No Man's Sky

I'll mainly stick to why this game manages to make me keep thinking about it, and coming back to playing it on my computer. Exploration - it manages to get this into your head right from the start. You're tasked with finding things in this alien world in a brand new game that doesn't exactly hold your hand. I enjoy it because it constantly gives me the itch of, "what's the next thing I can find?" or "I wonder what's over there?" Yes, I totally understand it can get repetitive, but I'm one of the people that enjoyed and played through the first Assassin's Creed. It's not about the repetitive actions, it's about getting to the greater goal of finding out who or what the hell your character is, and then getting to the other planetary systems. Things I hear from other players and reviewers - I've yet to encounter. What I'm mostly hearing from review sites and podcasts of people who keep coming back, is that they're not sure why they like it. I think it's curiosity, and it has been a while since a game has made us feel this sort of curiosity whilst surrounded by an immense amount of controversy and divisive opinions. I'll sum it up as a "carrot on a stick" that makes you think about what the hell flavor it is, it sure isn't carrot. As for all the optimization issues, I have an i7-4790K, GTX 970, 16GB of RAM, and my game is installed on a regular 7200RPM hard drive. When I first started the game, I definitely felt the chugging. It was a huge letdown seeing the game running at 30FPS. For some reason the game felt so good to play, that I ignored it for the first 2 hours. Then I needed to explore faster. So I went onto the NMS subreddit and found a bunch of FPS and hitching fixes. Once you get this game, you'll enjoy it to the point that you either ignore the problem (wasn't horrible for me) or you will actively seek out a solution to continue enjoying the game. It's hard to figure out if you'd wanna purchase this, but exploration and discovery are what drove me.

33 hrs played, only two CTD's. Pros: - HUGE galaxy to explore. - Tonnes of things to collect/scan. - Can edit FOV manually in settings file. - Memory editing. RIP PS4 players. Cons: - $60 - Exploration is too slow. Most POI are placed approx 1 to 3 mins apart with very little in between. Aerial travel is basically an autopilot (see below), most space travel is an auto-pilot/load screen, ground travel at least you can collect resources or scan things as you go. - Poor PC controls. Some inputs can only be triggered by a controller, partial free-look in the cockpit is the most important one. - Poorly designed inventory/crafting. The inventory is tiny, horrifically expensive to upgrade (ship inv especially), no "auto-sort/stack", items share slots with suit/ship upgrades, many items do not stack or can't stack high enough, and you need an empty slot to view crafting recipes or move items around. - The game rewards hard-work with RNG. Receiving random recipes/words leads to frustration and dissatisfaction. - Upgrades/fuel/ammo can't be transferred/salvaged from old ships/tools, you have to craft it all again. - Too grindy. You will grind resources to: Continue harvesting resources, walk around, stand still, take-off, travel to new planets/stars, craft/repair/refuel, and interact with most NPCs/objects. Money is worse, spend an hour grinding/exploring and earn approx $275k, a decent ship will cost over $25mil. - Frequent and long (20-30 secs) unskippable dialogue/cut-scenes that disengage the player and break immersion. The "Milestone Award" is the worst, frequent, it blocks 1/2 the screen, disables pausing/inventory/interaction, while leaving you vulnerable to attack/damage. Milestone Award Death-count: 3 of my 4 (total) deaths. - Horrible terrain pop-in. - Poor ship controls. No 3rd-person view, unable to stop and hover, turns like a bus, auto terrain avoidance, slow, can't mine within atmosphere. - There would be more if not for the character count...

Given the bad reviews, I decided to find someone who could let me try out the game first. I was absolutely blown away by it. I love how the randomly generated worlds look, and the game makes you feel completely lost in a huge world. The game also manages to get me curious about the underlying storyline, which pushes me to find more and more words of all the alien languages. The thing I don not care about it the whole "shared universe" thing. But I can play single player just fine and not worry about that at all. In the meantime, I've tried this game on 3 separate systems, because I was wondering about the performance issues. I have no idea what all these people are complaining about. On all systems, it was running as smoothly as could be expected. Only on PC3 the game would't start at first. But it worked immediately after installing the latest NVidia drivers. Details below: PC1: -CPU: Intel i7-2600K -GPU: NVidia Geforce GTX970 -RAM: 16GB -OS: Windows 10 + latest NVidia drivers -Settings: 1080p, AA on FXAA, Anisotropic filtering on 2. Medium settings. Vsync off. FPS lock to Maximum -Result; 110 - 150 FPS PC2: -CPU: Intel i5-5600 -GPU: NVidia Geforce GTX770 -RAM: 8GB -OS: Windows 7 + latest NVidia drivers -Settings: 1080p, AA on FXAA, Anisotropic filtering on 2. Medium settings. Vsync off. FPS lock to Maximum -Result: 50 - 70 FPS PC3: -CPU: Intel i3-4160 -GPU: NVidia Geforce GTX460 -RAM: 8GB -OS: Windows 10 + latest NVidia drivers -Settings: 1280x1024, AA off, Anisotropic filtering on 1, Low settings, VSync off, FPS lock to maximum. -Result: 30 - 50 FPS (Low, but certainly playable) To all people having issues, i'd recommend checking the following - Install the latest GPU drivers. - Check performance hogs and temporarily disable them (e.g. Virus Scanners.) - Set VSync off - Set FPS lock to max - If still not perfoming well, turn AA off - Procedural Generation is CPU heavy. Can your CPU handle it? Is it thermal throtteling? Clean dust out of heatsink if needed.

Nice game :)

All performance issues aside. This game is just lackluster. After you have explored you 15th Desolate Rock Planet the 18 bazillion planets all just seem to look the same. There is no sense of progress. No way to leave your mark on the planet. Gameplay wise is feels like a basic Unity Game. Ground combat is just dull, And space combat is a joke. I know it was meant to be a more relaxing adventure game, but the space combat isn't even comparable to Battlefront II a game that came out in 2005. The game also looks like a late PS2 game. The lighting is ugly, I can't stand to look at something for more than a few minutes because it just looks so bad. This is a $60 game for maybe $15 dollars worth of content, content that looks like placeholder assets. And even then I've played so many $15 games with much more content than No Man's. Starbound comes to mind. Apples and Oranges I know but I'm comparing the actual depth of the content, not what kind of game they are. Starbound you can make colonies, fight bosses, decorate a ship, play with friends. In No Man's You go from one planet to another, with no way of stating this is my world with the occasional Space Station Visit. The trading system has less depth than Albion Prelude's nividium exploit. Its just a boring game. That not to say there isn't fun to be had. A friend of mine enjoys the hell out of the game. Personally I was hoping for a Star Trek Experience (Discover new worlds, and life forms, explore space with a crew on a nice big ship) but it came up short. Its no bad, but its not good. There is nothing worse a game can be than mediocre.