I bought this game new on clearance which is how I get most of my PS4 titles. No Man’s Sky is a futuristic planetary exploration and survival crafting game. I’m not really big on survival when the word ‘horror’ doesn’t come after it but the exploration sounded novel and intriguing. This game is notorious for having a LOT of problems on launch and let me tell you… breaking news: this game has a lot of problems.
Anyway, I’m here with no idea how the game works at all but understanding that I have critical gauges in my HUD that are slowly dropping so I need to survive and probably fixing my ship would be a good idea. I start mining rocks with my laser gun multitool to get ferrite dust which pisses off one of the ever present sentinels which starts shooting me. Annoyed, I kill the sentinel. I go back to mining and two more sentinels show up and start shooting me so I kill them. Then more came. There’s a message at the bottom of the screen sometimes that says something along the lines of “Kill sentinels before they signal for help.” That’s not a thing. That’s total fucking bullshit. Here’s how it works: You kill a sentinel, more sentinels show up. Always. Eventually you get the four legged one and then the near indestructible giant walkers which are essentially just AT-STs from Star Wars. The system is like the 1-5 star alert rating in the GTA or Just Cause games. You are trapped in an endless positive feedback loop of more and greater enemy reinforcements until you die or run away out of sight. Any time a sentinel witnesses you mining or killing an animal they will attack you. It’s never worth defending yourself because you’re just going to exacerbate the problem. It’s much easier to just continue mining and taking easily sustainable potshots from a single sentinel than it is to retaliate and start a war. This was really a shit way to start the game. I haven’t even taken inventory yet. I have no idea how anything works and I’m just instantly thrown into this fight with an infinite barrage of hostile robots. I had the misfortune of spawning with my ship atop a giant plateau formation something like Devil’s Tower in Wyoming. To escape the attack I have to jump off and run and then when it’s finally safe getting back up is a bitch and a half.
After you fix your ship you have three different components on your ship that need to be fueled for complete starship travel. Your takeoff boosters allow you to takeoff without a landing pad. Once you fly up into space you can engage your pulse engines allowing you to cruise the system at a moderate speed. Sometimes it will take you a couple of minutes to get to a far away planet. These engines run on trintium which you can get from mining asteroids which are EVERYWHERE unlike actual space. Eventually you can install an FTL warp drive in your ship which allows you to travel to other star systems but only certain systems, (usually just one) within range so you have to treat the galaxy like an enormous checkerboard which is stupid. I should be able to travel wherever the hell I want however I want.
The planets have a list of attribute variables which I guess are configured randomly to create all these planets. There’s atmosphere or none. There’s the size which actually affects the gravity, (how high you can jump with the jetpack,) which impressed me. There’s number of animal species and which species, extreme heat, cold, toxic or radioactive environments. Those all come with their own storms which quickly drain your suit’s environmental shielding. There’s of course the plants, minerals and earth formations. You reach a point where it becomes boring and you think you’ve seen it all and then you find your first mostly water planet or one with impossible floating islands or one with crazy half mile high hexagonal pillars sticking out of the ground. The game also has an in game debug mode that lets you set up perfect screenshots for whenever you see something really cool.
On planets there are rocks, plants, animals and precious metal deposits all of which you can mine for materials. Everything has a primary substance that it’s composed of that feeds into your inventory as you whittle down the object’s lifebar with your laser. Some items have a secondary substance that you only get a little bit of once you destroy the object. The game plays pretty fast and loose with elements and compounds. A lot of them are real, a lot of them aren’t. It almost doesn’t seem to matter or make sense a lot of times what stuff recharges or makes what. It just does. Some things will accept 2-3 different things as recharging fuel with varying degrees of efficiency. Carbon recharges your laser multitool. Whatever. Sodium charges your personal environmental shield. Oxygen recharges your life support. Frost crystals can make glass? But also platinum can make glass? Refining ferrite makes refined ferrite. Refined refined ferrite becomes magnetized ferrite. Refined magnetized ferrite becomes… just regular ferrite again but a lot less of it since much has been lost during the refinement process. You can craft antimatter? That’s kind of scary. Refining gold makes pyrite… great. So you can literally turn actual gold into fool’s gold which is doubly mystifying since they share no elemental makeup. Refining pyrite makes ferrite which I haven’t mentioned can be found anywhere and is near worthless. So if you want to make gold into playground gravel, this is how you do it.
