No Man's Sky

This game had a great deal of hype behind it coming out, and given the ambiguity of the developers promises regarding the game, we didn't really know what to expect from No Man's Sky when it came out. No Man's Sky is a procedurally generated space exploration game, which has borrowed a few survival elements. Whilst there are a variety of features, at its core this game is about exploration, and charting your course through the galaxy whilst you unearth and explore cryptic hints about the galaxy, the various species that inhabit it, and Atlas, your supposed creator. The emphasis on exploration is where the game excels, as it often produces beautiful environments for you to explore, which in itself is a technical marvel. Moreover, the way information is conveyed to you through the game to me feels organic, and has the same essence of writing that the sci-fi novels it drew on as inspiration had as well. There are however, some issues with this game, which I hope will be fixed. Firstly, whilst this is not the case for me, there have been numerous reports of instability and crashing for PC users. The game's textures often look muddy, and the pop-in for chunks is jarring. Moreover, combat feels very light and shallow, and none of the weapons you acquire really feel like they have any weight to them at all. Secondly, there are, for me a variety of issues with movement across the game. Controlling the ship is a nightmare at times, and often seems to directly disobey your input. Moreover, I wish that there were easier ways to move around on foot on planets, as the rate of movement is often quite short, and the limit of your exploration on foot suffers for it. Along with this the inventory and trading system does need refinement as do the ported menus for mouse controls. With all those complaints however, I am still wholeheartedly enjoying my time in NMS, and love its' subdued tone and pace, its' beautiful score and its' gorgeous aesthetic.

Hi, I have played the game for the 20 hours by GOG tracker and my experience was exciting and after some time frustrating. From the start: Its open space you can literally go anywhere. But the problem is distance. You will be traveling by the foot or by space there is not some vehicle which could help you travel on the planet. The planets should be unexplored - you will see something no one has seen before. Its not happening. I have visited about 15 planets. From that I have spend about 10 hours on my starting planet. It was really nice breathtaking experience. You have on each planet some fauna - if the conditions are good. But the problem is there is about only about 10 types of wildlife and it breaks down to the about 20 maybe less specimen for entire planet... and it doesn't looks entirely different. For now I have encountered lifeforms based only on carbon. Apart from this there are aliens - species settled in the solar system which are all the same for the system (deviates only by visual looks). Technology - You are collecting technology all the way. But after 10 hours on one planet I Have had all the technology I could get. Hope it change, when I will get closer to the center. And there are the sentinels. The wore disaster of the game. I thought I will be exploring the unknown. But there are sentinels everywhere! On the ground in the space... You do one wrong click, hit the passing ship and incomming sentinel ship. Bam you cant just afterburn away, you are moving so slow like on the planet... and the problem is, you cannot dodge so you get hit always. And shooting sentinel in space spawns another one and even more -> suicide. The space is ugly. Asteroids are everywhere. And why there is always one space station? That looks the same by the race which inhabit the sol. The last thing is the UI. There are buttons for scrolling but they are not working properly, so you have to clicking several times. (No, they are not rewinding.) You cannot delete waypoints in galaxy map. You dont have some map for the planet exploration. You even cannot create some waypoint to the already explored area. And why add features which are not documented? I hitted X in galaxy map and some wierd thigs started happening... game started searching for something and my discovery was spammed by other players discoveries. I couldn't hide them, even if there was the option. You cannot hide your own discovery. Lack of description. After 20 hours I don't know what to do anymore.

