Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

Like many, I was excited for No Man's Sky. Allow me to provide you with my frame of reference in anticipation of the title. I love the Fallout titles. While you CAN complete the Fallout games in about 10 hours or so, I generally put 150+ hours into them. This is because I love traversing the wasteland, seeing a structure in the distance and heading towards it. Not because the game tells me to, but because of the excitement of what I will find inside. I'll spend hours and hours just wandering for no other reason to check out what's over that hill or to rifle through old papers in an abandoned factory. When No Man's Sky was touted as an exploration game, this is what I expected, only in space and much MUCH larger. This was delivered on zero levels... I cringe when the term "procedurally generated" is used in the description of any game. Why? Because that means instead of taking the time to hand-craft a world with life and purpose and intrigue, you've decided to craft thousands of lines of code and let the cold/lifeless/emotionless/unimaginative machine figure out the rest. This is ever present in No Man's Sky. It's a game where you see an odd game mechanic and instantly realize the only reason it exists is so no developer had to actually DO something. It's a Choose Your Own Adventure book with no plot or consequence. It's a game about nothing in a universe where nothing happens. If you're still on the fence, continue reading. If you're preparing to flame me in the comments, I'm glad that you like the game specifically, but I couldn't care less about your counter-arguments. So, the game about exploration. The spirit of exploration, the very crux of the practice itself, is finding something new and unique. You'll be hard pressed to satisfy this criteria even 3 hours into the game. Buildings all look the same and no matter their size you will only be allowed in one room usually with one alien until you can craft keys. Interacting with the items in the room and/or the alien will get you blueprints (which take up no space on there own, but when crafted are mostly useless upgrades and do little more than take up precious inventory space), units - aka money - (which have limited purpose in the grand scheme of the game) or sometimes random items that you can trade for units or blueprints. Flora and fauna all look surprisingly similar even across planets. They do however change the names so it may SEEM like you're discovering more. In the end though, a cylindrical rock formation made of iron is a cylindrical rock formation made of iron no matter the name and you'll find them everywhere. This is especially frustrating as you try to catalog your findings and find that, even though you know you've cataloged a creature, this one is actually somehow different so you just need to scan everything you come across. While some planets are truly a sight to behold, most are desolate wastelands with varying atmospheric conditions, taxing your suit and your resources, with seemingly little more differentiation than a color pallet swap. Exploration proves fruitless very early on and doesn't get any better. Enter a planet's atmosphere, do a fly over the terrain, is it pretty? (yes, land, check it out), is it an ugly/craggy wasteland? (yes, leave and head to the next planet), repeat. Another fun fact: the game about exploration has no map. That's right, when you're on a planet, there is no map to speak of. Not even a Diablo-esque black screen that updates as you wander. "Have I been here before?" You'll wonder. "WHO KNOWS!" the game will undoubtedly reply. A revelation that makes it clear that even the developers knew nothing would be worth visiting twice. The animals mostly act skittish and just run around in the distance. You'll likely stop noticing them. The aggressive carnivores are few and far between and are easily dispatched in unsatisfying fashion as they just charge you - dealing damage if they come into contact. No grappling jaws, knock downs or interesting abilities. They could be untextured spheres or cubes and achieve the same lifeless effect. That's the problem with the universe that is No Man's Sky. For something so abundant with worlds and species, there is no life to be found. I mentioned the aliens. Most of the structures you will enter have a single alien inside holding a clipboard. You will approach the alien and – instead of a scenario playing out before you – a text box appears detailing what is supposed to be happening. What is this, a MUD? The Alien stands there blinking at you while you read (and I guess imagine) what is supposed to be going on. You make a selection from a list of choices and a text box appears telling you what the outcome was. Regardless of the outcome you may then still interact with the alien as if nothing happened. Example: I approached an alien. A text box appeared stating that, as I entered, I witnessed a room full of open vaults and this alien transferred items into his inventory. Keep in mind that while I’m reading this, we stand in an empty room, no vaults, and the alien just stares at me blinking occasionally. I’m presented with three choices; tell the alien to give YOU everything, tell the alien to share, report the alien to the authorities. I elected to report the alien to authorities. The text box updated that I had reported the alien and that he was being punished accordingly. I confirmed and was rewarded with reputation gains from that race. Yet nothing changed. The same alien still stood there in the same empty room. I approached him to speak with him again. He greeted me happily and was glad to accommodate my request of teaching me a new word. The choice I made resulted in NOTHING. He wasn’t mad at me, no one came and took him away, even what I was supposed to be witnessing never actually occurred. But it’s fine because it’s all in the spirit of procedural generation of assets. This is the gameplay of No Man’s Sky. Approach something, read text, make a choice, collect a reward or take damage. All the while, nothing actually happens on screen. In addition to exploration, it’s also a game about resource management and survival. When you are outside your ship, your life support system will experience constant drain. If there are conditions in the atmosphere (toxicity, radiation, extreme temperature), your environmental apparatus will drain (same thing for all conditions apparently). You will need to replenish these items by using various materials you find. However, the materials require are plentiful and generally you’ll just stroll over to the crystal clusters you’ve been passing every 10 feet, blast it with your mining tool and you’re good. It feigns survival through tedium. Your ship’s resources require fuel also, but most is readily available and requires minimal effort. It is inconsistent at best and nonsensical at worst. For instance, you require fuel to take off from the ground. UNLESS you’re on a landing pad or next to a landing beacon. Then you inexplicably can take off for free. There’s no animations showing any hidden mechanisms that allow this feat, it just happens. The fuel to take off is plentiful, but you can only leave terra firma 4 times per full tank, which equates to mild annoyance more than survival. You do not require fuel to stay aloft or speed through the atmosphere, however. Gravity operates under the laws of “developer convenience” in No Man’s Sky as further evident in the next paragraph. No Man’s Sky is a game about resource management… Sometimes… When we thought of it… Consider this; I see the HAVOK physics logo prominently displayed in the opening. I’m wandering across the first planet I find myself on. I see a large monolith of gold. I use my mining tool and am pleased to see that I can harvest the precious ore using the default tool. Feeling curious, I cut a swath clean through the base, expecting lumberjackian results. Much to my dismay, the upper 90% of the obelisk stays aloft – exactly where it was. So, tons of gold stay aloft inexplicably, but it takes a quarter tank of straight Plutonium to get my little spacecraft off the ground. Sure, why not? Atmospheric conditions are strange also. For instance, the planet has a toxic atmosphere and it’s raining. I walk onto a platform for ship parking. There is a roof, but no walls. My sensors tell me that the air is no longer toxic and the rain continues through the roof as if it isn’t there… No Man’s Sky is Science Fiction; easy on the science. Overall, the game is a battery-powered battery charger that’s only good for charging its own batteries. You fly to a planet to collect resources so you can fly to a planet to collect resources so you can… And so on. The structures and people offer no narrative of any substance to reward the intrepid wanderer. You will find yourself frequenting structures less and less because you already know that there is nothing in the way of knowledge or material that makes it a worthwhile endeavor. I’m hoping that the developers will do a major overhaul, because the concept and foundation exist (albeit buried deep under banality).