Wherever you go you can set up bases. These bases can be as simple as just a base computer (which costs 40 chromatic metal to craft) to a building as big and complex as you wish to make it with flags, starship landing pads, exocraft pads, hydroponic systems, various discipline terminals where you can hire other beings to work. These workers will essentially give you quests that get you items or help you learn how to make new products and technology. Eventually I built one of my bases big and complex enough to accomodate all the important components needed to enrich my abilities to the max. I used the modular pieces to build because it was easier and I hadn’t done much building before. There seems to be no erase or demolish button except for deleting the whole base via the base computer. So as you add on to your base having no Idea what spaces you’ll need next or where the best place to put them is you’re eventually going to build something less than ideal and you’re just going to have to accept that your base looks fucking stupid now or doesn’t work very well. I had one part of my base where a glass geodesic dome was stacked atop two modular square rooms because it conserved space and minimized necessary building materials. The only feasible way to be able to access all those spaces is with a ladder so I have two doors on the first floor to get in, a ladder going up through the center of the ceiling inside to the second floor and then a continuation of the ladder to go up to the third floor dome. The problem is the game has no way for your character to get off of a ladder unless you are at the top or bottom. Since these two ladders are seen as one you are forced to climb past the second floor to get to either the top or the bottom of the ladder. This means the second floor is virtually inaccessible and there’s nothing I can do about it. Because there’s no such thing as modular style stairs in the build menu that I could put on the exterior. I eventually just put a door in the second floor which I could fly through from the outside with the jetpack.
There are things called “journey milestones” where the game keeps track of how far you’ve walked, how many sentinels you’ve destroyed, aliens met etc. and it tells you every time you make the next increment. However I’m dubious of its ability to keep track of days spent on hostile worlds. I spent 80 hours playing this game and I only have a two star rating out of ten. The all animals discovered on planets function is just plain broken. I’ve purposefully scanned all animals on a couple of planets, got a little check mark message and it still shows me at zero.
You can get space freighters which allow you to store stuff and amass a fleet of different space frigates which you can send out on missions similarly to Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood. You want to make sure the ships you send have appropriate collective stats to the mission or they come back with more damaged components which have to to be repaired and that is super annoying because YOU are the only person in your entire fleet that can fix anything. The missions run in real world time using the console’s clock till completion so when it says 28 hours it means your ships are gone until tomorrow. You have to build a command center in your freighter for every mission you want to take simultaneously. So I built three which means I could have three missions going at once. This is fucking stupid. It’s like if you had to buy one computer for every internet browser tab you want to have open. When ships come back they gain experience, you get paid and you get a payload of items gathered depending on the type and duration of the mission. My Freighter’s inventory is really small so I found myself having to bus a bunch of shit out of my freighter inventory to sell at the store or into secondary storage to have enough room so I could complete a mission and receive the items. You can build storage rooms into your freighter but they’re not part of the regular inventory and have only half the item stacking capacity. I built eight containers but the containers are all individual units which occupy eight separate rooms and only have five slots each so if I’m trying to find a specific item or empty spot I have to walk to one, open it up, exit out and walk to the next one however many times that takes. Why can’t I just upgrade my freighter inventory like I do my exosuit inventory? This system is so cumbersome.
When I get a rare item I hoard it in storage as many as will fit in one slot and then I sell whatever surplus I get. Eventually I just end up with a ton of money that has no purpose other than to continue snowballing into a larger amount of money as I make bigger investments and expand my fleet and rare items and materials that 75% of the time have no reason to exist whatsoever. One of them might be used in some esoteric starship weapon upgrade you don’t care enough about to craft or it might be some item with a vague description that means nothing to you so you don’t even know what you do with it. I’ve had main missions where I’m supposed to craft a critical item and then it gives you the recipe which says to make it out of two other crafted items which you don’t have the recipes for and it doesn’t tell you where you can get them so you’re just up shit creek.
I saved a freighter from a pirate attack that was the size of a freaking star destroyer. The captain offered it to me which I would have loved to take because my freighter is the smallest they come and I’d been having inventory space issues for forever. I didn’t take the ship. After playing this jankey ass game for sixty hours I knew dollars to doughnuts they fucked this up and if I switched freighters I’d lose all modifications to my previous freighter which I guess is realistic but I’d also lose everything in my freighter inventory and containers. I looked it up on the internet and sure enough that’s exactly what would have happened.
