Genre: First Person, Exploration, Action/Adventure

Platform: PC

Available on: PS4, PC

Released: August 9, 2016 (PS4), August 12, 2016 (PC)

I got the chance to play No Man’s Sky on PC today for a few hours. While my time with the game so far has seemingly barely scratched the surface of what this experience has to offer, I now have a much better idea of what the game actually is and how it plays. This is not a final review of the game by any means, so there will be no numerical score to let your brain place it on a familiar scale of quality – you’ll just have to read the words and discern for yourself what you take from them.

Let’s get into it.

Graphics/Presentation:

For such a small team working with a new game engine, No Man’s Sky is really quite beautiful. Up close it’s not always so pretty, and much of the landscape looks muddy and pixelated – but it doesn’t ruin the game, because who wants to play games with the camera shoved into the ground. The atmosphere so far is vast and colourful and the sense of scale and distance is just incredible. It looks great, whether expansive vistas, the vastness of space, or the twisted, cavernous areas blooming and sprawling with ghostly phosphorescent flora. It does look like a lower budget indie game standing beside its blockbuster peers, even though Sony decided to sell it at big budget AAA full pricing, and that’s, unfortunately, going to affect some people’s view of the game. It did affect mine.

So far I’ve only been to two neighbouring planets, a small “deathstar/pokemon ball” like space station that I couldn’t get into, and a lifeless moon beside some giant fucking planet; but the variety, even on a single planet, is interesting and colourful, reminiscent of those old sci fi book covers of the 70’s and 80’s, and quite often eerily breathtaking in an uncanny, ethereal way.

The sound design is very fittingly sci fi and really pulls the presentation together to create that atmosphere of the weird and unknown, blending organic alien sound effects of the environment you’re in with the whirring, humming, buzzing and whooshing of robots floating about, ships speeding through the sky, and beacons signalling some intelligent, mechanical construction to explore. It all works in harmony to create a universe that flows with the lifeblood of classic science fiction.

NPC’s have been the first and most obvious disappointment. So far my encounters have all been identical, save one, which still wasn’t much different, though he is the first NPC I’ve actually seen in the game world. The others were ships I approached with a floating “interaction” button – when pressed, it opens a dialogue type screen showing an image of the robotic NPC off to the side (so far they’ve all been robots), with three dialogue options; buy their ship, buy their merchandise, or sell them yours. Every one is the same. The one different one I found was sitting in a chair, in a building I broke into on random planet #2 – gave me a small piece of story, and offered me items. Same sort of dialogue screen as the others, just different offers and a hint of story.

Speaking of others, you are alone in this universe. Utterly. Alone. The NPC’s do nothing to alleviate this, since you never really see them in the world at all, and the one I did see was sitting with a stiff, repeating animation until I pressed the interaction button that brought up the conversation/menu screen. The wildlife and flora are cool and alien and shit, but they don’t really do much yet – though I’ve only seen a handful of species. You get a little currency deposited to your account for discovering new species. Cat/wolf things, armadillo-rabbit like things, some deer-pig like things. Some alien-dinosaur birds way off in the distant sky. Pretty cool stuff. This weird crab-dog thing gave me a red icon and when I stopped to look toward it, the fucker started making a beeline right for me, slower than my grandmother. I walked away. This time.

I see a ship land and decide to follow, landing off to the side of it. No one gets out. I walk up to it and the interaction prompt pops up. Well fuck. Lone wanderer. Off I go. Jump in my ship, thrust into the air, point to the sky, hit the boosters and I’m off, straight into outer fucking space. A planet in front of me, softly glowing sphere in the sea of stars. Says five days drive. Hit the pulse engine and the time changes to less than two minutes as the stars melt around me. Holy fuck yes. All in real time. It’s pretty amazing. Flying into a planet is even more intense, and the size is incredibly overwhelming after watching it approach for so long as a small sphere in your view. The ship doesn’t seem to let you crash, though. I tried to smash into some asteroids, and the pokemon deathstar space station, and they played out the same. No felt impact at all and sudden spinning in circles until I hit the brakes. I also couldn’t seem to crash into the ground while flying low. It only let me go so far. I haven’t tried directly flying into a mountain or giant wall yet, but I will once I make some money and buy a new ship.

*Edit: I tried and it just won’t let me crash my ship. Possibly a good thing.

