A storm is coming. Another damn storm. And not the strong winds, hard rain kind of storm I remember from back on Earth.
No, this storm is going to be much worse. It’s going to raise the already scalding hot temperature of the alien planet I’m exploring from a wicked hot 92 degrees Celsius to 327 degrees Celsius. That will knock out my exo-suit’s thermal protection in less than half a minute, which makes this huge deposit of gold all that much harder to mine.
In fact, I’ve named this particular planet “Hot and Gold” which I think is pretty clever. I haven’t named a lot of my planets. There’s one I wish I’d named Big Red in retrospect. Because you can kiss a little longer on Big Red.
But oh well.
At first, when I started playing No Man’s Sky, I didn’t name anything at all. It wasn’t until a bit later that I started naming stuff—but only a few things. Particularly interesting beasties and planets. The occasional system. On what watery planet (which I named Water World, in honor of Kevin Costner) I found some big, fat alien thingies that looked like bouncing turnips. I named them Fat Boys. I’m a very literal creator of names, I guess. I do it this way because it helps me remember, helps me catalog where I’ve been.
After all, for all its menus and catalogs, No Man’s Sky is really a game about where you’re going, not where you’ve been. More on that in a bit.
I spent hours on Hot and Gold. For one thing, it was full of gold! Gold is worth good money! But it had even more precious elements as well, and everywhere I went, I found more of them. So much valuable stuff to mine and then sell to the highest bidder. Much better than the average planet, to be sure.
Hot and Gold was vast, too. Filled with alien life, treasure and myriad other points of interest. After hours on Hot and Gold, I was still a long ways off from 100% completion.
I have two warring sides when it comes to video games. The completionist and the slacker. Or, perhaps more accurately, the obsessive-compulsive and the reasonable human being who realizes they can’t spend all day in a manic mix of tedium and addictive feedback loops. Because man-oh-man, if there’s any way to describe No Man’s Sky, that’s it. Tedium and addiction. And just a dash of awe and wonder and delight.
I’ve traversed the stars, hopping from planet to planet, exploring the universe and building a vast personal fortune. I’ve met a bunch of aliens, and even learned some of their language. And after hours and hours, I’m still not ready to issue a verdict, let alone a score, for this big, weird game. But I am ready to offer up some impressions—just as soon as I mine this giant tower of gold. Which will require me to run back to my ship a few times to cool off.
God, it’s hot out here on Hot and Gold. Hot and full of sweet, sweet loot.
for videos : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UAglE7IHy3Y
The Good
There’s lots to like—and plenty to love—about No Man’s Sky.
The music is wonderful, and sets the mood perfectly throughout much of your exploration.
I really do love how you learn bits and scraps of various alien languages, and how learning these languages can help you when speaking to various NPC’s throughout the game.
I enjoy the little number puzzles you encounter, which—if you solve them correctly—lead to new discoveries.
Graphically, the game is a marvel. It’s beautiful and strange, and sometimes even breathtaking. The aforementioned Big Red planet wasn’t just an earthy red. The grasses were red. They undulated. It was hypnotizing.
Sometimes, staring off across some vast plain or ocean, you really get a sense of wonder. Sometimes the universe around you is green or yellow. It’s almost never black. The game is a smorgasbord of vintage color.
Occasionally I got really excited about a new alien discovery. Some strange, long-legged dinosaur hobbling across an alien frontier. I zoomed in and analyzed it and didn’t care that its name was gobbledygook.
Sometimes I feel really small in this big universe that Hello Games has created. I feel like I’m seeing this game in a way nobody else does. My own planets. My own stars. (But then, there are always signs of alien civilization everywhere. I’ve never found a planet bereft of outposts and shelters and all the other signs of previous discovery…)
I love the weird alien ships, and I’m saving up still to buy a really expensive one.
Much of what I love or like or enjoy about No Man’s Sky is sort of hard to put into words. The game’s best qualities are a bit amorphous and vague. There’s a sense to it that really harnesses you, draws you in closer. You can tell that it’s a labor of love.
Basically, I love the aesthetic. I love the sound design. I love getting rich and getting better Multi-Tools. I love the addiction. Need that fix. Want that bigger, better ship with so many more inventory slots. I want those inventory slots so that I can get more stuff, so that I can get an even better ship, so that I can keep on keeping on. I love that feedback loop!
And then…
The Bad
…then I start to feel empty. I start to feel all alone in a big universe. It’s not just that it’s a single player game. It’s that I have nobody to talk to. Just aliens I can barely understand. I start to wish this was Mass Effect, that I had a crew. A friend. A lover. I don’t need this to be multiplayer, but I don’t think I’ve ever felt so lonesome in a video game before. I need somebody.
God, even an enemy.
Or maybe it’s not somebody that’s missing. Maybe it’s something.
Maybe I need purpose. No Man’s Sky doesn’t give me any purpose—at least not yet. Any meaning.
There’s the Atlas, which is mostly just a mystery at this point. There’s a story here, sort of, and lots of lore. But it’s a nihilistic experience; I don’t know why I’m doing what I’m doing, other than to get more Units. A bigger ship. Better stuff. I’m a space consumer, entrepreneur. I’m a capitalist crafter with a capital C.
I’m just not sure why. And pretty soon, it all starts to feel dreary with sameness.
All the planets are different, but for all their differences, they blur together. I can’t anchor any of them with any meaning. My discoveries are like little boxes I tick off, little notches in my belt. Why?
Why am I doing this?
No Man’s Sky, when the wonder wears off a bit, and the awe slips, and the delight fades, is largely comprised of all the things I hate about modern video games.
