kind of tetris-like inventory management with varying sizes and shapes of objects that I would need to do, so the unusable slots would provide a bit of an additional challenge for fitting things in there. But I never ran into any object that took up more than a single square slot, so that seems to not be the case (or maybe I didn't get far enough). It feels sort of like leftover UI from a feature that was meant to be something more complex, but was never finished. The controls for interacting with your inventory are also terrible, with the button mappings constantly changing depending on various context states like whether you've hovered over an item for a while or not.

At about an hour in, I had repaired my space suit, found my ship and begun repairing it, and was really wondering when the hell I would reach a point where I could actually save the game. I ended up googling it to find countless articles about the topic (clearly a sign of a well-designed UX) and found that the only way to save is by entering and exiting my ship. Apparently later on in the game, you can build a physical object in the world that serves as a save location. All of the articles recommended carrying around enough materials to build (and afterwards, destroy) one of these objects any time you go exploring. I can't even express how idiotic I find the concept of being forced to build and destroy something just to save the damn game. I'm not sure if the devs were overly concerned about save-scumming and thought saving at any time would be too easy or what their reasoning was, but regardless I find it completely incomprehensible and immersion-breaking, not to mention inaccessible and inconsiderate of people who might need to exit the game quickly.

By the time I reached the 90 minute point, I realized I just wasn't really enjoying myself. Even putting aside my frustrations with the controls and UI, there just wasn't anything compelling about the gameplay loop. I was nearly two hours in and still being hand-held and told exactly what to do by constant pop-ups and map markers. The resource gathering wasn't interesting in any way - all materials are gathered in the exact same way with no variety: walk up to it and hold down a button. I was excited when I got the analysis visor to start exploring the surroundings and the variety of plant and animal life around me, so I spent a few minutes scanning, only to be presented with the game telling me that I had already discovered and scanned all seven of the different creature species on the entire goddamn planet. It immediately gave me the feeling that the game was about as deep as a puddle. Any enthusiasm I had for exploring was promptly squashed, since I'd barely walked a hundred feet on this planet and apparently already found everything there was to find. Procedurally generated games can sometimes have this problem, but there are certainly ways to make exploration interesting regardless. No Man's Sky, however, does none of that.

It was at this point I realized that I was fast approaching the 2-hour cutoff point for refunding the game on steam and had to decide whether to continue. I know there is a whole lot more to the game that I didn't get to experience - hell, I didn't even make it off the first planet - but after a frustrating, awkward, and frankly quite boring first 90 minutes, I found myself entirely uninterested in finding out what else was out there. So I returned it. I still give it more than 1 star because the game obviously has a lot of potential and wasn't unplayable by any means, it just wasn't for me. I trust that if I had made it through the initial slog and gotten accustomed to its idiosyncracies, there is a good game in here somewhere. But I'm just not patient enough to find it.

Intro

NMS is a game in which you grind resources, explore planets, build bases, upgrade equipment and do bare bones quests.

The Good

• Some of the planets look nice and have cool things on them.
• Freighter salvage missions have a creepy "Aliens" feeling to them.
• Having to learn alien languages is a neat idea.

The Bad

• Crappy console controls.
• Sometimes still makes you hold buttons even if you turn those off in the settings.
• It launches in an inescapable "load save" menu (i had to use Alt+F4, wtf).
• Starbases don't mark the two sections. I always forget which is which.

The Ugly

You know it's bad when i need more headers.

Lack of content

There is very little actual content to interact with. Every starbase i saw was exactly the same, with very minor differences in the decoration. Every uninhabited shelter has two buildings which are always exactly the same with only a couple of different versions. Every monolith and other related structure is always the same with a handful of variations.

The same goes for so many aspects of this game. I've played this for 13,5 and 6+ hours and i constantly saw the exact same objects. How hard would it be to even just randomise building placement? To assign different container locations on the walls and generate those randomly? The constant repetition makes the game feel fake and empty. It doesn't help that buildings sometimes spawn half in the air.

Travel sucks

Most of this game involves travelling and grinding. Travelling across a planet is incredibly tedious because if you want to go somewhere far you have to fly back into space, lock on to your destination and enable pulse drive. You do this over and over and over and over again. Even worse is how this has a resource cost, because of course it does. And travelling to a new system is even worse because you have to grind resource A, put them into a processor powered by resource B to get resource C so you can build consumable Y. Why would you make travelling incredibly annoying in a game where the main purpose is exploration? That's like making players in Battlefield manually refill and load bullets before they can actually fight.

