Gideon’s Perspective
I purchased No Man’s Sky when it released back in 2016, and it’s one of the few games I’ve ever refunded. It’s not that it was bad, it’s that it felt non-existent. Even with your controller in hand, there simply wasn’t a game in there to actually play.
You can find a video version of this review on YouTube!
Over the years, No Man’s Sky has redeemed itself in a way I don’t think any other game has. It has received numerous updates that have essentially overhauled the entire game more than once, and have added a ton of new gameplay systems to its core identity.
The most shocking thing about its redemption arc is the fact that every update for the last decade has been released completely free. Not only that, but Hello Games has implemented zero microtransactions and no premium currency, even though they have had plenty of opportunity to do so. Regardless of what else goes on in this review, I’ll take my hat off to them for that.
Over the years, I’ve dabbled in No Man’s Sky, an hour here, an hour there, but never really dove in deep. With the most recent update, titled Voyagers, I wrangled up some friends and took the plunge for over a hundred hours.
I came away addicted and incredibly impressed. No Man’s Sky is very nearly the best space game experience I could imagine. It does things other games can only dream of and is one of the best case examples of procedural generation I’ve ever seen. I’m so impressed that it may have ruined most other space games for me.
However, that fact only deepens the wound of my equally grandiose disappointment. Given the absurd amount of systems and content that can be found in No Man’s Sky, this feels crazy to say, but it’s missing something. A few somethings, actually, that are crucial to tying the entire ensemble together in a way that would make it the undisputed king of the space genre. No Man’s Sky also has a few glaring problems, especially on the multiplayer side.
So let’s dive into one of the most difficult reviews I’ve ever cobbled together, and what may end up being my longest review to date.
| Gideon’s Bias | No Man’s Sky Information |
|---|---|
| Review Copy Used: No | Publisher: Hello Games |
| Hours Played: 100+ | Type: Full Game |
| Reviewed On: Xbox Series X | Platforms: PC, Xbox One, Xbox Series, PS4/5 and Switchs |
| Fan of Genre: Yes | Genre: First/Third Person Open World Survival |
| Mode Played: Custom (Hard Settings) | Price: $59.99 |
An Odyssey of Stellar Proportions
There is something monumental about any given playthrough of No Man’s Sky that no other game comes even close to touching. You have a universe to explore, with more star systems and planets than are feasible for you, or even humanity as a whole, to explore in your own lifetimes.
Where most games try to make you the center of attention, you feel infinitely small in No Man’s Sky, even if certain questlines suffer from giving you main character syndrome. The game, the universe, and even a single planet can feel overwhelming, not because of complexity, but simply sheer scale.
You genuinely feel like you’re being transported to an alien universe, and that awe-inspiring immersive sense of being only amplifies the moment you take flight for the first time. In that moment, you realize that you can go to any planet, fly down through its atmosphere, and land anywhere you choose, get out, and start walking around. The whole endeavor is seamless, without a single loading screen, at least a visible one. It makes Starfield, a game that I poured a ton of praise on, look absolutely archaic by comparison.
Yet, that was only the start of my mind being blown. You can build bases in No Man’s Sky, and you can also build Corvettes, ships big enough for you to walk around in. You can also get out of said Corvette and jet pack down through a planet’s atmosphere and land on said planet.
At one point, I had a base built on a planet. I could have built this base on any planet and anywhere on that planet. I flew up into the planet’s orbit and jumped out of my ship, and free-fell down, not only to the planet, but to my base, watching it become visible on the descent with no visible loading screen.
Had you shown me such footage at a gaming show in order to hype up the capabilities of an upcoming game? I simply wouldn’t have believed you, and I would have remained skeptical until it was in my hands. Yet, I did exactly that in a game that’s almost 10 years old.
The procedural generation is some of the most impressive I could imagine. There are no limits to the number of planets you can explore, and each one is filled with terrain, plants, animals, and oddities that are unique to some degree. The tech does have limits. You will see some degree of crossover, and the longer you play, the more you will spot it.
However, each world still feels like it has its own personality, and at times, the repetition actually plays right into the arms of the exploration. For example, if everything is special, nothing is. You might find a handful of worlds with a hodgepodge of animals that are amalgamations of other random animal parts, but somehow still look like the same type of cattle.
But then you will find a towering dinosaur, an elegant moth-like creature, or some creature that grew way too big for the tiny wings that it has, carrying it around. Those moments feel special because they aren’t in your face all the time. This applies to the plant life or even the planets themselves. Maybe you find several Earth-like planets and then find one with floating islands and bubbles protruding from the ground or an alien nest with giant worms burrowing through the ground.