Gameplay:

In general, I’d say the gameplay is almost great, though not nearly as slick and fluid as some big budget AAA games. On foot everything seems to feel a bit slow and heavy. Even running isn’t quite fast enough, especially considering the size of the terrain and the impossible task of trying to navigate long distances on foot. Of course, this early in the game, it could be a progression system that just starts me off as slow as a Sunday driver – I hope so. Perhaps they’re just going for realism and that’s as fast as it gets. At least the jet pack is fun – an interestingly dangerous traversal aid. Choosing when and for long to use it, with its limited fuel and cooldown time, during a big fall can be critical – though I’ve yet to actually die, even after a full free fall off a pretty giant cliff that completely fucking destroyed my shield. The crunching sound was bad – real bad. I walked away. Alien badass explorer.

Shooting is free aim and as it is, it’s not bad, and works well enough on a gamepad, but it’s not great, and I suspect a lot of people will want to play this with a mouse and keyboard, if they’re playing on PC. I have yet to play it on PlayStation 4, so I’m not sure about the controls there, or any configuration options. I’ve tested it on both low and high settings on PC, and both ways the movement felt a little sluggish, but may be due to just starting out with a base suit. Here’s hoping for an Iron Man suit somewhere out there…

Until then, I rely on my ship to truly get around. You can jump in and out whenever you want, mostly anywhere on the planet, as long as you keep it fueled up. Flight control is a mixed bag of working fairly well and feeling pretty good, though it just gets a little wobbly a little too easily. Any complaints I may have with the controls may have to do with me just sucking and not getting the feel for them yet. It’s easy enough to thrust into the air and soar across the planet’s alien landscape, but quick turn maneuvers get fucking wonky fast, which makes space flight a little tough at times. Could just be that I suck. I haven’t even had a space battle yet. None of the asteroids I shot fought back.

The bulk of the gameplay so far seems to be exploring and blasting some flora and rock formations for materials. Sentinels see you blasting a lot and they come shooting, easy little tin cans to shoot out of the air so far, nothing too stressful. Collect materials until you have enough for repairs and fuel, then blast off. My first objectives were to repair and fuel and get offworld. Once I was in space my next objective was to pull up the galaxy map and hit the hyper drive to the next system. The map has a line stretching out like a constellation for you to follow. I couldn’t make the jump to the third system yet, so I assume I’ll need to get something for my ship first, and so it will go down the line to the center of the universe, I’m guessing.

You can seemingly explore each system forever, and the distance between some of the planets and even moons is truly staggering. However, you have a very limited amount of inventory space, in the beginning, anyway. I’ve already seen ships with almost twice the inventory spaces as mine – and there will be more, of course. There are other things to find, such as monoliths that contain “words” of alien races to learn and increase your standing with them, different save locations around each planet with supplies and occasionally new tech to learn, and other sentient constructs, alien fauna to catalog for currency, and potential upgrades for your multi tool and suit. I’m sure there’s more things to find, but that’s all I’ve encountered so far.

In Conclusion:

No Man’s Sky seems like a very interesting game with some really fun and amazing space exploration game mechanics, and really great, colourful, sci fi art design. I want to love it. The universe seems pretty fucking empty, though. Outside of mining materials, logging new species, and stumbling onto strange, primordial monoliths, the game gives you no other real reason to explore – so it’s left with what, the story to carry you off the track to all these endless planets? So far the story is nothing more than hints and whispers of ancient things, and reminds me a little of how Ark: Survival Evolved started out – which I have also only played very little of. Hopefully they keep the element of mystery going right to the end, to help motivate me to push forward and seek more. The NPC’s apparently aren’t offering much outside of a quick speech blurb and the same three-option-menu over and over. Will it be an endless progressive grind for better gear and ships? Without something deeper at its core, I don’t know how long it can engage me.

It’s hard to say this early in the game. I’ve barely started and I’m talking shit, mostly. There may be much more out there in No Man’s Sky. We shall see. I’m curious to see how different the full review will be from this initial taste test. Perhaps it will be an interesting lesson on forming opinions on things without the full knowledge of the thing you’re forming an opinion on. Internet comment sections, anyone?

Honestly, as a typical higher tier indie game priced at $30-40, I’d probably think this game is fucking brilliant. At full price $80 AAA blockbuster pricing, I expected a little more life, finer tweaking and polish in the universe. That being said, I’m still excited to jump back into my ship and head toward the center of the universe to see what adventures await me.

strawberry-kissed rhubarb jam / 10