NO MAN’S SKY – or – One Big, Beautiful Nope

I am the target market for No Man’s Sky.

I’ve had a lifelong fascination with space exploration, and I’m a total sucker for sandbox games. The very thought of a wide-open, limitless starscape that I can actually explore is intoxicating. I want to GO there, and I CAN! I want to dive into mind-meltingly beautiful alien landscapes, see life in all of its bizarre and exquisite forms, and this game offers both in huge abundance. The scope and scale of No Man’s Sky is so gargantuan it can only be described in wacko, sand-related metaphors that imply such incomprehensible vastness they don’t even sound real. This game was built for people like me.

That makes this review so difficult to write, because So. Much. Is. Wrong.

The game’s interface alone is reason enough to send it back to alpha; the sense of story is pathetically botched; interactions with alien races are lifeless at best; and the design choice for a game about exploring alien worlds to be completely devoid of maps – oh, my stars. It all adds up to a surprising, bewildering disaster.

And yet, I’ve played this game for roughly 48 hours (yeah, I know), and I want to play it more! What on earth is wrong with me? I feel like a crazy person, spending hours at a time playing a game I cannot confidently claim to enjoy. So, what’s the deal? What gives it so much… for lack of a more appropriate term… gravity?

NMS is hands-down one of the most gorgeous games I’ve ever played, and it goes way, way beyond eye candy. There is a visceral joy about seeing a new, untouched landscape for the very first time. Not just MY first time, but the first time for anyone, ever – the purest state of exploration. Sweeping vistas are everywhere! Bizarre and fascinating wildlife is teeming! Strange, towering plants intermingle with extraordinary deposits of minerals and harvestable elements! All of these things coalesce into a truly awe-inspiring experience. And yet, they quickly become so predictable as to be boring.

If you played NMS for, say, 3 hours, and then stopped forever, I’d wager you’d have a deeply memorable, possibly even moving experience. But, if you stare at the curtain for too long, the curtain disappears, and the game’s inner workings come fully into view. The uniqueness of planets collapses. Something that would astound you to your core in your earliest moments of gameplay drains to beige after seeing its parts reassembled so easily into something else. Eventually, all the building blocks of the game are too visible as just building blocks. The wonder rapidly disappears, and the wonder is why I came.

But all that is “the experience” of the game. I haven’t talked at all about the gameplay, and JEEZ do we need to talk about…

THE GAMEPLAY

If you, Dear Gamer, are into harvesting stuff – I mean REALLY INTO harvesting stuff, like, that is YOUR THING – you might actually enjoy your time spent in No Man’s Sky. Most of the gameplay is pretty grind-y. It looks like this: 1) aim your raygun at an object, 2) obliterate that object with your laser, 3) automagically slurp its shattered elements into your inventory, 4) wonder if this is some meta-commentary about rampant colonialism and resource scarcity because you just completely destroyed something beautiful in nature for your own selfish purposes, you monster.

But wait! You need all these tiny matter-chunks! They’re necessary for crafting every improvement, every component, and every upgrade for your raygun, exosuit, and ship! The only thing in NMS you don’t build from spare parts are your extra inventory slots, which are more precious than anything else. You will need every inch of empty room you can afford. At some point, in fact, your entire purpose will be to hoard objects, components, and raw materials in order to sell them in the artificial (totally non-dynamic) economy in the desperate quest to expand your available inventory.

Your extra space is split between two locations. First: your exosuit, whose upgrades are purchased from tiny kiosks randomly scattered on every planet, a concept which raises so many logistical questions I can’t even start. Second: your ship’s hold, which can be increased either by buying a larger ship from aliens you encounter, or (huge sigh) by finding a crashed ship on a planet somewhere and going through the process of dismantling every upgrade on your old ship; transferring the disassembled, raw components (some of which were destroyed in the dismantling process) to your new ship; repairing your new ship because virtually every system was broken when it crashed; stocking back up on the resources that were lost when you dismantled your upgrades; then rebuilding the upgrades you had in your old ship. All of this for one extra inventory slot, or two if your unreasonably lucky.

If that process sounds hellish and annoying, you’re quite wrong. It’s worse. Multiple times I’ve come across a salvageable ship while I had a nearly full inventory, and decided to just leave the wreckage to rust rather than ditch enough cargo (yep, it’s gone forever!) to make the room necessary to build every component and repair the new ship.  And yet, this ship-swapping is a necessary evil, because every alien whose ship is for sale asks for such an unreasonable amount of money it’s not even worth considering. Unless, of course, you already have a large enough ship to cram full of valuables to sell off multiple times, not to mention the patience to hunt down and collect enough shiny stuff to fill your inventory, which… no. Just no. All of it, no.

And I haven’t even told you about the terrible, terrible interface!! And I won’t! Just suffice to say that it was either designed by someone with zero experience or interest in usability, or a gerbil with a keyboard. Those are the only two options. It is so bad it hurts. There, I talked about it.

This is why I am so torn! No Man’s Sky has made such a massive technical achievement in the scale of procedural generation! The very fact that 18 quintillion (18,000,000,000,000,000,000) planets can be built and exist in such a tiny, tiny amount of storage, only 2 gigabytes, is a feat of such hyperbolic proportions it cannot possibly be overstated. It is a game-changer. But the game itself is so utterly flawed, it burns me. For the record, there are more problems than I listed here, but I had to stop myself for my own sanity. I wanted to love this game. I still want to love it. I can’t.

To explore the universe of No Man’s Sky in all its massive scale and beauty is an experience that borders on spiritual.

To play the game of No Man’s Sky is… garbage.

2 stars, out of 5. (Unless they fix it, then please tell me immediately.)

Designed by – Hello Games

Distributor – Sony (who has no excuse for this kind of behavior)