Thoughts On No Mans Sky

We're gonna need a bigger spaceship!

By now everyone has an opinion on No Mans Sky, most seemed to have formed it before the game even came out; with death threats upon delays and DDOSing of negative reviews. People have to justify their ludicrously expensive preorders and special editions somehow, and Hype culture means some players can't admit to any of the game faults. Suffice to say, passions are high/toxic around the games community but after all the hype, is this a universe worth exploring or should we resign to staying on planet earth, where the weather is radioactive and the social interactions catatonic.



Well it's funny you should mention that (or should that be 'I'), because for all the variety of planets in No Mans Sky, most can be defined by 'radioactive weather and tedious interactions'. There's an exponential amount of promise lurking within No Mans Sky: eye popping visual spectacle, a chair melting musical score and the enormity of discovery - You'll just wish there was something more behind the curtain. It's like having a beautiful art exhibition were the food is inedible, the curator belches in your face and all the patrons are talking about Colin's pet dog - it sours the atmosphere slightly. Simply having beautiful vistas is meaningless when once you get there, you find yourself doing the same tedious thing you were doing on the previous ten planets.

No Mans Sky asks you to spend a lot of time doing the same thing, which permitting that mechanic is interesting; isn't necessarily a bad point. Personally I find having to grind for materials, then a spot of mind numbing inventory management, topped off with frustrating shooting quite a dull and monotonous experience. Unfortunately this makes up for most of the games playing time, with minor excursions into text adventure interactions with static alien life. 'Life', there's another inadequate word to describe No Mans Sky's universe, being populated by several alien looking species such as the Gek, who limply stand in their predefined spots. Talking to these mildly humanoid creatures centres around a 'choose your own adventure' type system where you're presented with a sentence of Alien language (which can slowly be learned over time), a paragraph or two of text describing their behaviour and a choice of how to react to them. Of course you don't actually 'talk' to them, in most occasions it boils down to deciding what resource they want from you, getting it right increases how much the race likes you and getting it wrong - well you get the idea. The text adventure flavour is, surprisingly, one of the more interesting tasks in the game, there's enough vagueness to entice intrigue into the games 'lore'. Though again, it's not particularly enthralling and if you've played any of the great text adventure games released recently, in the likes of 80 days or Reigns; it's all rather shallow.

While on your space adventures you do often spot other spacecraft whizzing about the Sky – so it should be ‘Lots of men's Sky’…. moving on, on face value it makes the game feel more populated, though once again it is mostly superficial. Aside from the ability to engage in fiddly dogfights, other ships don't really do anything - there's some joke here about how you as the player don't do much either, but I'm not clever enough to make it. Space Stations are used as a HUB type space for a star system, allowing you to sell and buy items. Other ships also land on the space station which is genuinely quite exciting the first time you see it, before you quickly realise that no one will ever leave their ship due to the absence of A.I.

The term 'jack of all trades, master of none' is an easy one to assign to a multitude of open world games but it does seem quite apt for No Mans Sky - or here's a good one; No man, Bye...No wait, that's trash. It's classic quantity over quality, bragging about what's between your legs while knowing no moves. Granted it is a huge universe here, one that is procedurally generated by building blocks that are interchangeable. Planets are visually striking and the space between them is home to such bright hues and colours; it would be enough to impress the most grumpy of sods. Luck has some part to play, you can in theory be stuck with a string of the most generic or drab planets on offer, strapping you in for a bad ol' time. Exploration and a sense of discovery is what the game does best, if that's what you want going in to the experience, you'll get your money's worth. Expect much else and disappointment is bound to happen just like running out of inventory space. There are many tiny annoyances that tear me away from being relaxed while playing the game, so here goes. The game needs less shooting in it, the shoehorned gameified threats add nothing but frustration to the game, the floating robots seem to exist just so people can't claim that it isn't a 'real game'. The constant notifications and warnings need to be toned down. The constant disruption of telling you when your life support is at 75%, making it therefore low just makes you want to crash your ship into the nearest larva planet - which you can't do.

Longevity will scale based on what you enjoy most from the game, I've already found the game tiring and wishing for something new to do, not just to see. No Mans Sky is a game of big promise that falls infinity short, delivering short bursts of thrills between tedious chores. A vacuously empty, lifeless albeit pretty universe isn't enough to get by as a full priced experience. Although it's a huge achievement for the small development house of Hello Games, a lot more needs to be added to make the experience worthwhile. It's a No Go Sky - I know this is worse than the previous pun.