In many ways, the exploration feels rewarding because most planets are unique without being too unique, and it makes the truly exotic ones stand out strongly. While some elements inevitably cross over, I never truly felt that any aspect of the game was copied and pasted. Each world had character, and I found that to be incredibly impressive, and it’s one of the factors that drives the whole game. No matter what your mission or goal may be, you’re always looking forward to what’s over the horizon, or even in the next solar system.
A Sandbox of Toys
Having a whole universe at your fingertips is one thing, but what do you actually do in it? The answer is, whatever you want to do, and I’m not being facetious. No Man’s Sky is a sandbox, and I do mean a sandbox. While the game does feature main and side questlines, there is no ending, and no credits scene. The main factor driving you is you and what you want to do.
To give a quick example. I have dove into many aspects of the game. I’ve followed the main quest lines to their completion, built a corvette, obtained a freighter and settlement, built several outposts, and explored well over a hundred systems. I currently have three ships and three multitools.
My partner, who has played the same amount of time I have, has only been on a handful of planets and built bases on them to facilitate her ability to gather milk and other such resources from the native animals. She does this to fuel her cooking endeavors, a system of recipes that can be sold for credits or nanites and can impart huge bonuses if consumed via a Nutrient Ingestor. This is a system I haven’t dabbed in at all.
Maybe you want to collect a fleet of the rarest ships, build the ultimate corvette, become the overseer and manage multiple settlements, build luxurious mansions on exotic planets, assemble a fleet of frigates, upgrade the ultimate freighter, or collect and assemble fossils for your own personal museum. There is no shortage of activities to pursue. You’re free to do any or all of them at your own leisure.
There is a factor linking all of these aspects, however, the acquisition of resources, credits, and nanites. All ventures are going to require these things to some degree, yet how you choose to acquire them is also up to you. You can build industrial bases to automate resource collection, or fly around to planets and collect them personally as you need them.
You can build exocraft, such as buggies or mechs, and outfit them with mining lasers and weaponry to aid in exploration and resource gathering, or maybe you go out and loot most of what you need. For money, maybe you do missions, hunt pirates, or be a pirate yourself. Each system has its own economy, so maybe you craft items and sell them where they are in demand, or maybe you buy low and sell high.
Perhaps you focus on frigate fleets as a source of income, or look for rare artifacts on various planets. Maybe you repair and salvage crashed ships, or quite literally go fishing. Once again, it’s up to you. At the same time, it’s important to note that in No Man’s Sky, the grind is the game.
Pursuing what you want or need, be it a new ship, new technology, or a new weapon, is a large part, if not the largest part, of the game. Attempting to skip the grind is to skip the game and miss the entire point. No Man’s Sky dangles a ton of carrots in front of you, and you choose which ones are important to you. However, the journey to acquire those carrots is as important as the destination, because if you run out of carrots, you run out of game.
That’s not a criticism, that’s just how it is. While many of the systems are interlinked, No Man’s Sky is still, at its heart, a light survival game about gathering or earning what you need to unlock what you want, and then using that new shiny tool to help propel you toward the next carrot. That carrot can be any of a hundred different goals.
While most of it is intrinsically linked to resources and money. The sheer scope of things you can do in the game is staggering. Each system, while not as deep as an entire game dedicated to it, has enough substance to let you sink your teeth into it.
Settlements, for example, aren’t as deep as a city-building game. But you still have to choose what buildings to build, resolve disputes, and defend them from attacks. There’s enough there to make meaningful decisions about them.
On the other hand, the base building system goes as hard or soft as you like. You can build small outposts with just the necessities, build resource mining bases with autonomous setups, or go grandiose and fully decorate full-fledged mega designs. You can even build a base on a freighter if you prefer, or even an underwater base.
More so than almost any other game, you simply do what you want in No Man’s Sky. Whatever you choose to do, the game will support it and you. If your desires change with the wind, the game will support that too.
Problem #1 Gates, Free Stuff, and Balance
No Man’s Sky is a true sandbox, and you could play 100s of hours while ignoring both the main and side quests without running out of things to do. However, there are some pretty substantial things actually gated behind some of these quest lines. This is a problem for a couple of reasons. First of all, the quest lines can be long and tedious. While the lore is interesting, the vast majority of the main quest consists of go here, land, take off, go here, land, repeat.
Secondly, while the main quest tries to act as a long tutorial introducing you to new gameplay systems. It gives you way too much free stuff. In fact, the game constantly tries to pile you with free stuff.
