The video game No Man's Sky captured our hearts the moment its veil was lifted for one reason: seeming infinity, right now. A very sci-fi, virtual version, of course, but its abstract take is still something wild: more than 18 quintillion planets, all "magically" generated on the fly, for us to immediately fly toward, excavate, and marvel at.

It's not flying cars or an auto-mutating vaccine that can cure all influenza or anything, but it still seems like some sort of sci-fi dream. The marriage of technology and infinity is the kind of thing you might not have ever expected to see, especially on current systems.

Still, No Man's Sky doesn't fully manage to scratch that basic human itch of the ever-exploring conquistador, nor does it help shed light on the reasons why our species always needs to go "over there." To answer why No Man's Sky fails, we can look at how it misses the target of human exceptionalism. The technology here is impressive, beautiful, and sometimes unforgettable. That tech's basic template, however, sets a level of expectations that maybe no game could ever deliver—and that this one certainly doesn't.

The tech, and the game sewn into it

Hello Games































Game Details Developer: Hello Games

Publisher: Sony (PlayStation 4), Hello Games (Windows PC)

Platform: PlayStation 4 (reviewed), Windows PC (tested)

ESRB Rating: E for Everyone

Release Date: August 9, 2016 (PS4), August 13, 2016 (Windows PC)

Price: $60 / £40

Links: Steam | Official website

Hello Games: Sony (PlayStation 4), Hello Games (Windows PC): PlayStation 4 (reviewed), Windows PC (tested)E for EveryoneAugust 9, 2016 (PS4), August 13, 2016 (Windows PC)$60 / £40

If you come to this space-exploration game wanting nothing more than to lap up its ambitious planet-generation system, you're in luck. No Man's Sky is a Magic Eight Ball of visual possibility—one that you can shake up, turn around, and use to discover an amazing sci-fi vista every time you play. Whether soaring across planets in a ship, running past their mountains on foot, or blasting between star systems at hyperdrive speed, there's literally always something new to see.

The game's design process apparently began with a simple, brilliant realization by its creators: math plus programming could generate a seemingly infinite universe. Some of NMS's formulas define the shape and variation of mountains, caves, and other basic geometrical stuff. It's all built with voxels rather than the kinds of polygons that form most hand-crafted in-game models, and the effect on the procedural terrain is striking throughout (in spite of some ugly textures and lousy close-up effects on the voxel elements).

Other formulas determine the types, colors, and designs of so many other objects on each planet. At their best, these creations vary in a lot of interesting ways. The variety peaks with grass, foliage, rock formations, and especially the creatures found on these planets. They fly, they skitter, they stomp, they slither, and they rarely look the same from one planet to the next. The allure of "Spore but with better random creature generation" will certainly satisfy some players as a technological feat alone. The game's geometrical diversity ultimately more than makes up for some of the muddier-looking stuff.

So, then, the first promise of the game: Get on a spaceship, hop between thousands of procedurally generated planets, and see something wildly different wherever you go. People who have doubted NMS's gameplay potential have at least counted on this hope of a cool galaxy to loiter around. Two problems get in the way of this promise, however, and the first is in the rendering engine.

Let's say you fix up your crash-landed spaceship—as the game's first "mission" urges you to do in the game—and blast off with the sole purpose of sightseeing. Your typical flight path is a perfectly maintained altitude above the surface of a planet, as if you were working for Delta and had the smartest auto-pilot system in the world. You can never crash-land on the surface, and it's very difficult to bounce off the side of a mountain, since the ship will automatically ascend or descend to keep you coasting. (You can also blast off away from any planet, at which point you have full piloting control in open space.)

No matter how quickly or slowly your ship is going, however, the game's voxel-generation system cannot keep up. NMS's thousands of formulas crank out whatever you're about to see at a given x-y-z coordinate, and whether you play on PlayStation 4 or a high-end Windows PC, the engine has been tuned the same way: to optimize performance, and therefore, to generate unfinished, blotchy, and semi-transparent objects as you fly. It just looks bad. Buildings, hills, caves, gemstones, flora, fauna, and other prominent features define the planets' surfaces, and they all take too long to pop in. (Even some sort of fog or cloud effect to temporarily limit the visibility distance might be better than literally watching the world being created in front of you.)

