No Man’s Sky Game Review

[section_title title=Conclusion]

Conclusion

No Man’s Sky is ambitious but there is a lot of work that needs to be done to achieve greatness. The planets become a blur of same faced animals and reds, greens and blues. You get to your ship, launch into space and quit for a bit. Only to find on your next session that the save system is more obtuse and didn’t feel like saving and your back on the starting planet with none of the minerals collected.

You warp into a system and are immediately attacked by pirates, it’s tense and thrilling but then realise you are fighting the controls more than the pirates. The lag between mouse movement and ship movement is seconds long. It becomes a war against the UI, fighting it’s console roots. The UI is a jumbled mess and ported with no thought for mouse use, navigating the galactic map is horrible. Every page change in your inventory resets the mouse position to dead centre like a controller requires. Mouse clicks require holding for a second to fill a bar, except when they don’t, changing how it works on the same page.

This is perhaps the truth of playing No Man’s Sky, there are frequent hours of mindless mining punctuated by crashes, freezes and saves not saving. It’s broken beyond belief and infuriating a lot of the time. The LOD is far too close even on high, but you forget about it while exploring a planet. There’s a lot of grinding for very little game, getting different numbers to make the other numbers go up quicker in an addictive little clicker game loop.

And yet, I can’t stop playing, despite seeing body parts recycled across animals far too regularly. I love landing on a new planet, getting my bearings and setting off across alien landscapes, discovering the strange combination of animals and crashed ships and just watching the worlds go by.

In it’s current state it’s a gamble if it will even run on your system. For that reason I recommend waiting for the stability patches before purchase.