Tiny inventory

You get dozens and dozens of different items right off the bat and your inventory space is severely limited. Eventually you'll probably get a Hauler ship with lots of space and an item teleporting upgrade, but it's still all so pointless. It makes the game so annoying because you spend half your time wondering what items to throw out to make room. Even in the "creative" mode (basically godmode) you have to deal with this nonsense.

The truly atrocious

Grindy, grindier, No Man's sky

I've played some pretty grindy games in my day but NMS really takes the cake. You need resoures to build stuff. To get them you need resource to power your laser. To exist you need to power your life support. Basically anything involves tedious busywork. That would make sense in a game focused on survival, not in the "normal" game mode of an exploration and building game.

Conclusion

I was looking forward to playing this. I love games that involve exploring, building and fighting like X3 or Fallout 4. And even though i hate this game i can still feel it call to me because it has so much potential. Now it's just awful.

I tried both the normal and creative mode. Normal gets annoying because of the grinding and the other flaws. Creative gets boring because nothing matters. Enemies don't even acknowledge your existence. It honestly hurts my brain to wonder why in the five years since release Hello Games has never managed to come up with some sort of mix of the two. Heck, let people pick the aspects they like. Give them options.

Combine that with some more hands-on planet building and it could be a good game. Now it feels like some abandoned MMO - complete with its own shitty, fake-looking hub (the Anomaly). It's so very sad.

Space exploration, base building, alien creatures, what could go wrong? Procedural generation, that's what. The designers could have crafted 5-15 beautiful and interesting planets with varied biomes. But instead we've got an infinite number of randomly generated planets, most of which inevitably wind up boring and empty.

So prepare to spend hours and hours and hours searching for a pleasant planet for your home base, only to find that once you've found one and started started building, you're in a constant struggle with your inventory size, the game's confusing mechanics, and refueling everything you own or use. Can't find a particular material on your planet? You'll have to fly off of yours, but oh wait no launch fuel. Oh wait no hyperdrive fuel. Oh wait can't find a planet with the material. Oh wait your mining beam is out of fuel. Oh wait you're out of storage space. It all feels much more tedious than in other survival games.

And once you've built your base, a couple cool vehicles, you realize - there's nothing of interest to actually be explored and there isn't much story to speak of. There are barely any threats to your health and safety, and the variations among different kinds of flora and fauna basically amount to: wow, a vaguely cow-shaped thing with longer legs than the last cow thing.

That's my 10-hr story with No Man's Sky. I tried. I really did. And I wanted to like it. Some people do find this infinite randomly generated space exploration thing interesting. But for everyone else, go play Subnautica, The Forest, Conan, Ark or The Outer Worlds, Mass Effect, Astroneer - really any other survival or space game instead.

This is one of those endless games for which a definitive review would be impossible. So I will state here that I originally picked up that game after the Next update and quickly bounced off it after about 10 hours. Progress seemed to take forever, the story wasn't grabbing me, gameplay was repetitive. It's a beautiful game for sure. I will also note that I had 0% hype for this game when it came out and watched its disastrous launch with amusement. By the time I actually picked up the game it was $15 and there seemed to be enough there in my wheelhouse to give it a shot. Not hugely disappointed when it turned out to be a dud.

But as it turns out, this game has a tendency to radically change between updates. I was intrigued to hear that Beyond would introduce support for PSVR, a novelty I quite enjoy tinkering around with. VR mode seems to have made all the difference for me. Rejoining the game in November after a number of quality of life patches had already been introduced and my initial concerns about the game resolved certainly contributed to my positive experience.

I get motion sick easily and the Hello Games team really did their research on how to minimize that experience for players. Using teleport for movement and smooth screen transitions helps a lot and I find I can play for a few hours at a time without needing a break. The custom UI for menus and ship controls in VR for the Move controllers add a new level of immersion.

In VR, this is a really fun, immersive space sandbox to play around with. I've been tinkering with it for a few weeks and find myself unwinding at the end of the day by putting on some chill music and working on my base, or exploring new planets, or working toward the main storyline.

I'm still not sure I'd recommend the base game by itself, but I'd call it an essential title for a PSVR library. It's one of the most thoughtfully designed titles on that platform.

In 2016 I was excited to play NMS when in launched on PS4. I played it for 16 hours the first week. I was one of the people whose enthusiasm quickly turned to bitternes for the game not being what I thought it should be. I ended up trading it back in shortly after that. I came to the realization that although the game was very pretty in the end there was little to do other that “just survive”. Two years later the “Next” expansion came out and I decided to try it again. I’m now close to 60 hours in the game and couldn’t be happier with it. There are a ton of objectives to dive into.Base building, owning freighters and fleets, land vehicles, individuals missions, multiplayer, community events, and a reworked story (still prett light, but better).