There are three main alien races: Klingon, Slippy Toads and Daft Punk. They have three different languages which you can theoretically learn one word at a time via finding devices, shrines, knowledge stones or asking for help from native speakers. Each time you access one of these items you’ll learn one random word from one of the languages which means in dialog boxes the word will show up translated in English. This is a big fucking waste of time because you’ll never learn enough relevant words to slap together a coherent translation because when you learn a word it could be practically any word in the entire dictionary which includes words rarely or never used in the game like ‘phlegmatic’ or ‘corduroy’ or ‘disingenuous.’ Really? I ask you for help with the language and you teach me the word for disingenuous? Don’t you think the word for ‘food’ or ‘help’ or ‘the’ would have been more useful?
One of the worst problems this game has is not knowing where the hell you’re going. You can build portals in this game which makes traveling easier but the more portals you build and the more space stations you discover the harder it is to know where each of these gobbledygook names on the expanding list takes you. You can tell what is a base and what is a space station and where your missions are to a degree even though it will only be as specific as which star system and not which portal in that system is closest. If it’s a different interest like that one planet you found with the uranium or tons of gravitino balls growing everywhere or your base with the big refiner in it then you’d better rename the planets and bases after those things so you can remember or you’re going to be spending a lot of time watching the portal loading screen. (I mean watching it once is more than long enough.) And another thing, the game catalogs the names of these planets you discover and what star systems they’re in but it says nothing else about these planets which really sucks. If you need to mine a lot of a specific thing to make something, you can’t just look at your list of planets, see which one has what you’re looking for and then go there to get it. You just have to go into space and fly around scanning planets until you find one that works for you and in all likelihood the thing you need is only found in trace amounts there and will take forever to mine because if you’re having to go on an interplanetary voyage to get it it’s probably not common.
Now this is great. I booted up this game again over a month later just to take some more screenshots for this post. There has been at least one update since then. In the twenty minutes of play I noticed:
The inventory screen now gives you an extremely general explanation of what items can be used for, which is a step in the right direction.
I’ve never gone into my freighter and seen this weird bloom effect clipping through the hull. Is that part of the update?
I found a new type of quest and went to the HUD quest marker which was on the nearest planet. Then I found the marker was for this building which is cantilevered in the air off the top of a big hill. Not only that but I had significant trouble finding the door because the door is blocked by the ground so I can’t even get inside unless I use the terrain manipulator. Then once I do get inside there’s all this other terrain clipping through the structure. The game is like “Oh, good! You’re back! I have a surprise for you. Hold on. Wait for it… IT’S SHIT!”
There are so many little things that I could go on and on about like the paradox of specifically using my laser to mine material to recharge my laser or the ubiquitous multitude of near worthless upgrades you can install in everything and various other gizmos and compounds that claim to have a purpose but don’t. What the hell is quicksilver? There’s the fact that there are basically only four missions ad infinitum available at the missions board and HUD markers being wishy washy about if they’ll show up when you do a scan on your surroundings. There’s the pedantic randomness of what materials and how much of them you need to fix which random broken parts on your frigates and the frustrating walk back to your starship and the flight to wherever and back to procure said materials but let’s just wrap it up with the ending. Should you choose to follow the story it’s basically just a bunch of go here and talk to x and go there and activate y and then have a few 2001: A Space Odyssey existential crises. I don’t think I’ve ever played an open world game where the actual story didn’t feel like a giant hassle whenever you finally took a break from your own self directed fun, sighed heavily and went over to that mission marker because it was so close. Here come the spoilers… I guess. That’s kind of a misleading statement because In order to spoil something it implies that the object in question was substantial or worthwhile at some point and believe me when I say that the ending of No Man’s Sky is not. Anyway you find out that this universe is a simulation and what you’re doing is going to reset it. There’s lots of psychobabble to read and then you think maybe you’re about to witness something incredible. The game lets you choose one of four new galaxies to go to and then you go there and then it starts you marooned on a planet with your current ship and all of its components broken. There’s no cutscene. There’s no event. You just begin unceremoniously in the new galaxy the same way you began in the old one. This is bullshit. My ship had a dozen different upgrades installed in it and now they all have to be repaired or trashed. My bases and everything I’ve discovered are all inaccessible because they’re… I don’t know… erased or just in a different plane of existence. I still have my fleet somehow. Now in accordance with my understanding of the story I was prepared to sacrifice everything I had and everything I’d done but I expected to be compensated with a stimulating reveal or resolution but instead I got something that was no different from just going to a new star system and landing on a random planet which I’d already done a hundred times before except this is worse because my ship is trashed and my bases are gone. I understand that the whole idea behind the game is like the meaning of life is an endless journey but I came away from it with a message more of nihilism. I had fun in between all the bullshit but when I got to the end it left me empty. The game Journey I felt had a similar intended message but executed it much better and with zero dialogue. This was such a missed opportunity.
