So I played a bit of No Man's Sky last night and to cut to the chase, it was kind of boring. The game is beautiful and I love the idea of endless space travel, but the game is just that, big and kind of empty.
You start off on a randomly generated planet with a minor explanation that your ship is broken and needs repaired. I spent my first 10 minutes of game play trying to figure out how to manage my inventory and figure out how to repair my ship, as the game lacks a good tutorial. It wasn't until my suit started to break down that I figured out how to repair stuff. Once I got a grasp on reading the menus the game started to show it's true colors. This game is an endless grind for elements. Elements are used to repair your space suit, fuel your ship, upgrade your multi tool, so on and so on. The problem is, you have to do this a lot. Every time your ship takes off is uses fuel, so you are constantly trying to find more fuel. Every two minutes or so, your space suit starts to degrade and you need to repair it. The elements aren't hard to come by, but it's aggravating how often you need to be micro managing your stuff!
You start off on a randomly generated planet with a minor explanation that your ship is broken and needs repaired. I spent my first 10 minutes of game play trying to figure out how to manage my inventory and figure out how to repair my ship, as the game lacks a good tutorial. It wasn't until my suit started to break down that I figured out how to repair stuff. Once I got a grasp on reading the menus the game started to show it's true colors. This game is an endless grind for elements. Elements are used to repair your space suit, fuel your ship, upgrade your multi tool, so on and so on. The problem is, you have to do this a lot. Every time your ship takes off is uses fuel, so you are constantly trying to find more fuel. Every two minutes or so, your space suit starts to degrade and you need to repair it. The elements aren't hard to come by, but it's aggravating how often you need to be micro managing your stuff!
Once I finally figured out what needed to be done to repair my ship, I was left with another dilemma. The game wanted me to create something out of iron. So I walked around till I found some and started to mine it with my multi tool. Once I had it, I didn't know what to do with it. It took me a few minutes of fiddling around with the menus to figure out how to craft items. One of the biggest problems I had as a new player was the lack of tutorials to teach me what to do, but I'm a video gamer at heart, so I figured it out. I started understanding how the repair function works and set my sights on my multi tool which also needed some repairs. I found the associated materials that were required for the upgrade and proceeded to create a scanner for my multi tool. The scanner allowed me to push a button that shoots out a radar of sorts and lets you know where important items are around the map. I needed only 1 last element to fix my ship, so I pushed the scan button and started looking around. It popped up on my screen but when I hovered over it, there was a number below it. 10:43. The more I walked towards it, the smaller the number got. Turns out, that's the amount of time it will take you to get there. So I spent 10 minutes traveling to the resource and 10 minutes traveling back just to fix my ship.
After about a half hour of walking around aimlessly, trying to manage my small inventory allotment, and making a 20 minute trip to (what felt like) the other side of the planet, I fixed my ship and was in the air. This is the part of the game I was looking most forward to. I wanted to explore the galaxy like Han Solo with my Millennium Falcon, wanted to shoot down some bad guys in space like Star Fox, this is moment I've waited for. I was let down. The flying in the game feels shallow. Plenty of other games handle planet side spacecraft handling very well, take Halo for example, flying the Phaeton, Wasp, and Banshee feel great, and the game isn't even built around that mechanic. Flying your ship on the planet feels clumsy. The controls feel odd as your left stick controls the ship and the right stick controls your pilots view inside the cockpit. In space things get a little better as you are now able to rotate your ship upside down.
Ultimately the game is going to need a lot of work. There isn't a story narrative to drive the repetition of finding minerals, fueling your ship, constantly repairing and refilling your space suit/multi tool, and flying to the next planet. Many will make the argument that the game doesn't need a narrative, that's it's about the experience. If that's the case then it needs a lot of work, because the experience is comparable to a flight simulator in which you are constantly stopping to refuel your ship and grab a bite to eat to make you healthy again. They would do well to follow in the path of Minecraft, allowing players to build/explore/fight together, I think the game would do well to implement some kind of questing system with the ability to build space stations. Though the game is impressive based on it's pioneered endless galaxy system, it doesn't make up for how empty the game feels.
If you enjoy being in the woods and just looking at nature, this game is for you. NMS has some beautiful planets and some amazing creatures. The art style is great and the ambient noises of ships flying over head or an animal growling in the distance makes you feel pretty immersed. There is a lot of promise for this game and I think the dev team will make this game great in about a year or so. As for now I'll just put the game back on the shelf and hope for a good patch in the future. I'll give No Man's Sky 6 carbon out of 10.