And in a world where most everything is a completely unique mathematical creation, the prebuilt, non-procedural content feels even more repetitive than usual. Pretty much every major "manmade" structure, meaning buildings and mystical relics, only comes a few models (with the exception of a few special building types that can appear later in the game). The galaxy only appears to have about 15 spaceship designs and one "home" for each of the alien races. There is only one type of outer-space depot and one structure for the "landing pads." The entrances to caves carved into the planet's surface are dotted with the same basic objects all too frequently. (At least the relics mix and match some pre-defined designs.)

So much outer space, so little inventory











The game's issues with repetition only begin there.

The four systems that make up the gameplay half of No Man's Sky will look familiar to any fan of the "open-world survival" genre. First, you gather resources on land and in space to fuel your spaceship and craft its upgrades. Then you travel to further-out, more dangerous lands to find rarer elements, needed for more elaborate upgrades and more distant points of the galaxy. While doing so, you need to make sure to craft the gear necessary to survive in poisonous environments and deadly battles—which you'll need to engage in to find those rarer elements, of course.

Many games have similar-sounding systems and succeed in spite of admittedly being pretty repetitive. No Man's Sky cannot say the same, because none of its systems really has a meaty hook. Crafting elements is only a matter of finding them, which is usually a mix of simple and drawn-out. For example: Need some plutonium? It's on almost every planet, but sometimes, you have to hop into your ship and fly verrrrry slowly until you spy a small cache (which is hard to do thanks to those previously mentioned pop-in issues).

Other elements are a little rarer, but their rarity doesn't always pay off. Many of the game's elements take up space in your limited inventory with little context as to how useful they'll ever be. My dozens of hours with the game revealed that most of the hard-to-find stuff either never proved useful or eventually became craftable using all the game's common elements, making me wonder why I was lugging it around that whole time.

Should you still choose to hoard all those unknown bits and bobs, you'll quickly run into a tight restriction on inventory space. Players start with 25 inventory slots in all, with six of those being reserved at all times for mandatory functions such as engines and the laser tool. The remaining slots fill up quickly. You need to dedicate a few of them to the required elements for basic survival (to refill "take-off thrusters" and laser ammo, for example) and a few of them to eventual, expensive upgrades. Before long, the game will start barking at you about your storage being full, in an off-putting, robotic, British-accented voice.

Expanding those slots alleviates that pain to some extent, but doing so becomes prohibitively expensive at pretty much every point in the game. Each new inventory slot on a new ship seems to add exponentially to the cost of that ship, and that's if you just happen upon the perfectly sized/prized ship either at a landing dock or crash-landed in the wild.

Why should a game about limitless exploration hold players back with such a short inventory leash? It might be because the three main parts of a player's arsenal—the suit, the ship, and the laser pistol—have very few meaningful upgrade options beyond that inventory space. You can increase the firing speed and damage output of your spaceship and your pistol, but the spaceship always has the same two types of weapons: an auto-targeting laser beam and aimable cannons. The latter require leading your target to score a hit, and you'll die in the early goings trying to get used to them. The auto-aiming beam gets the job done much more efficiently, but it's incredibly unsatisfying to use. Either way, between these boring weapon choices and the game's single enemy type in space, the system can barely even count as space combat. Instead, it's "press X and occasionally turn when an enemy passes you."

On-the-ground combat can be augmented a bit more, with upgrades like an installable grenade, a shotgun attack, and a railgun attack. These upgrades end up being moot, for the most part. The majority of the game's creatures are entirely passive aliens, with the exceptions of a few pesky, attacking predators and occasional flying drones known as "sentinels." The AI on all of the enemies is pitiful—usually just haphazard running that makes them either hard to hit or easy to run away from. And there's no real payoff for engaging in combat; creatures and drones don't cough up rare elements from their entrails, and if you're a sadist who just wants to kill quintillions of innocent tentacle-bear-dogs, you won't even get the satisfaction of noticing impact or reactions from any of your attacks.

Thus, impactful upgrades really don't exist in NMS, other than maybe crafting protection kits that make it easier to run around on deadlier planets (though these kits are both easy to make and annoying to maintain since they burn through certain elements at a huge rate on any affected planet). The game does not deliver anything in the way of variable upgrade paths. Everything you might have to use is laid out clearly and simply with very little variance in how to craft or use it.