A good game is often said to be more than the sum of its parts – a special, unquantifiable feeling that comes from seeing every mechanic working seamlessly together to create variety and surprises. No Man’s Sky

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“ Visual variety is No Man’s Sky’s strong suit.

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“ Few of the upgrades I’ve worked for felt like a significant improvement.

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“ The combat experience is pretty miserable.

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The vague, barely-there story starts each of us on a random planet (one of a claimed 18 quintillion) with a broken spaceship and the sci-fi equivalent of Minecraft’s pickaxe: a laser beam that slowly vacuums up a planet’s resources for you to feed into typical, simplistic crafting recipes. At first I was struck by the impressive world around me, which in this particular case was lush with colorful plant and animal life straight out of a Dr. Seuss book and rolling purple hills dotted with pillars of minerals. I named it Stapleton’s Landing and uploaded it to the server – though I’ll probably never see it again, another player might one day stumble across it and wonder who I was. (As far as we’ve seen so far this is the extent of No Man’s Sky’s multiplayer interaction in every reported test to date – even people who have gone to the same place at the same time haven’t been able to see each other.)But then you get in your ship and fly straight up off the surface and clear the atmosphere of a planet directly into space, then zip over to a neighboring world and land on its surface without any loading, and it’s hard not to be impressed. That’s an experience I’ve always wanted in games, and No Man’s Sky pulls it off. It’s a great moment of glory, and one that’s badly needed as virtually everything between those moments is a repetitive, frustrating, and confusing slog.While the tutorial is sufficient to get you up and running with your handy jetpack, basic crafting skills, and a working spaceship capable of interstellar jumps toward the goal of reaching the center of the galaxy, there’s a huge amount of important information it never introduces you to. Things as fundamental as how to switch your multitool from mining mode to combat mode and back to more nuanced things like how ship upgrades depend heavily on placement to function best aren’t addressed at all. In general, No Man’s Sky does a poor job of teaching you how to play, so you should expect to lean heavily on external guides if you don’t want to waste time figuring out its opaque systems for yourself.In a game with so much inventory management the experience of actually managing it is important to get right – and No Man’s Sky botches it with a clumsy cursor-driven interface. Using the thumbsticks to navigate your cursor over the grids of your three different inventory screens (for your suit, your ship, and your multitool) just feels like the wrong tool for the job, especially since it doesn’t snap into position and can often land right in the middle of two options. Bafflingly, the cursor is even used to select between dialogue options; if I were challenged to come up with a more frustrating and less efficient way of choosing between two or three options with a gamepad thumbstick, I would be hard-pressed to make a worse one.Speaking of poor control, the galactic map where you choose which solar system to visit next is also a pain point. Getting the hang of selecting the star I wanted to go to took some effort, and even after dozens of jumps it doesn’t always move in the direction I’m expecting when I push the stick toward the next star along the path. But, since there’s almost never any indication of what a given star system will contain before you get there, it doesn’t really make a huge difference which one you go to. If you’re looking for a certain mineral to complete an upgrade to your ship, the only way to find out if a planet has it is to land and look around. So the choice of where to go next is completely uninformed, and therefore meaningless.All efforts to make combat more interesting ended up making it worse. The craftable modifiers you can attach to your weapon to change it from a submachine gun-style attack to a shotgun or burst rifle just mean the auto-aim lock is broken more frequently by reloads or breaks in firing, forcing you to retarget these small flying things to establish it again. For some reason you can also make bolts reflect off of objects, which seems exceptionally useless because there’s no way you’re ever going to hit something with a reflected shot in an outdoor environment. If there are more upgrades out there I haven’t seen any hint of them, but even if they exist I’ll be surprised if any of them can make this basic, uninteresting shooting feel fun.I also loathe having to pop open my inventory halfway through a battle to recharge my weapon if I happen to run out of reloads. The inventory window doesn’t pause the action, but it does prevent you from moving, so you’re just taking a beating until you can work through that awful interface. And while you’d think loading your gun with plutonium rather than carbon would produce a different effect, there’s no such subtlety involved. So why isn’t it automated? Just to create more busywork.Of course, the Sentinels are so bad at their jobs that you can basically just walk away from them. They’re all-seeing and can spontaneously spawn out of thin air as needed, but their attention span is laughably short. It’s to the point where I was able to run around a planet grabbing protected items at will with impunity because they couldn’t be bothered to chase me for more than 15 seconds or so. Even when their bigger, death-ray-packing friends show up they’re easily dispatched (grenades take them down quickly) or avoided.