Combat is limited and not very good, whether on land (against floating sentry robots) or in space against enemy ships (that kill you very quickly until you get more powerful). I almost wish the game didn’t have combat, or that it had actual first-person shooter combat. Go big or go home. Why are these sentries even attacking me?
Who am I to attack?
Really, who am I? I don’t even know what I look like.
Mostly, this is a game about gathering resources and then crafting stuff, and then getting rid of that stuff so that you get better stuff. Out with the old, in with the new, over and over again. It’s at once deeply addicting and horribly tedious.
I’ve complained about too much crafting and too much resource gathering before. I think back to a game like Dragon Age: Inquisition, which had me almost in tears after a while I just couldn’t take any more of the damn crafting and gathering, and the combat never really made up for it, and the story wasn’t that great even though I enjoyed it. No Man’s Sky is like all of that, but with even less combat and an even sparser story, and even more gathering and crafting.
I also started to think about FTL, which is a space game with resource management and space jumps and all that, and I have to be honest: No Man’s Sky just doesn’t even compare. I’d take FTL any day, no matter the fact that it’s a much smaller game, a much uglier game. It’s just a lot more engaging.
But maybe this is just a matter of taste. Maybe for crafters and gatherers this will be the best space simulator of all time. It’s certainly one of the best looking, or at least artsiest looking.
So there are other problems.
On one planet, I found a signal which led to a jammed terminal. I solved the puzzle it presented me with, and was then led to the crash site of a ship that was much better than my own. The only problem was that it was also pretty beat up. I fixed some of its components, but didn’t have the proper resources to fix it all—not even enough to get it off the ground. So I was forced to go in my other ship to look for those resources, or for a trade uplink. The problem? No Man’s Sky doesn’t give you any sort of map, or any beacon system to mark places you’ve already been.
for videos : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nvU644GC4hQ
As I said up above, this is a game determined to propel you forward rather than let you languish in the past. But I wanted that ship, so after I found the resources I needed, I kept flying across this massive planet (which I called Barren) and I kept finding lots of stuff. Alien monoliths. Abandoned shelters with some weird, green goo everywhere. Lots of stuff, but I couldn’t find that ship. I finally had to give up. It was more frustrating than tragically poetic.
A lot of the game feels frustrating, and that frustration leads me toward the dread B word. Boredom.
I have Red Dead Redemption installed on my Xbox One. I found myself pausing No Man’s Sky and turning on the other console. Chasing down bounties, getting in gunfights, exploring the Wild West.
The two games are different, but they both reward exploration and discovery. They both tap into similar feedback loops. It’s just that Red Dead Redemption has lots of fun stuff to do, and No Man’s Sky gets old pretty quickly.
I mean, at the same time it’s utterly absorbing. Like I said, I spent hours just trying to unlock the secrets of that damnably hot Hot and Gold planet. I’ve spent hours in the game and it’s been addictive enough to keep me wrapped up in just one planet for ages. I finally left Hot and Gold and kept making my way through the stars. I could spend dozens of hours with No Man’s Sky. I’m just not sure I want to.
But then again, this is just part of my “review in process” so who knows? I could have a change of heart.
The Ugly
There’s very little actually ugly about this game. Some of the alien species are certainly on the ugly side, but that’s just my prejudice seeping through.
But even with the big day-one patch it’s a game with some real issues. Frame rates slow at times, and there’s some serious graphical tearing here and there. Nothing too distracting, but nothing that should be ignored either.
I did have one pretty terrible game crash right after a fight with some sentries. I was looting their debris, when the game froze up. It froze up so badly I thought I’d have to unplug the PS4. Thankfully, after a few minutes the game crashed completely and I was able to restart.
It makes me wonder how the PC version will perform, since we can almost certainly expect more issues from a PC version than a PS4 version these days, of just about any game.
Still, for all my hours with No Man’s Sky so far, I haven’t had too many issues. Load times vary, and could be better, but it’s not Bloodborne bad.
The UI is, in some respects, a little too like Destiny for my taste. You even select menus the same. (More on that in a separate post.)
Beyond this, a few things could be better explained. I definitely wasted time walking around my first planet when I should have been flying. And faced various other now-forgotten confusions. It’s not that I want my hand held, but a few more instructions early on wouldn’t hurt.
Perhaps I’m nit-picking.
Verdict-in-progress
Overall, I’m glad No Man’s Sky is a game. I’m just not sure it’s my kind of game. Or maybe it’s not sure what kind of game it wants to be. Or maybe I just need to keep playing, keep digging deeper and deeper. Will the completionist in me ever let me finish No Man’s Sky?
Is finishing it the point?
Maybe the point—the point that this post can’t capture, because it’s just too soon still—is the journey. Maybe I haven’t learned to do the journey yet. Or maybe that’s my hope. Just browse through the gallery at the end of this post. It’s filled with images of planets I haven’t yet encountered. Of planets and creatures and things I may never encounter in this vast, randomly generated space exploration game. That’s sort of beautiful and wonderful in its own right, whatever other shortcomings the game may have.
Stay tuned for lots more No Man’s Sky coverage in the coming days, from me and the rest of the crew here at Forbes Games. And chime in on social media or in the comments to let us know what you think of the game. I particularly enjoy commenters who tell me I know nothing, Jon Snow, about video games or life, for that matter.
If nothing else, this is a game that has me thinking. I’m not sure that’s as good as a game that has me doubled over with fun, but it’s nothing to sniff at either.
source : http://www.forbes.com/sites/erikkain/2016/08/10/the-good-the-bad-and-the-ugly-of-no-mans-sky/#6bf48e6a739c
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