No Man’s Sky [Game Review]

Disclaimer: the article was written immediately after the game was released; the information and assessment presented reflect the release state of the product, therefore at the time of the post on the portal they are rather of historical significance

While scientists are trying to send humans to Mars, the gaming industry is offering tours to various corners of the universe, especially within the space simulator genre. One of the recent stars to shine on the horizon of space sims is No Man’s Sky – an adventure game, an epic game, a "universe game", as the developers call it, Hello Games. Its main feature is the algorithm for generating planets and galaxies, providing a unique gaming experience (potentially endless!), allowing you to feel like a pioneer of the cosmic depths, a kind of Magellan in a spacesuit, victoriously planting a flag with his name in the sands of another desert planet, or Przhevalsky, solemnly riding an alien three-headed horse. It sounds damn delicious, you must agree: somewhere inside the inner child-explorer begins to lick his lips. And there were a lot of such adventure-hungry children: the project already at the concept stage acquired an unimaginable number of fans. However, we have already heard more than once from different companies about a “living open world”, and we know that quality is often inversely proportional to quantity, especially when we are talking about an entire randomly generated universe. Were our fears justified??

Let’s start with the fact that No Man’s Sky costs $60, which, for a second, is almost half the cost of living today. A game that has a similar price tag automatically ranks with AAA projects, and the demand from it is corresponding. So, as an AAA project, No Man’s Sky doesn’t hold up at all. Yes, for developers this could be a dream game, a childhood fantasy come true. This is their children’s gouache drawing – naive, ridiculous, but their own. For a player, this is also an expensive purchase, and not everyone is ready to shell out four thousand rubles for a child’s, albeit sincere, daub.

The game opens in a classic (read: hackneyed) way for a survival adventure: we come to our senses at a broken trough, on which, after repairs, we will have to explore the galaxy. By the way, the starting planet is generated randomly, and the game can be met with either beautiful purple bushes or a gray desert with two bushes on the horizon (I personally saw four starting planets, thanks, crooked optimization for PC).

This is where you first encounter https://lasbetcasino.co.uk/mobile-app/ the local survival system. At first, collecting resources and crafting parts is really interesting, primarily due to the unknown: by touch you understand that organic matter is needed to extract carbon, and it is better to look for metals in rocks, and you are pleasantly surprised to find a two-meter iron mushroom. However, after visiting a couple of planets, all the magic disappears, giving way to experience and calculation – you unmistakably know that the best source of isotopes are red crystals, and fuel for the pulse engine is easiest to obtain from meteorites in space. Around the same time, the realization comes that survival elements are rudimentary and do not represent a real test. On the one hand, this is better than the endless running from the water pump to the bed, as in the recent We Happy Few, and the extraction of resources does not particularly slow down research activities, on the other hand, some time is still spent collecting the necessary minerals, and against the backdrop of the general emptiness and ease of the game, this time feels wasted.

I can’t help but feel that the survival idea was added to suit modern trends or, more likely, to fill a gameplay vacuum. And what will be left if you throw away resource gathering?? Planetary exploration and combat system. By the way, the local combat deserves to be thrown out the window of the ship during the next hyperjump in some uninhabited sector. The player will always emerge victorious from ground battles even with the initial cutter, and it is worth installing combat upgrades only in order to save time on firefights. Space battles are meaningless and merciless – forget about the dynamic and intense battles of some Elite Dangerous, ship control is limited to WASD, two acceleration buttons and mouse buttons, and is absolutely not suitable for arcade brawls (no application was made for depth). At the same time, the opponents turn out to be surprisingly toothy: in my experience, running into Sentinel ships is the only way to die in the game. Fortunately, with the installation of homing missiles, space battles cease to be annoying, although they still do not cause joy.

Let’s return to research – the main activity in the game. To be honest, the developers should have left only this component, without scattering themselves on everything else – a sort of ABZÛ about space and unknown worlds. Here, however, everything again depends on luck – sometimes the new planet turns out to be just another rocky wasteland, twisted into a ball, and sometimes there are beautiful forests, burning with yellow leaves and inhabited by wonderful primates. There are several points of interest on the planets: these are alien bases, where you can meet representatives of extraterrestrial civilizations, and ancient monoliths, from which you can learn new words for communicating with aliens, and broken ships awaiting repair, and simply lighthouses that perpetuate the quirks of the landscape… However, by the fourth planet you almost certainly know what awaits you at any of these points, or rather, you know what generator will be chosen from. There are no complaints about his work, he may be trying, but he only has few initial blocks to work with, and this is felt more and more with each planet visited, when once again you meet a Chupacabra, differing from the previous one only in the number of horns on the ridge.

