Real Talk By: T42

In this review I will be covering the game from two perspectives.  The first perspective will be purely just a game review, unbiased straightforward.  The second part of this review will cover the hype and criticism this game has received.  My final verdict will be based only on the first part of this review.  I feel that it is important to be honest and upfront with the reader, especially when it comes to a game like No Man’s Sky that has received many criticisms and opinions.  Let’s begin shall we?

No Man’s Sky is a single player exploration game set in a Sci-Fi universe with Billions of Planets to explore.  It features a simple crafting system in which you use to fix your ship, upgrade your equipment and even your survival suit.  The game’s main objective is to reach the center of the universe.  The PC version, for which this review is based on, can be played with either a controller or a keyboard and mouse.  Let me further explain that this is not a spaceship flight simulator game similar to games such as Elite: Dangerous or Evochron Legacy.  In fact this game is much simpler than that.  Although as I played the game the controls did feel funny especially when I wanted to land, the game makes it obnoxiously difficult to land which makes no sense to me considering part of the game’s mechanic is to fly the ship.  The game doesn’t offer much in the way of depth other than exploring and uncovering a mysterious language which helps in your conversations with other alien species.

The game also offers a puzzle system with either shapes or number games in order to solve problems and unlock more supplies.  Personally, I felt the puzzle system in the game to be tedious and more of a chore than actually feeling like I solved something fun.  But that’s really not enough to call this game bad. The graphics in the game are also very pretty and easy on the eyes.

Overall the relaxing tone of the game and simple gameplay make it a nice entry into the indie market, it’s $60.00 price tag however is bothersome.  For an indie game with as little depth as this game has, it makes one wonder why the AAA price tag?

Here is where we get into part two of this review.  For a small Indie team it’s pretty impressive that they got such the hype and excitement they did from IGN.  There was week-long information releases and excitement and craze that this game started to become more than what the devs had intended.  This is in no way meant to be a slam against IGN.  This is designed to be a wakeup call to those in the market to really think about what they are doing.  Hello Games had several trailers and interviews where they talked about features or showed footage of features that aren’t in the game and as of this review has no intention of being in the game in the future.  One of the most talked about features that is seemingly missing is the Multiplayer.  It was said that the game’s universe was so big that it was near impossible for players to find each other.  But then the game launches and day one 2 players find the same planet only to discover that not only was it a different time of day on the planet, they also could not see each other.  So what happened? Well they intended for the game to be multiplayer, for people to potentially see each other.  But something happened.  And that something was a delay of launch and the feature pulled.

The other interesting note about this game was the release on PS4 versus the launch on PC.  When the game launched on PS4 people were raving about it and hyping it up even more.  People were loving it and the game just worked.  Keep in mind that on the consoles and especially on the PS4 you don’t have that many space based Sci-Fi games like this, so something like this is exciting and new to the player base there.  When the game launched later that week on PC however, that was a completely different Story. Tons of errors and bugs due to different PC builds.  In other words the Port to PC was not optimized at all, which considering all the coverage and hype the game received you would have thought that the game would have been a 10/10!

But, is it a bad game? At launch yes, after a few patches, no. This isn’t about casual versus hardcore gaming, but if you want to enjoy a casual experience with a relaxing game that doesn’t offer a lot of depth, then No Man’s Sky is for you.  Based on just a pure out of the box experience:

 No Man’s Sky Gets

2.5 out of 5

What’s Legit?

+Graphics

+Sound

+Mood

What’s Perpetrating?

-Price tag

-Out of the box, game crashing bugs

-Eventually gets repetitive