REVIEW

No Man’s Sky Review

by Ford James, August 29th, 2016

Since the first unveiling at VGX 2013, No Man’s Sky instantly captured the hearts and minds of gamers across the world. Winning countless awards years prior to release, players were truly infatuated with the beautiful world that Sean Murray and the guys at Hello Games were proposing. The sceptics amongst us however noticed a trend; in every interview, every trailer, every time the game was talked about, there were rarely any specifics mentioned. Questions like “What do you actually DO?” weren’t answered until the game was actually released, Sean himself said in multiple interviews that multiplayer and player vs player combat was in the game, but that turned out to be an outright lie. It’s endured one hell of a development journey but now that the game is finally in the hands of the public, our review looks to see if it lives up to the hype.

There’s over eighteen quintillion planets, 18,446,744,073,709,551,616 to be precise. Each and every single one of them is supposedly unique, with various landmarks and alien monoliths amidst the procedurally generated terrain and often wacky creatures inhabiting them. It’s nigh on impossible that the entire player base throughout the life span of the game will visit them all. Statistically, it’s unlikely you’ll land on any two planets that are remotely similar. Unfortunately, that’s not the case. With 18 hours played, only half of the planets I’ve landed on have had any fauna whatsoever, while there have been quite a few completely barren environments with the odd sentinel drone surveying its domain. Sure, the rock formations will look different and one planet might have a red tint with an incoming storm compared to the previous one with grey skies, but ultimately it’s dull. Empty wastelands with no minerals to mine and a lack of activity isn’t an interesting place to explore.

Conversely, the planets that are teeming with life are a joy to behold. Vibrant colours, the random assortment of limbs thrown together to create the variety of creatures and the mountainous terrain makes exploring on foot very fun indeed. No Man’s Sky has always been about the exploration and discovery, from trailers and interviews to the first sentence of the games about page: “No Man’s Sky is a game about exploration…” So why are only half of the planets actually interesting to explore? Grinding through the crap planets until you reach somewhere remotely fascinating isn’t fun; it’s boring.

Despite stumbling across some utterly adorable amalgamations like the little fella below, it soon becomes apparent how the procedurally generated creatures work. There’s essentially different categories of body parts, with each living being consisting of a randomly picked feature from the categories. Similar to how the character creation works in The Sims, with a lot more variety. It’s like Lego on another level, which unfortunately doesn’t work great as you start to recognise the different limbs from previous critters and beasts, breaking the immersion. Combined with the fact that the elegant dinosaurs and rampant lizards seen in some of the original trailers are nowhere to be seen, you’re often left laughing at the monstrosities rather than marvelling at the beauties. And whilst all of these creatures are unique in appearance, there’s two distinct categories of behaviour; they’ll either run up to you and try to nibble on your shins, or run away from you until you feed them and they become friendly. There’s no depth, every creature is a simple re-skin of the one you saw just over the hill or in an entirely different galaxy.

There’s also three “intelligent” lifeforms that inhabit the entire No Man’s Sky universe, although each solar system is usually home to just one. The Gek are smaller reptilian-esque beings with beaks, the Korvax are robotic entities that strongly resemble the members of electronic duo Daft Punk, while the Vy’keen are slightly more humanoid warrior race, albeit often with horns and tentacles on their faces. You can improve your reputation with each faction by successfully adhering to their requests, such as gifting them the right material or making an important decision for them, but you won’t actually be able to understand them until you’ve visited enough knowledge stones to learn enough of their language – everything they say will be complete gobbledygook until you know enough to piece things together.

Trading is the other key aspect about the other intelligent races. There’s often a galactic trade terminal inside the research centres and labs you find scattered across the universe for buying and selling items, and you can trade with the various pilots that land their ships in space stations and trading posts. You also have the option to buy their ship off them for a considerably large amount of units, if it has a larger inventory than your own. There’s no way to upgrade the size of your own ship outside of that though, despite other aspects being able to be upgraded like the efficiency of your weapons and how quickly you consume fuel. You also never see the other races walk about, you either speak with them at their desk in the laboratories or jump on the windshield of their ship like a yob on a police car in order to interact with them. It makes each planet feel incredibly lonely despite the existence of NPC’s, as they’re little more than talking cardboard cut-outs that don’t interact with the world in ant interact with the world in any way.

Perhaps No Man’s Sky’s strongest trait is just how gorgeous it looks. Even the aforementioned barren wastelands have an eerie charm to them and if you’re anything like me, a considerable amount of time will be spent trying to set up the perfect angle for a screenshot with a planet or moon in the background and a cute critter up close. The ambient noise as you meander around, interrupted only by the beeps and hums of the robot sentinels that guard each planet and watch your every move or the quiet whoosh of a spaceship entourage zooming above you, makes each planet you visit very atmospheric.

Coasting through space is the same, with the only threat being relentless hostile space pirates that once you’re engaged with, you cannot escape. Your ship has three modes of flight, the fastest of which is used to travel at light speed from planet to planet, but as soon as your ship detects a threat, the ability to use it is shut down so you stay and fight till you’ve blown them all up, or you’re blown up yourself. So if you’re itching to play No Man’s Sky as a peaceful explorer without killing a single soul, you’re out of luck unless you somehow avoid all random encounters with the bandits. It pretty much throws the notion that you can exclusively play as one of three archetypes (Explorer, Trader, Fighter) out the window.

No Man’s Sky is supposed to be all about the journey and not the destination. Which is great in theory, but with all the content promised by Sean Murray and then excluded from the game, the final product feels like nothing more than a proof of concept. Every aspect of the game can and has the potential to be enjoyable, but it’s often not. Hello Games were under immense pressure to deliver on what they promised but they bit off far more than they can chew and it’s resulted in a lot of players being thoroughly let down. That’s not to say No Man’s Sky is a bad game by any means; there’s a solid foundation here, but it needed a lot more time in the oven before being released. The issue with that is after the amount of delays it already suffered, postponing the release date even further would’ve severely depleted any remaining hype and anticipation surrounding it. A tricky situation and although Sean has has not been truthful about some features in the game and it’s nowhere near what it could’ve been and was pledged to be, it’s still worth a buy in a few months when the price has dropped.