The game is now all about picking the tasks you want to complete and chasing them down. The universe seems far more alive now than last time. There are more friendly NPC aliens waving at you, more ships flying by, and fleets that warp in next to you with garbled radio chatter.

If there was ever a game worth giving a second chance it’s this one. The base of the original game is still there it’s just filled out better now.

It was ugly, it was boring and controversial. Then, Hello Games decided to take the Game and make it to the Game they promised before release. They updated it over 2 years. Improved Graphics, trading system, more ships, more features, better Planets, Base building, Multiplayer, Missions.

It's not finished, maybe and hopefully they will never stop adding things to this game, because it is already huge and so much fun, how is it with even better planets? With even bigger systems? More Aliens?

After the recent updates, this is just a huge, beautiful Universe Survival Sandbox. This is the Space Game I ever wanted.

(Review from a month after the game released, not to date to recent game updates)

TL;DR

A super chill game that looks pretty and fun because it doesn't have a goal

General Thoughts

So most people were VERY upset about this game; because it was really hyped up by gaming media, the developers talked it up like it was going to change gaming forever, and many people felt like the developers promised features that didn't actually end up in the game. I don't and didn't care about any of this. I played the game with basically zero knowledge about it basically because coworker suggested it to me. With zero expectations, the game was pretty amazing. It honestly made me feel like no other game has made me feel - the sense of exploration, discovery, loneliness.

The Good

Graphics/Art

I really like the art style. The stylized graphics make me think that this game will look good for a while. The game is very colorful, which is a nice breath of fresh air. The style of the plants and animals allow for some interesting looking things

Sense of Scale

The game feels very big, and it does really make you feel like you are in the universe and there's actually a whole universe for you to explore. That being said, the actual planets felt pretty underwhelming, until you install the big animals/plants mods. With these, the game feels awesome, since you can land on planets with giant spiders and large forests and it makes you feel small.

The Not So Good

Repetitiveness

After about 10ish hours of playing the game, it felt pretty repetitive. Finding a new planet and seeing the same deer/blob/crab thing but with just a slight modification will get boring after a while. If there were more variety in the game, it would be more interesting for long: more animal variety, more planet geography variety, maybe different biomes on a single planet.

Although controversial, I think this game is brilliant, and I'd like to take a moment of your time to justify why I think you should play this game.

I bought No Man's Sky near enough as soon as it was released in the UK. Back when this game was released it was in an even worse state than many believe it is in now. There was just one type of currency, no base building, and no real narrative. yet, I still liked the game even then.

The reasons why I love this game probably help distinguish why certain people are not fond of it. I bought this game not expecting a strong narrative, I bought this game not expecting multiplayer or base building (although, I was slightly gutted when I first bought it and there was no co-op). I went into this game with extremely low expectation levels, I went into this game with just one wish for it to fulfill; to let me travel and explore the universe at my own will.

Sure, if there had been an amazing non-intrusive story then I would have appreciated that and the same goes for all the other features listed above. But, the game live up to my rather low expectations of just being an adventure space simulator. Now, since then, the game has recieved countless free updates. We now have a bare bones multiplayer which should become what everyone expected initially - full fledged co-op. They have added a more fleshed out economy for trading, buying ships and weapons now all feel like important decisions to make thanks to the added feature of rescourse slots etc. You can purchase fraiters and store all of your scavenged material there if you wish, or you can find a planet to call home and build a base to store your materials. The universe map is breathtaking to look at and the creativity/intelligence that went into designing and making the games is noticeable at times like these.

Yes, it is true that you spend a lot of time scavenging for parts and crafting, you spend a lot of time flying and discovering wild life/planets. The game feels very much like a survival simulator (you have to fuel your ship up, your guns require fuel, as does your exo suit). Ultimately, really, the game is a massive RPG survival simulator in space. You're very much left on your own, rarely encounting other human or sentient alien beings (apart from animals). Do I think it's worth full price (£30-40) and am I going to pretend like the game wasn't advertised to be something bigger? No. Do I think it's worth playing but deserves a bit of tolerance from the player? 100% Yes.

Ultimately I think it depends on what kind of gamer you are, this game is for the people who like to get away for a few hours a week and explore on their own in solitude, the game can be beautifully lonely and melancholy sometimes, other times it can be bright and colourful. Sure it needs some work for it to become the game that a lot of people expected it to be, but even in it's current state it still provides me with great doses of escapism every time I choose to play it.

The lesson learned from NMS is definitely about over-hyping a game, especially such a new and untested concept as this was supposed to be.

