No Man's Sky

Gameplay: Honestly, I had a lot of fun. This is like Minecraft, except actually entertaining. The exploration aspect is fun and I enjoy seeing all the animals ans planets I see. My only beef is there is a feel of repetition but its a good repetition to me. However, this needs a bit more content. A little base building or immersive content would be cool. For example, I would love for my character to settle down on a planet in a self built city or visit a space station bar and grab a drink with weird randomly generated aliens like I'm in freaking Mos Eisley. They actually have announced this sort of content may be in the works, and the game needs it. The long and short of it: The hype was sort of real, Hello Games did deliver everything they said it would. That being said, some may feel its not worth 60 dollars and I can argue that. But I did, and I have no regrets about this purchase. The tech: This game did cause my CPU to full-on halt once but after that it performed fine. I have it running at max settings at 1080p at a LOCKED 120 FPS on my 120hz monitor. I have a 6700k with a GTX 970 with 16G DDR4 3200Mhz, on a old ass HDD, and have no real issues except that first thing. As a programmer and a general computing enthusiast, I appreciate the unique way this game works and the content is well done. Especially when you compare it to similar AAA projects like ESII:Daggerfall attempting the same, which was far inferior and buggier. Even for the time. However, people do seem to be having issues and It just seems it could have used and additional couple of months of QA. TLDR: Great game in more ways than the game part.

If I could give only a 1/2 star, then I would have. I am running Win 8 on an ASUS ROG G75 VX which is not a sad computer to run games on. Used the installer on a clean hard drive and got a lovely slow moving screen saver of names flying by. And, then........crash. Hard to believe I paid full price for this. Should have been from the bargain bin.

TLDR: If the optimization wasn't so horrible I would give this game a 4/5. I love games about space exploration but since it's a bad port it gets a 2.5/5 Just wait until the game is more stable because it's not worth full price right now. I can play Witcher III on my gtx 760 in 1080p on medium to high settings with stable fps(1440p on low) but sometimes I can't even get 30 fps in NMS on low settings with everything turned off. Did they even test this game on some pcs before launch? I can run it fairly stable in 720p resolution but with lag spikes here and there. But how is the game itself? Grindy some would say. Repetative... maybe? Well, it's not boring yet after ca 15 hrs of gameplay. As i travel further in towards the center of the galaxy I can't help but starting to feel some things getting repetative but it's the new tech, planets and lore that keeps me interested. There's also the Atlas path but I havn't gotten far into that yet. I only wish there were more interesting side missions etc. Also, even though there are npcs in this world I still feel alone. You only find npcs standing still.... You will never see another npc land on a planet and go outside to mine etc. You can see lots of ships flying about though. You can't hire npcs either to maybe have as companions. Sure, there's the animals but they have very predictive behavior... either they ignore you, run away from you or attack you... that's it. I have probably played too much mass effect, skyrim, Fallout etc where you have a lot of interesting npcs with interesting dialogue and quests. There's none of that here. Would love to have teamed up with a IRL human. What if this game had a single, voiced side companion like maybe the ships ai to act as a sort of red line through the game. As you explore the AI learns more and can give you more interesting facts, show exitement etc. Maybe make you feel more emotianally invested. Idonno. Like the narrator in Bastion or Elizabeth in Bioshock Infinite maybe.

I have 16gb RAM, an i7 with 3.4Ghz but the game runs horribly on a 960 gtx. With these specs I have been able to play games like Witcher 3 on max settings 1080p 60fps but this game just constantly stutters and lags below 30fps. This port is embarrassing. Not only does it run badly but the game gets ridiculously repetitive even after 1 hour and I have seen animals that look close in design and planets close in terms of environment after 1 hour 45 mins.

I'm perhaps lucky in that I've not encountered any of the big game-breaking issues that seem to be affecting others. My system specs are hardly the best out there, but I'm still able to play the game with all quality controls set as high as I can. For completeness my specs are as follows: CPU: Intel i7-3770 (Sitting at stock 3.40GHz) RAM: 16GB (Mostly for a still in-development space sim) GPU: AMD R9-290 4GB Whilst I find some of the UI a little clunky and not quite right, it's workable. I dislike the click and hold to activate menu items, but I can live with that. I also take issue with some of the in-atmosphere flight mechanics, there are two particular areas that bug me here, 1) Why can I not control my altitude? Sometimes I want to get the thrill of speeding far too fast over the ground which I'm just far too close to and 2) Why does it have to be such a pain to try to land the ship? I want to land as close as possible to the structure or waypoint that I want to activate, but sometimes I end up overshooting the whole facility and having to run my way back over to it, sometimes I land right where I wanted to and other times I completely ignore the landing pads and set down just beside it! With a bit of time I'm hoping that at least my 2nd planetary flight issue will be sorted and I'd hope that click and hold to select can be taken away, but if those are three little gripes against the game which certainly is pretty and offers a means to escape reality, I'll take it.