No Man's Sky

I previously bought the game on the other platform last year to find myself asking for a refund as the game lacked 80% of what was shown on the trailers and was optimized so poorly that I had to play with medium-low settings with a decent rig like mine. You'd think they would optimize the game in one year since release, right? Apparently not. I can no longer say a word on the game itself as I had not the opportunity to really play it. The reason? It runs at a whopping 15 FPS now on the same settings and most of the times I tried and start a new game, it froze and had to force close it or even shut down my PC. I wish I could enjoy this game. Too bad. At least GOG has been very fast and efficient with their support and refund. Thanks GOG. Not so much to HELLo Games.

Don't get me wrong here based on the 2 star rating; I played crap like minecraft to death way back when it wasn't polished very well. I enjoy starbound... yes yes i know. I bought it on steam long before GoG released it. Mass effect, space engineers, emperyion... all games i can play. Enter no mans Sky and you essentially get Starbound on a buttload of steroids. Seriously... and for someone like me this is a good thing. I am very much enjoying the way the game plays, it suits me i can get up and come back when my son or my wife needs me. It doesn't even matter to me that its repetitive... unlike every other idiot there who throws their money at these types of games and expect it to be something much more amazing than it is... I knew what to expect and its a time wasting game i wanted, so its a thumbs up from me. I cannot however overlook the fact that much information about the games PC version was deliberately not discussed in open forum... because it wasn't finished. lets just get it out there now... this is just another poor console port. and that alone would not bother me if i could change the controls on the freaking Gamepad. Seriously guys... Hello Games... HELLO! your game needs joystick support, Gamepad support for Logitech and Saitek and flight controls available on the keyboard. the mouse for flight is unusable, its too slow and you cant look down far enough, so if you get attacked by pirates your dead. My Xbox360 controller should fix that right? Wrong! plug that one in and the pitch and yaw controls are on the left stick and the cockpit POV is on the right stick, if your anything like me your brain just does not process FPS style controls on the left side. its difficult to use and there is nothing you can do about it. I'm looking at hacking a copy of a 360 controller emulator and setting up a joystick with custom axis and button assignments using vjoy and simply switch back to the mouse for playing on foot. If it works I'll post it on the forums.

This game is a mixed bag so I'm going with a simple pros and cons list. Pros: - This game is downright Gaaaahgeous[sic] the first time I entered an atlas interface I just about lost my mind. Its liking walking into a neo-synthwave album cover wetdream. Huge props to the set designers, all the stations are pretty, the ships and multitools are pretty, Space is pretty, setting down on a planet is pretty. - Music and sound effects are eargasms - Flying around anywhere I want, land on a planet and walk anywhere I want, mine rocks, tag animals, go spelunking, loot crashed ships. It really is an open world. - Procedural generation works alot better than I thought it would. Cons: - It's pretty shallow. Visiting new planets, scanning wildlife, rocks, and plants while searching for loot and scenic vistas is great for about seven hours and then you've seen everything and that's it, that's the game. There's no faction relationships, or commerce, loot is only in the form of blueprints and I got them all within ten hours of starting, the text adventure snippets that form lore start recycling super fast. - I got pretty awful PC performance. Stuttering everytime I opened a menu, crashing half the time I interact with a blueprint, and every couple of hours I drop down to like five fps and have to restart. - Combat is no skill just auto-aim and upgrade your gun eventually you'll be a god. - Bugs!!! My ship that I had to grind for hours for just randomly took off and flew away without me! WTF Opening certain blueprints crashes your game Warp speed crashes your game Typos I fall through the world every other time I reload a save Unminable minable rocks Mixed: - It feels like the devs wanted you to feel alone on the frontiers of space but they put an outpost every hundred meters and have ships fly overhead every two seconds so I don't really know about how the atmosphere works and whether I experienced what the devs wanted and didn't like it or if they failed. - Inventory management is pretty annoying, again is it supposed to be this annoying or is it just a bad job? Either way it's pretty annoying that your backpack can carry fifteen stacks of iron ore or fifteen beads. Overall I think that this game really succeeded in a chill open world exploration and even though I think the amount of content is more fitting for a $20-30 indie game or an early access then a full price AAA release I probably would have kept it and played occasionally if they had ironed out the bugs before release. As it is I returned it and will maybe take a second look in six months or a year.

It's a game that hates you. It will drop you on a planet (usually a Hot Toxic hell hole) that will quickly kill you. While you are dying every couple of minutes, the game taunts you with messages that you can't turn off, telling you that you are dying. Nice. If you try to save yourself some of this dying (and taunting) by using some of the very scarce resources to keep yourself alive a little longer, than you have just totally screwed yourself. How? You now can't fix your ship, since you need the those resources to fix a item on the ship. (the game waits till you use them, then lets you know you need then for your ship). Really nice. In several starts, it's always the same. Toxic planet, temperature 170's degrees, death soon after you start. The really stupid part, once you get in and out of the ship (fixed or not) that is where you will spawn. So walking really far to get needed resources is now out of the question since you will never make it back to the ship with resources to able to fix it. I am a pretty determined person and made past this torture test. Now the really stupid stuff starts. The game "guides" you through the "missions." The problem is, game mechanics seem to be thought up by a 5 yr old. If you like convoluted IU this is your game. The game will tell you to "tag" a place that you are going to. Sounds good, and it is if you a walking there, if you get in your ship all landmarks disappear except a couple that you are not going to. This bring up another sad point, you can never go back to a place you were before. Why? You will never find it, tags go away as soon as you get in your ship so why have them. There are drones that watch over planets, they don't like you doing anything, like gathering resources. Once you are on there bad side you have to let them kill you. If you fight back, they will keep sending more and bigger drones until you are dead. You can leave the planet, and go to space where more drones are waiting for you, hunting you till they get you. Again just another totally stupid game mechanic. (Who was the 5yr old that came up with that.) NMS is nothing more than series of gotcha moments wrapped up to look like a game.

Amazing graphics-environment effects-sound-character animation. Great sand-boxing, breathtaking planets, endless possibilities. I think I put close to 100h, and I haven't even built a town yet. And the amount of free-to-roam concept in this game? It's infinite. Even getting to explore a part of a planet will take you many hours, not on foot (don't be ridiculous), but using your aircraft. Start with literally elements to build your trading colonies. Beware that you can die even falling from heights and if you're playing perma-death, then that's it. There are some glitches, but apparently devs are working on issues. Last one I had was losing my exosuit inventory after dying, even loading was the same result. Not a show stopper but it might be a good idea to have some backups.