I found it unwieldy and repetitive. There was little to keep my interest after a few hours of playing. The control layout was not intuitive (for me personally) and made things awkward.

I did enjoy the concept of finding new species and naming new, undiscovered worlds, but it got old quick with no other aspects to grow on.

Oh, boy. This game caused some polarization, huh? My personal take is "mostly positive", but I'm very aware of the big problems.

Some backstory: When I first heard of this game I was cautiously intrigued, I enjoy adventure/exploration. The more than came out though the more it sounded like a "Minecraft in Space" and not to go on a tangent, but I never could get into the Minecraft-style games. I want a narrative, or just a goal to work at, so this lowered my opionin of No Man's Sky. I am a few days into play, but I have picked up some story elements. The plot isn't too present, mostly helping in tutorial stages, but the lore from the 2001 monoliths are engaging enough to make me want to learn the languages and piece the history together, but I've a disposition to playing "archeologist". That, and alien interactions are the high points for me.

Now the low points. I don't think 'hype' hurt this game as much as 'poor marketing', follow me on this. A lot of No Man's Sky was kept very mysterious up till release. I was constantly wondering, "is there a story, isn't there?", "how multiplayer is it?", "how present's the survival element?"and so on. Hello games never giving straight answers. I get not wanting to spoil your whole game, but there's being selective & being obtuse. I had no idea what No Man's Sky was, why would I buy it? And I think this game'd catch a lot less flak if they released it with a $40 or $30 price.

But after seeing some streamer footage I did choose to take this adventure into space. It's a rather shallow journey. The planets look gorgeous, believe me, but most are devoid of animals, the mining is busy work, the UI is poorly implimented, and the space combat is iffy [but I may attribute that to operator error]. I know they wanted to give us 10 quintillion planets and what not, but I'd say the galaxy would feel just as big with 10 trillion planets, especially if it'd give time to improve the much flimsier parts of gameplay.

I know I've seemed negative, but I do fully intend to play No Man's Sky till I've figured out the lore and swindled with all the alien traders. While it can get tedious, there's that allure of exploring space that keeps pulling me back in.

3/10

Before I complain, let me just say that I don't really think hype played into this because while I was unbelievably excited at the initial announcement, anything that came afterward tapered my expectations a lot. At some point, I was unsure about this game, and I just wanted something that was merely "good." Also, this is a small team that took an ambitious route so I admire that; I even respect certain technical achievements, considering said small team. In the hands of a gigantic and talented team, with no video game industry bullshit involved in the creation, No Man's Sky might have truly been something special.

Alas, I can't do this anymore. I haven't even put the hours into it that some people have, by any means, but I'm so bored by this. Bored is a common word in reviews and I can't separate myself from it, forced to parrot what others are saying. But it wasn't always like this.

I was digging the way it handled and looked like Destiny, though on a smaller scale. At the beginning I felt awe, like somehow this small team created an illusion of being a AAA title (not that only AAA games are good because that's sorely untrue). Then I realized that they did create an illusion. No Man's Sky is smoke and mirrors: they hid behind the however many quintillion planets and populated them with... nothing. Sounds cool, but it isn't cool.

It doesn't take long to figure out that the procedurally generated planets don't have much action or anything to do. Sure, there are monoliths, aliens to talk to, and a few other places to explore, but that's all there is. Other gamers have said that they've experienced some great things like getting married, but what does it even mean? There's no substance to any of it. There are plenty of monsters and ores to find, or caves, or buildings, but they're very similar and don't entice the player. It didn't take long for me to get sick of travelling along and attempting to find things. Which makes exploration unbearable, and isn't that the point?

The survival mechanics aren't nearly as bad as I thought they'd be, which is refreshing. They exist but they aren't that intrusive. It's easy to find the multiple things you need to keep yourself going, but I did get sick of going to planets to try to find them (even if they are plentiful in most cases), so I'd end up buying whatever I could. What I thought might be the worst aspect of the game ended up being inoffensive.

The inventory management kills any desire to explore, as well. You can only carry finite resources in both your ship and on your person, and you start with such little space that my journey consisted of trying to find upgrades to increase it, or get money to buy another ship that can hold more. It's hardly rewarding nor reason enough to venture off the beaten path, because it was such a poor decision to make it all so limited. Some may argue that this forces you to adapt to the game and be smart, but no, it's just a drag: it doesn't add anything or make me smarter. It just makes me go into my inventory and destroy things. Yay.

I hate to give a game like this a 3 but I just don't like it. If a game feels like a chore than it's time to quit. I am quitting now.