Another problem that comes to the fore quite early on: even a planet with a dominance of animals and bases feels uninhabited at best, dead at worst. The fact is that there are two types of animals: cowardly friendly ones (in fear they cut circles around the player, you can feed them with resources for the sake of resources) and evil heel-biters (in a rage they run at the player in a straight line, resting on the stones, you can feed them with your own ass for some unknown reason), and, as Butusov once sang, “it’s equally boring to go with both of them.”. As for the aliens, interaction with them turned out to be painfully scant. You can meet them exclusively at bases, where upon first contact they give simple quests, usually boiling down to choosing one of three answer options (learned words to help!); then for a small amount of resources they offer several services (learn a word, repair a ship) depending on the level of reputation. It’s a paradox, but you learn much more about the history and culture of the few races that populate the game world from “dialogues” with monoliths than from its living representatives.
The same emptiness fills space. Don’t get me wrong, I didn’t think that space was an exclusively populated place, but why the hell aren’t there any ships in the system?? However, once you get to the space station, it immediately becomes the busiest place in the universe – the flow of ships is simply endless. This is the appearance of life – offensively cheap and absolutely implausible.

By the way, in all this it was completely forgotten that the game has a plot. Yes, yes, imagine. And its implementation in a randomly generated world, even on paper, seems like a non-trivial task. It is solved as follows: from the very beginning the player is given obvious goals – to repair the ship, leave the planet – and the player fulfills them, because this is exactly what he wants without any hints. Then the plot suggests assembling an engine for hyperjumps, visiting another system, and finding a new recipe in it… On the one hand, this is a very correct approach, on the other hand, at some point you begin to notice a certain obsession – it is very difficult to resist the beacon on the map pointing to another conditional factory, and you supposedly accidentally bump into quest buildings in the middle of the plain. In a word, the illusion of randomness of everything that happens fades away quite quickly, but otherwise the plot is one of the points that No Man’s Sky copes with more often than not.
And the game also copes with creating an atmosphere – in some places. The first planet, the first spacewalk, the first few hours are frankly captivating, and although over time the feeling of discovery becomes increasingly devalued, for n boring minutes/hours there is one or two wow moments. By the way, the player’s only companion in this world of loneliness will be music. Local melodies are not bad, but disposable. Don’t get me wrong, it’s quite good, but like everything else in this game, it’s only for the beginning, so I recommend choosing your own playlist. Believe me, exploring planets while listening to your favorite songs can give you many moments of true pleasure: personally, I really enjoy playing something like The Everly Brothers – All I Have To Do Is Dream, feeling like Star-Lord from Guardians of the Galaxy. If you decide to buy, be sure to try it.

And finally, a little more about the sad. As mentioned earlier, optimization on PC is terrible. I don’t have the weakest machine by modern standards, and it wheezed and cursed, trying to produce a stable 30 frames per second. It turned out so-so even on low settings. The way the space ahead is gradually loading causes universal sadness. And never fly over the planet at the level of the clouds – their graininess can cause a stroke even in an experienced space ace. And I also talked about four starting planets, remember? The fact is that the game flatly refused to save the updated graphics settings, and was not going to be saved at all. The solution was found quickly – run as administrator. Although compared to the crashes of other users, all this seems like minor problems. I can’t comment on the console version, but reviews from foreign journalists indicate that there are problems in it too.

On the game’s website, the developers answered the question “What to do in No Man’s Sky?"As you can see, they have nothing special to offer

No Man’s Sky is truly an adventure. The adventure of an ambitious idea, born within the walls of a small studio, which, becoming a game, unexpectedly gains popularity and loses itself in the waves of self-created interest, along the way acquiring unnecessary mechanics, and then comes to us – awkward, unbalanced and damn expensive. And this game can be enjoyed, picking out the highlights for which it was created from the damp final product; or rather, you can enjoy what is happening in your imagination, and not the game itself.

As a science fiction connoisseur, I think the game should be given a chance. A rare game that allows you to experience the childhood joy of a discoverer. However, as a journalist evaluating the product, I have to admit that No Man’s Sky of cheese does not live up to expectations and is absolutely not worth the money. Leaving this verdict to the reader, I put on my headphones, turn on the David Bowie playlist and set off to wander through yet another poorly loaded red tundra.