Video Game Review? No Man's Sky - Floating Space Rocks

Developer Hello Games
Publisher Sony Interactive Entertainment
Distributor Ster-Kinekor
Where we got our copy Ster-Kinekor
Genre FPS
Game modes Single Player
Reviewed on Playstation 4

Available on PC

BiPolarBear

Published September 1, 2016

I have no idea of how to go about this. It finally happened, the behemoth of a game No Man’s Sky was released and yet I no idea what I should say about it. I’ve been playing the game for quite a while and yet I’m still unable to give a solid opinion about the game. There is unfortunately too much at play for this game to give it a good and proper traditional review, but hey, let’s try and make something of this crazy mess shall we.

In the end, the greatest enemy of No Man’s Sky will, unfortunately, be itself. You’ll have no doubt by now seen all the hate directed towards the game that, to be fair, it brought upon itself. During its development pretty much every thing was promised to us and the game itself was built up to such a degree that our expectations made us believe that if we were to look up into the starry sky of gaming and wondered, we would eventually come to No Man’s Sky. This is, as it stands on release, definitely not the case.

So what are we actually looking at? Well it’s not completely unfair to look at the current build of No Man’s Sky as the ‘Early Access’ version, but this is still a full priced release which means, from a consumer point of view, it shouldn’t be allowed to escape harsh criticism. Fortunately enough, however, even though I’m going to assess the game based on what’s on the disc, it doesn’t do the game any favours.

Upon starting No Man’s Sky, you’re thrust onto some planet somewhere in the universe with nothing more than some broken equipment that you need to repair and some vague pointers for what you’re supposed to do with yourself. So you set off on your inter-galactic adventure by lasering a couple of rocks until you can navigate an arbitrary menu to repair your ships and other equipment. From then on it’s up to you with what you want to do, but you’re unfortunately quite limited in what you can do from here on out. While the universe is your oyster in No Man’s Sky, you’re unfortunately not going to find many pearls.

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While upon starting the game the player will be filled with wonder and awe, that feeling is unfortunately not going to last very long as you’ll unfortunately find out that every new planet you go to could easily be one of the other ones you’ve previously visited if you changed your display’s colour settings. You’re unfortunately going to find that there is very little variety in No Man’s Sky and so once you start getting into it, you’re going to find that there’s very little to get out of it. One of the major flaws with No Man’s Sky is that why the game is acceptable at a surface level, the moment you start digging deeper into the moment the moment, it starts to show its flaws.

This theme of surface level competency starts to rear its head in almost everything in the game. While you may come to a planet and, at first glance, feel that everything looks quite pretty, the moment you start digging deeper is the moment that things start to lose all flair. You might start out appreciating the look of a planet, but the moment you actually start exploring and look at things up close you’re going to find some pretty awkwardly places entities. I know that since everything is procedurally generated we can’t expect things to always be perfect, but for the most part, I was put off by just how jarring everything looked upon closer inspection. I can understand that not everything would look how one would expect it to, but for some reason floating space rocks throw my immersion out completely.

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All of this together gives the player a universe to explore, but at best a lucky packet of things that they want to see. It’s incredibly difficult to hold any interest in the game as you keep playing and the subtle yet detrimental flaws in No Man’s Sky design start becoming more and more prevalent. All of this could have been avoided if everything didn’t feel like an infinite number of palette swops. If only there were interesting things to explore and experience over the course of one’s exploration in No Man’s Sky. The only way open sandboxes work is by having weird and wonderful things to discover and while we haven’t really had one on the scale of No Man’s Sky, at least other games have had more on offer than finding yet another iteration of a weird doggosaur.

At the end of the day, it’s incredibly difficult to find any merit in No Man’s Sky. If we based our views on this game on what we expected to see we will be sorely disappointed and if we base it on everything else that is available to us we won’t land up doing much better. No Man’s Sky, in its current state, is an incredibly hollow game whose void is only echoed by its scope. Creating the No Man’s Sky we all expected would potentially be an impossible task and the game that we received is unfortunately unable to even fulfil the bare minimum of a player’s desires. What we have at the moment is the husk of what, if the developers are to be believed, will eventually become the No Man’s Sky we were waiting oh so long for. Whether or not that release ever happens, it’s nearly impossible to recommend one pick up No Man’s Sky until we have a better idea of where the game is heading or the buyer is not expected to fork out full price for it.