No Man Sky Review

What is No Man Sky?

No Man Sky is a single player space exploration game made by 'Hello Games' which attempts to capture a universe within a game. Playing the game, you will be jumping from planets to solar systems, from solar systems to galaxies, and then finally the rest of your procedural generated universe. This universe is in theory generated to be unique every time you make a new save file. The goal is to reach the center of the universe and to discover what is waiting there but with such a broad concept can it really be as good as it sounds or will it be all style and no substance…

Visuals and Audio

Screenshot of in game HUD and  land gameplay                           By  Francisco Pereira

No Man Sky is a game which is not graphically impressive because of some poor texture qualities here and there and some very bad detail pop-in issues especially when flying due to the speed of the aircraft and so you will see trees and details of mountains just appear out of nowhere. The life that is found throughout the game have some pretty jarring problems. For example, when talking to two ships that are of the same type, a pilot of the same species and identical twin will appear in both ships with the same name which can cause a giant disconnect for you and the game. However, the main strength of this title's visuals is its unique aesthetic which makes the game pleasing to the eye despite its low quality graphics. The way that the game generates its landscapes can be brilliantly dreamlike, especially at noon and dawn in almost any planet. With such a beautiful aesthetic, you need a calm, beautiful soundtrack to support the player's immersion. In ‘No Man's Sky’ the music dynamically plays in the background when flying around or the alarming combat music that plays when getting into a fight really excites you for a good engagement with the enemies in the game. The sound effects are also enjoyable as the sound of your engine, while flying through space and past planets, has a rather calming effect. On the ground, using your jetpack and mining tools produces an exquisitely satisfying aural response.

Overall, I think the sound design and visuals are all almost perfect with some jarring mistakes for immersion and so I give it a 4/5.

Gameplay and Story

Piloting a ship and shooting asteroids                                                                     By Francisco Pereira

No Man Sky tries to entice you into this grand universe by giving you little story bits here and there through space diaries which you will have to read if you want any substance to the story. It doesn’t give any hints to what is at the center of the galaxy which gives a very lackluster ending where the game just zooms out and creates a new galaxy for you to explore and to reach the middle again. Fortunately, there are some interesting mechanics to the game like the way you talk with NPCs  and how events in the game work as it takes into account that you don’t understand the language of the aliens you will meet so you have to learn how to speak their language by finding what are called knowledge stones around the planets to learn a certain species' language. However, the way you obtain words is almost completely random and this can lead to some frustrating experiences, such as the first word I learned for the language of the “korvax” is how to say “korvax” which ended up being simply “korvax”. In fact, I learned how to say “korvax” in their language four times. This lackluster story is complemented by an overly simple gameplay which is to explore and discover things, this is the most fun part of this game but it comes with a big problem. In order to be able to explore new planets or get new ships and equipment, you have to mine for resources to sell in markets found on space stations. You might say that mining is not that bad until you realize that with an hour and a half of mining a valuable mineral, you have earned 25 percent of an actual upgrade to your ship. This 'upgraded' ship is the exact same ship you had but it looks different and it has more space. This is the only kind of available upgrade to anything in this game because upgrading is basically adding modules to your precious inventory space in your suit, ship and mining laser and this gets rid of that free space in your inventory. This makes it so that the more upgrades you have, the slower you can collect minerals. You may be able to mine faster and you may be able to move faster  but that doesn’t change the fact that you have less space in your inventory which forces you to travel to some sort of trading post in order to continue collecting resources. Furthermore, throughout your common experiences with this game, you will have to constantly babysit your 4 main condition bars (besides health) which go down as a result of the environment, using your mining laser, taking off or landing and using your ship's hyperdrive. Each of these activities  require slightly different materials which takes up more precious space and also makes you stop doing whatever interesting or boring thing you’re doing. Then you have to go through a clunky menu and every press of a button takes a few seconds to select anything which can be pretty annoying when you’re in the middle of a fight with some sort of enemy because the game continues in while you are in the menu. The result is that you will be taking damage while you are desperately trying to refill those bars so you don’t die in some other horrible way like asphyxiation or even to reload your gun which ran out of ammo in the middle of being fired upon.

Overall, the gameplay and is extremely lackluster and the story has no substance but the simplicity can lead to some relaxing and fun gameplay when exploring 1/5.

Conclusion

'No Man's Sky' is a game in which the Aesthetic and sound design are the absolutes leave the rest of what makes a game a game to suffer which is the game play  . As a peaceful stress-reliever game, this may be a viable purchase if it was priced at 20 US dollars. Alas, it is not, a painful 60 US dollars wasted and so I can’t recommend such a flawed game at such a high price so I would wait for this to go on sale or wait for it to become decked out with all of the promised features and mods for those who are on PC.

Overall Score: 5/10 Average