It's a truly beautiful game, that much I'll give it. The art, music, and sound design are wonderful. I WANT to like it! But mechanics-wise, I found it too frustrating to put up with. The controls are way too floaty and finicky -half the time I tried to wall-jump it wouldn't take and I fell into hazards- and on top of that there's no key remapping option, which meant I had to contort my hand in weird ways to hit specific key combinations. This does not mesh well with the harsh reaction times required to navigate certain terrain obstacles barely an hour into the game. Plus, the tutorial is just the right amount of unhelpful when it comes to explaining the frankly *staggering* amount of mechanics. I'd also like to add that the story was really not engaging; it just feels like a half-baked excuse for a convoluted fetchquest, and said fetchquest didn't feel rewarding to me -more like a slog. Granted, I only got a small part of the way through: I wish I could review this based on more gameplay experience, but I wound up softlocking myself two hours in and figured that was a sign to quit. You'd think the developers would have considered that when you try to open a two-key door with one key, you get to keep the key... apparently not. I'm not resetting my save file and playing the same stuff for another two hours just to get another shot -I feel like I'll just end up softlocking myself again in the next area.
I've finally bought No Man's Sky and, honestly, I love it. First off, it's the graphics are STUNNING. Beyond that, it runs surprisingly smoothly! I've experienced minimal bugs and the biggest complaint I have in the technical department is the fact that alt-tabbing out of the game disconnects the cursor from it when I return to the game window. The controls took a little getting used to and some customization, but overall they're very tight and responsive. The sound design is pretty good, though certain SFX are kind of grating and I've noticed some little balancing issues. Again, I can live with that. To be quite honest, this is a game you can play with the sound off and still be totally immersed. I've never been much of an economics buff so the depth they've put into the in-game economy system is actually pretty impressive. I adore the language-learning system and the NPC interactions overall. I wasn't expecting them to be as RPG-like as they are! Of course the interaction scripts are procedurally assigned, but they're so well crafted that even the limited interactions the player has with NPCs gives them a little spark of character I was pleasantly surprised by. The game is a bit weak story-wise, but has less of a focus on factions and plot and more a focus on meta existentialism, which is quite refreshing. I love the philosophy of it. The biggest problem I had was the fact that the player is just thrown into the world without much of a tutorial. I died about five minutes in while I was still figuring out the controls. I'd recommend starting in creative mode to get a feel for how it works before attempting survival. TL;DR - it's a very good game, imo. It had a rough start, but the devs owned up to it and poured a lot of time and effort into making this the game they promised. That's rare. And yeah, NMS is still very Minecraft In Space, but Minecraft is the bestselling game of all time for a reason. People love to explore and create. No Man's Sky was worth the wait.
