No Man's Sky

This game has the same shortcomings as planet exploration in Mass Effect, except on a grander scale. The first planet you explore will take your breath away, but by the tenth, you'll have seen it all. There simply isn't enough to do. If you are not easily bored, get this and have something to come back to for a long, long time to come. If you require good writing, acting or indeed a plot, this is probably not for you.

Even with an install to an SSD hard drive, and a PC that can run Witcher 3 at 60 FPS with no problems, in this game with most graphics options tuned down and anti-aliasing completely disabled the game still stutters and drops frames all the time. Reaches 60 FPS @ 1080p only occasionally and whenever the game is loading anything (which is frequently given the nature of the game world), below 10 FPS is the norm. Game also has audio issues and crashes. The game promises a lot of variety, but most of it is utterly cosmetic and based on simply restructuring of a very limited number of base components in the same way that a lottery has millions of combinations but only 30 numbers. Combat is not worth mentioning, FPS and space simulators both from 20 years ago did those better. Travel to a planet - mine resources - craft items or sell resources for cash - purchase a new ship. Maybe if you're interested try to follow the learn an alien language one word at a time. Repeat until boredom and switch to a better game. The game has a nice coherent style to it, colorful and eyecatching yet functional in a comic-style fashion. There is plenty to explore and discover, but it gets old really fast when you meet a buffalo-with-bird-wings-and-someother-feature for the 60th time and mine you 100 000th unit of iron from a rock that is shaped slightly differently than on the previous planet. That is all there is to the game at this time. Maybe after a few hotfixes and some DLC to actually add something to do, this game can be salvaged. I cannot recommend you purchase the game at this time. Definitely not worth a full price.

Performance warning before getting into the gameplay, this game is optimized like garbage. Even on my 980ti there is horrible pop-in, constant hitching, and terribly inconsistent frame-rate. Something is wrong with the AA as turning it on lowers my fps by 20 and right now it won't save my key rebindings. If my break down of the gameplay itself doesn't stop you from buying it at the moment then I hope the terrible port will get you to hold off until it is fixed. On to the gameplay itself. No Man's Sky isn't the second coming that the hype train was making it out to be and it isn't total garbage either; it's just really really boring after the first few hours. It has all the trappings of a steam early access open world survival game. You have a series of meters that you have to constantly manage just in case you were about to start having fun and a combat system that feels totally tacked on for the sake of the game having combat. Sure it sounds pretty awesome to be able to have so many planets that you can never possibly visit all of them but what you do on each planet is exactly the same. Touch-down with your starship, look for some carbon, name a creature you discover something offensive, go mine for some carbon, get attacked by a drone that gets pissed when you try to get carbon, mine for plutonium to recharge the mining laser you exhausted fighting the drone, go back to your ship and leave without having done anything different from the last 25 planets you went to, and finally repeat ad nauseam. Full Disclosure: I did not complete the final game objective before writing this review but given how tedious the gameplay is I couldn't bring myself to put in 20 more hours to do so which is pretty damning in and of itself.

If you bought into NMS's original hype you'd likely have been crushed by what was originally released. We were aming for the stars and this hit like a leap off a tall building on earth. SPLAT. Some very clever coding, some pretty planets...but very little to do but GRIND GRIND GRIND. Hello Games receive gaming's largest and most righteous kicking, but promise to do right by us. It's 3.5 years later. March 30th, 2020. I've played the game once or twice since launch, the most recent about 8 months ago (approx) when the Next update dropped. I was having a blast but, eventually, got distracted and moved on. today I reinstalled it, having found out that there were two huge updates since Next, the lates of which introduces LIVING ships! finally I can make my Vorlon/Shadow dreams come true! Loading up my old save I find so much has changed, including plenty of old complaints having finally been addressed. HG are the only company out there that takes care of their games post release (Hello, Egosoft) but dear lord the amount of love and investment put into this game since release is approaching legendary. If you tried NMS in the early days and rage-quit as many, did, you owe it to yourself to take a look at what the game now offers. It's finally become something genuinely wonderful to play, especially if you have friends willing to play with you. There's simply nothing else like it - a 70's era sci-fi dream writ large - and urge everyone to give it a go.

2016 version - BAD 2020 version - Amazing space exploration experience. The game released in 2016 was definitely incomplete and a rush of the distributor. After many updates this game is a lot of fun, you can chill exploring the galaxy and find a lot of new things, play with friends in group, build your house, even fight with random ships. I found only minor visual bugs so far. Is not for everyone, that's for sure, but if you enjoyed exploring Skyrim, Subnautica, or even Minecraft you will enjoy this game too. Congratulations on the effort of the developers to do the right thing after all.