With its latest update, called Next, No Man’s Sky

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The new option to play in third-person perspective is more than welcome because the nicely animated and customizable character models (which can be of any of the available species) really seem to be having a great time bouncing around with their jetpacks. It makes No Man’s Sky much more fun to see someone moving around and interacting with these sparsely populated (by intelligent life, anyway) landscapes.

“ Characters seem to be having a great time bouncing around with their jetpacks.

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Most resources are mined in the same handful of ways, everywhere in the universe. You either hoover them up with one type of laser beam, drill them until they explode with another type, or walk up to them and pick them up. (Or you can shoot rocks in space.) After the first few hours, there aren’t many new tricks up No Man’s Sky’s sleeve when it comes to the moment-to-moment gameplay.

And that remains the biggest problem with No Man’s Sky: You spend the majority of your time monotonously gathering and refining the materials you need to do everything else, from simply surviving to repairing and upgrading your ship. That’s fairly typical of survival/crafting games, but No Man’s Sky denies you the ability to automate any of the basic resource generation until many hours in.

“ Upgrades come at a pace that’s just rewarding enough to keep me chasing the next one.

Resource gathering becomes even more of a hassle when you run afoul of the annoyingly touchy Sentinel robo-cops, who are offended by your doing anything more than looking at their precious rocks in their presence, or occasionally get attacked by pirates. Combat is simplistic and weak both on the ground and in space, with a small selection of weaponry to work with and uninteresting AI to shoot at. Dull fights and relentless pursuits (it’s impossible to jump away or evade ships in space without landing on a space station, and killing one just brings more after you) make all the combat-based missions you can run a drag.

The new base system that lets you build simple structures anywhere seems conceptually at odds with the nomadic nature of No Man’s Sky, but if you do decide to put down stakes on a favorite planet you can build handy teleporters can warp you back there whenever you want.

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You can even build up a mobile base in the form of a massive freighter that follows you around and carries huge quantities of resources, providing some relief from the strict (but more generous than before) inventory limits. It, too, is hungry for upgrades, and you can even build up an entire fleet of escort frigates with their own specific stats that can be sent on off-screen timed missions to collect resources for you – one of the few bits of automation we’re allowed.

“ No Man's Sky becomes dramatically buggier when there are other people involved.

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Joining a multiplayer game makes this universe feel a lot less lonely by letting you team up with up to three other players to explore and run missions together. It’s fun to goof around by building together or digging holes and sealing each other into them. But eventually you’re all going to need to pause to collect more materials to fuel your antics, and it turns out that lasering rocks together isn’t any more entertaining than doing it by yourself. (And how is there no cool effect for crossing the streams?) That slowed down the pace of my fun and made me feel like I had to save up in single-player before joining a multiplayer game.Also, be aware that performance isn’t great on any platform. There’s hitching and major pop-in on the PS4 Pro and Xbox One X, especially when landing on a new planet. And on PC, while planetary landings are smoother I couldn’t get a reasonably steady 60 frames per second on any resolution higher than 1080p even with a GTX 1080 and a Core i7-7700. No Man’s Sky doesn’t look good enough to justify that kind of sluggishness.