No Man’s Sky – Our Review
No Man’s Sky is a unique experience. At long last you can explore an alien planet, jump into your personalized spaceship, lift off through the atmosphere, take aim at another planet in the distance, and do a lightspeed jump over to it without ever seeing a single loading screen. The worlds are vast, almost always unique, and you can easily lose dozens of hours to it quickly. It’s amazing to witness yet hollow to play and you’ll more than likely end up with a strong sense of disappointment by what’s not there.
Yes, somehow, No Man’s Sky is getting measured more often by what’s not included in the game versus the experience they actually delivered. That’s perhaps not that surprising when you have such an outspoken representative making fictitious claims about the game in public forums. Sean Murray has understandably been compared a lot to another infamous game developer/promoter, Peter Molyneux, who was notorious for over promising and under delivering on games. We really want to give Mr. Murray a pass for doing so much with a tiny team of developers but some of the claims such as an actual multiplayer experience or the pre-scripted E3 presentations billed as completely random are too brazen to forgive.
Sadly all sandworms went extinct sometime after this trailer
The core experience of No Man’s Sky begins and ends during the tutorial sequence. After an navel-gazing opening sequence demonstrating the vastness of space you’ll pop in on a completely random planet tasked with repairing your broken spaceship and surviving the harshness of the environment and creatures of that planet – which, as it’s random, could be completely benign or so violent you can only spend a few seconds outside the safety of your ship’s cockpit. It’s easy to quickly register this game as a survival experience at first glance, but you’ll quickly gain the muscle memory of resource gathering plutonium, refilling life support systems, building out the broken pieces of your ship, etc. that you’ll never really feel that threatened. At worst you die and respawn back at your ship minus your inventory so it’s certainly not punitive like other survival games.
After you explore a few planets though and learn to warp between star clusters (considering there are only ever handful and no sun I can’t really call them star systems), you’ll finally see the edges to this experience. Yes, planets do vary but your experiences do not. All outposts function the same. All NPC dialogue occurs the exact same way. All space stations have the exact same uniform layout. All ships perform the exact same way. For all of the procedural generation, the game feels remarkably one note.
We’ve played the game since the launch having lived through the ups (like the first time you lift off into space and decide what to do next) and the downs (of the gamer community finding out collectively multiplayer doesn’t really exist on day one). We’ve tracked the blogs of this game that first tried to parse through the false claims of Sean Murray, to then itemize the list of improvements that would make this a fully realized game, and now have devolved purely to a screenshot gallery of pretty planets.
Savor this moment, it’s all downhill from here.
The game lost a significant volume of players after the first week and we get why. It’s not the game you want it to be and it’s hard to let that go after its lead falsely promoted that it was time and time again. It’s a walking simulator in space with some rudimentary game mechanics for mining and combat. It’s not the game the media and its developers claimed it to be for the last 4 years.
What works
Your immediate experience will be filled with discovery and accomplishing significant goals. Finding your first creatures and naming your first planets will be something you’ll cherish.
What doesn’t work
Anything after about hour 3. It doesn’t evolve any further than that and if you search for meaning at the center of the universe, with Atlas, or with any of those countless NPC dialogue chains, you’ll come up empty.
Overall: Skip It
There’s a functional shell here of a great experience to come. A small team did a lot and that’s worth some acclaim. We just can’t recommend it though after they themselves mislead us for so long about what this game really is and, to date, has yet to explain why they misrepresented fundamental items of this game. At least Molyneux was apt to apologize after his games arrived.
