A couple weeks ago, I, like many others, picked up a copy of "No Man’s Sky." It’s a planetary and space exploration game created by Hello Games. You travel planet to planet, solar system to solar system, discovering the truth behind Atlas, the Monoliths, and the Sentinels. While you’re playing you learn new languages, discover and register new creatures, and try to survive hazardous planets. I didn’t expect much from a sandbox game with 18 quintillion planets to explore, but I was not prepared for the inevitable crashes.
It’s understandable why the game would crash, but the reason the crashes are fearful is because of the way the game saves. The game either saves when you get off your ship, or you go to a designated location and activate the save point. That sounds convenient at first, but when you’re on a planet that’s full of water, it becomes a race against time. You might find yourself stranded in the middle of the ocean with no saves, a bunch of new discoveries, and really rare items. As you try to find the nearest resting point, you start to lose more time. The nearest one is just five minutes away, not that bad of a trip, but as you get within the homestretch, relieved that you can finally save, the game crashes just moments before you could save.
This wouldn’t be so much of a problem if Hello Games would allow the player to manually save from the pause menu. But after their latest patch, my copy has been playing worse than it was before. Now I can’t save when I go to the locations or get off my ship. Whenever I do, I would check the last restore part, which to my surprise, hadn’t saved for three hours despite me hitting the save locations. So when it crashed, I lost three hours of gameplay in an instant.
That’s not the only bad feature about the game. There’s the fact that you can’t interact with other players in jolly good cooperation. I would like to have some of my friends playing or random players join me as we take down sentinel walkers and explore the stars. Some of the aliens I’ve discovered look the same even in different galaxies. I have yet to discover a fully inhabited world filled with sentient beings, nor have I discovered a gas planet or anything of the sort. It feels as those the planets are just randomly generated with similar feature. The caves are all the same and include the same materials. It would be cool to go into a cave and not find plutonium everywhere or the same two crustaceous-arachnid like things following you in the cave. It’s completely abysmal that I’ve spent $60 on this, and it’s sad because the game has nice lore, and I want to see it do well.I give "No Man's Sky" a 6.5/10.
