- 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.