I love to explore in games. When I first bought Minecraft Alpha, I spent hours just taking in the first infinite and procedurally generated landscapes I had ever seen before learning a single gameplay mechanic. In Mass Effect 1 I searched every square of every planet and was immersed in the subtle world building discoveries. When I got Skyrim I spent 70+ hours exploring The Rift area before I started any major quest line. After close to 20 hrs, in my opinion No Man's Sky's exploration is sublime and all of its gameplay systems function to keep this fundamental aspect engaging even if the sum of its parts are not always as interesting as the exploration itself. Survival aspects such as gathering resources and crafting keep the player searching out mineral caches and give purpose to searching all the nooks of alien worlds. Limited inventory space keeps the player from amassing huge resource stuffs and makes the whole system more about what you can track down locally rather than how much you can collect at once. Flying is fun and fluid and since there is no way to crash the player is free to scan and watch like a hawk for those monoliths. Combat is simple and the crafting progression from frail little starship to One Man's Army is a small thrill. Even dying highlights exploration by only requiring you to trek back to your corpse to reclaim your stuff which will rarely put you in a position of having lost hours of resource mining due to a silly decision. There are technical issues at launch such as crashing, intense frame dips, and falling through the map when mining in some areas (be careful and reload as soon as you notice) but they don't do nearly enough to detract from the greatness of the exploration for me and I'm confident that Hello Games will fix them. You may pass over No Man's Sky expecting something more from certain aspects of its gameplay but gamers interested in the big picture of exploring a massive alien galaxy will find an enthralling experience.
