In a game world filled with vast amounts of planets, there’s barely enough substance to spread over one.
This is where many of "No Man’s Sky’s" problems stem from. When given such a vast and unending game world to explore, players can quickly run out of things to do while struggling to find a meaningful narrative.
As I do with any game that I play through, I try and keep an open mind in the first hour of gameplay. An hour is the ideal amount of time a game has to establish all of its core mechanics, build and expand on them while engaging me to play through its entirety. Additionally, if the game has any sort of narrative or storyline, an hour is usually the amount of time to get me invested enough to see it through to the end.
The first half hour of "No Man's Sky" sucked me into the world it was trying to showcase. It crash lands you on a randomly generated planet and gives you a starship that needs repairing and so you must seek resources to repair its components. The beginning gave me flashbacks to "Skyrim" where this vast and unforgiving world opens up in front of you, inviting you to explore its
The game establishes a system of resource generation and crafting that will keep you busy for a while as you try and upgrade your exosuit, starship, and multitool (which allows you to mine resources and engage in combat). It was rewarding coming across a massive deposit of gold for the first time, knowing I could mine the entire thing and sell it. Once your ship is repaired and you finally leave your starting planet however, the smoke and mirrors of the game world start to pull away.
The more planets you travel to, the more you’ll realize for as much as "Hello Games" was pushing variety in this universe they’ve created, they instead got a galaxy full of planets that feel very much the same. You’ll be discovering the same buildings with the same NPC’s inside of them and having the same conversations so often that it starts to feel like déjà vu. You’ll stumble upon "No Man’s Sky’s" story while on your interstellar journey but it’s about as thin as fishing line and to see the whole thing it’s entirety requires hundreds of warp jumps from star to star.
Technically, "No Man’s Sky" seems impressive but the longer you play the harder it is to shake the feeling that you’re playing in a glass box, glimpsing a vast universe that teases you into thinking there’s more there than in reality. For example, there are no orbits for any celestial body, which seems strange for the amount of time that is spent traveling between planets and solar systems. The planets do not orbit around the star and the moons do not orbit around the planets. You cannot travel to, or even get close to, the main star. It’s just a static object in the skybox.Like the planets that give off the illusion that they’re doing what they’re supposed to, the characters you’ll come across also give off the illusion of typical NPC’s. They’ll bark at you in strange languages that you can translate by learning their dictionary but these characters never give you anything meaningful outside of an upgrade for your exosuit, starship and multitool. No quests. No interesting pieces of dialogue or lore about the world you’re exploring. Nothing.
What I was left with after 20 hours of gameplay was a story that I did not care to see through to the end, 18 quintillion planets left to explore that held the same thing that had been on the previous 50 planets that I had visited. I could have maxed out my character’s abilities, but without any fun side quests or reasons to continue upgrading, I couldn’t see the point of carrying on any longer. For $60 dollars, it's not worth your time.
"No Man’s Sky" garners a paltry 4/10 rating on my end.