The game is not as advertised in any way shape or form. Let us start with this opener: >In No Man's Sky, every star is the light of a distant sun, each orbited by planets filled with life, and you can go to any of them you choose. This is false several ways but let's take the most easy to match to what one might expect. Q: Can you select every single star on the Galactic Map and choose to go there? A: No. You cannot go to every star. The stars at the very outer edge of each galaxy cannot be selected while on the Galactic Map (as someone who has been to the outer edge as far as 289849.7 LY from Euclid galactic Center I can attest to this). Overall, everything about this game's advertising is just like the above quote, overblown falsehoods and exaggerations. I knocked 2 stars off the top for that. The unique life is built of such a small sample of parts that other than slight color variation you will begin to see the same life forms over and over quite often. This is improved some with mods that increase the odds of variety and introduce some less than complete game parts. Even so you'll still notice a large amount of 'the same'. The plant life and even the planets all suffer the sameness as the creatures due to the same lack of variety at the base level. Now please understand I am not saying there is no variety. I am saying the variety is subpar for the exploration intent of the game. With mods the game can be a somewhat enjoyable casual time-killing screenshot collecting thing. I would not recommend this title for more than $10-$15 USD, AND that the person understands what their getting is not what is advertised on the store page. Comes close, but didn't finish the race. This is such a hard one to rate, on the one hand if it was advertised for what the game is, and sold for $15 I'd give it 3 stars. However, the price is $60, the advertising being what it is and was, the differences there-in and compounded by various performance issues, networking issues, that the local save data is limited (hence offline SP no real reason to rename anything but systems and planets). It just falls too short in so many areas.

I was really excited about a procedurally generated galaxy with nearly infinite planets. You get around the EVE issue (everywhere is already claimed and you're WAY behind the curve). It was supposed to have functioning physics. This was going to create a universe in which planets are all different; those close to the sun will have hot-house environments, those far from it are frozen, and thus have different resources. This is incredibly important. Having different resources on various kinds of planets is what enables trading - things that are common in one place are not in another and thus more valuable there. As it stands, all planets have abundant resources, with little variation, making trading pointless. As for exploring... YOU WALK SO SLOW. On the first planet, your job is gather the right resources to fix your ship. I had to walk fifteen minutes to find the mineral I needed and then fifteen minutes back to the ship to use it. There's no ground vehicle, so the only option to resolve that later in the game is fly your ship, which is kludgy and causes you to miss everything. HALF AN HOUR of just WALKING. And then there's the inventory. You can fill up your inventory with resources in less than five minutes. Even transferring items back to the ship there's no real point in any kind of resource gathering trip. It's like you're a miner who can only mine what he can carry in a backpack. And fueling the ship, weapons, tools, and crafting and annoying as hell - you have to perform every action manually from an inventory screen. Mining beam out of fuel? Open inventory, scroll to the beam, hold down left click, refuel. EVERY TIME. Want to craft five of something? Do it five times. There's a ton of potential here. The devs have done a great job building a framework for an amazing adventure. RIght now, though, it's just a framework. A strong NO MAN'S BUY from me until real content is developed and the trading/physics/inventory system is fixed.

The good: Expansive universe and strong engine. Terrain generation in particular is fantastic Unique style very "psychedelic" reminiscent of 70's sci fi. Control system in FP mode generally good. Storyline while subtle is genuine and gradually encompassing. Space looks good, 'roids are nice and varied good shapes sizes and materials Mod-ability so far looks fantastic, weather this was intentional is debatable but its certainly worked in the game's favor, if anything opening this capability up even further could provide a massive boost to the play ability and appeal of NMS The Bad: Runs poorly on less than stellar hardware, although the hardware when provided does give this game due justice. Soundbytes are boring and repetitive, suit alerts are purely informative, could have become a massive opportunity for immersion and plot development. Procedurally generated content is good but not varied enough, worldgen needs to be more unique as do ships and so on, some combinations need "exclusivity", make the player feel like this is really some place noone has been before instead of a cut and paste of the last planet with a few slider tweaks. Space flight very shallow, ship controls are poor, the mechanics have the potential to work well but need to be expanded on, planetary flight unwieldy, needs significant polish, and a focus on immersion Conclusion: The core of a fantastic game are here, if the devs maintain their velocity and manage to overcome the negatives, it more than has the potential to be a glorious success. The HG have balls being so ambitious. The only real criticism i can give is that more was demo'ed than was delivered, certainly its a matter of "get the core game out". Whats been delivered is good, but the average pleb who has no idea about game/software development will focus on flaming everything thats wrong without trying to focus on providing usable feedback to help the dev's ramp up their next set of bugfixes and features