It does not matter how well Hello Games’ improves and evolves the extremely ambitious No Man’s Sky, it will always be considered one of the bigger disappointments in gaming history. This is due to many factors like Sony egging the developers on as well as the gamers can be blamed for not noticing the warning signs in time. We do not live in a world where a entirely procedurally- generated universe would ever work as well as expected, ambitious as it is it did sound a lot better than what the end result turned out.
Fast forward 2 years and Hello Games’ deserve some credit, they have been grinding out new updates and fixes to No Man’s Sky free of charge, as well as brought it to the Xbox. All of those culminated to the “NEXT” update.
One of the major problems with No Man’s Sky is the way it was marketed… It was never really specified what type of game No Mans’ Sky was trying to be. What it ended up being is a sort-of Space trader with elements of games like Rust and Don’t Starve. You start the game when your spaceship crash lands on a unknown planet with you as a player having zero clue what to do. Apparently the updates have made your mission of finding the center of the galaxy as well as unearthing the secrets of the alien intelligence named atlas. Although this goal still is EXTREMELY vague!
To achieve anything in No Man’s Sky you need resources. Your ship needs fuel as well as your spacesuit and your multi tool which is essentially a gun, scanner and gatherer. If you do not need all the resources you have gathered via exploring and using your multitool you can sell it off at trading stations for, hopefully, a good amount of profit. Unlike games like ARK your hunger is not an issue, in NMS only thing you need to worry about is your spacesuits’ ability to withstand the extreme heat and cold of the various planets you explore.
It took me a rather long time and lots of forcing to initiate any form of combat and i was rather disappointed with it. Gun play is rather bland and flat, yet it is still easy. It is kind of expected with a game like No Man’s Sky seeing as it’s not a shooter. Secondly the game is too laid back to have its player do things you should do in shooters. The space combat is better, by better I don’t mean great, just better than on-foot combat.
The thing that No Man’s Sky really does well is the visual artwork. NMS can produce some tremendous vistas at times which can make you forget about all the grinding less than stellar game play! Realistic clouds float around overhead when you are on the planet surface with lush fauna and flora. Something I loved was how when you come in to land on a planet your ship passes through clouds which can be seen through your cockpit. As much as all the procedurally generated fauna and flora along with the string of dinosaurs, aliens and dragons look great their lack of any form of artificial intelligence becomes glaringly obvious rather quickly.
Multiplayer does make this rather bland game a little bit more exciting. I mean it is always better to be bored with a friend than on your own right?
When analyzing No Man’s Sky the way I have now it is easy to think that it is a terrible game. At its core idea and build it has the best foundation for a game, only thing is that with all the updates and changes the foundation is all that has changed, it still has a rickety shed built on top of that foundation. Hello Games can possibly fix this with lots and lots of resources being invested into No Man’s Sky but whether or not it would be worth the effort is where it gets tricky. In terms of potential No Man’s Sky is endless! Maybe the problem occurred right at the start of this title’s life when the hype was aiming at the stars but the end result struggles to get out of the earths’ atmosphere…
Special thanks to Apex Interactive for supplying the Review game