Open your base computer? Here, have a new blueprint. Rescue a freighter? Have it for free as your reward. Follow a strange signal? Here’s a free, rare, and powerful starship as a reward. This is a problem because, as I mentioned before, the grind is the game. The moment you run out of things to spend your credits, naninites, and resources on, you have nothing to do.
The game constantly tries to bombard you with free things that you would have otherwise had to buy or discover on your own. It’s also not like these are rewards for some challenging questline, they are mostly just fetch quests. No Man’s Sky is incredibly aggressive about this, too. Take the Freighter, for example.
After your first few jumps, you will encounter a Freighter in need of rescue. Fight off the pirates, and the captain will gift this entire capital ship, worth millions of credits, to you. You can, in fact, turn it down, but the game will continuously spawn new freighters for you to rescue and be gifted. It gets worse than that, though.
The first freighter offered to me was a C class. Almost everything in the game is rated from C to S, so in my eyes, the game gave me a low-class freighter, but I still had to work my way up to affording better ones, which seems like a fair trade-off. So imagine my shock when, after accepting the Freighter, I came across another one in distress later on. After rescuing it, the game offered it as a reward to replace my old one, this time with an A-class freighter.
Depending on what you are doing, it could be hours, maybe even days, before you save up enough credits to buy an A-class Freighter, and the game dismisses that effort by once again offering it for free. Sure, you can self-regulate, refuse to take those freighters, and buy them yourself. But for one. I don’t believe players should ever have to balance their own experience.
Secondly, I possess the will to balance my own game, yet I can’t escape the nagging feeling that I’m literally throwing my credits away when buying a Freighter, because I know dang well the game will continuously try to thrust free ones onto my lap.
There is a whole subsystem where you can invite specialists to your bases. I loved that idea, I could add more life to my base, and maybe they would help me do things. It turns out they are just quest givers that give small quests to unlock new recipes and bluerprints without buying them. An entire subsystem is lost to me if I don’t want to shortcut my own progression.
The thing is, it’s common, even expected, that following a quest in a game nets you a reward. The distinction with No Man’s Sky is that most of the rewards aren’t exclusive items that can only be acquired from those quests. They are things you could unlock yourself with Nanites and Credits. This makes it feel like the game is cutting your progression short, because it is, and also makes it feel wasteful if you actually buy the things it was going to give for free.
It’s a sour taste that unfortunately permeates a fair chunk of the game.
No Man’s Sky also fails to balance its intertwining systems evenly. There are plenty of ways to exploit the game economy, even accidentally. If one of your early planets is rich in Gravtino Balls, for example, you’re likely going to wonder how credits would ever be an issue. However, the most blatant example is the new Corvette system added in the most recent update.
You can buy and loot Corvette parts and use them to assemble your own Corvette in a super cool building system similar to Starfields. Corvettes are big enough that you can just get up and walk around mid-flight, or haul your friends around. You can also build inside them, and I feel that breaks a whole lot of the game’s rhythm.
Firstly, you can build storage modules in them. Your storage modules, be they on a base, freighter, or Corvette, are numbered and linked. For example, your storage number 1 is linked to all other storage number 1s, no matter where they are.
By building storage modules on your Corvette, you make it so that your entire storage is always with you, and it completely invalidates the ship’s storage system itself. Furthermore, you can build refiners on the Corvette, essentially giving you an all-in-one mobile base that doesn’t even have to land. You can hover above your destination and teleport down, meaning you don’t even need to worry about launch fuel like fighters do.
In addition to breaking the normal balance rhythm of the game, Corvettes invalidate fighters. They can do everything a fighter can, plus carry your entire storage, act as a mobile base, and almost never need launch fuel, so why use a fighter at all?
With so many interlocking systems, it’s inevitable that some aspects of the game were stretched too thin and broke from a balance perspective. But the Corvettes are erroneous in their design and the way they fit into the rest of No Man’s Sky.
The thing is, they aren’t difficult to get at all. The parts are fairly cheap, and you can have a basic Corvette up and running within just a few hours, and a basic one is all you need is to house your storage and invalidate fighters.
Problem #2 Lack of Friction
Throughout my articles and videos, I use the term friction so much that I’m starting to sound like a broken record, but it really fits here and is one of the key things holding No Man’s Sky back. There is little to no friction in No Man’s Sky to the point that I went at least 30 hours without acquiring a single weapon upgrade for myself or my ship. Why would I, when the game never made me feel like I needed them?
Combat, whether it was on foot with the wildlife and sentinels or pirates via my ship, was always incredibly easy. The entire game, combat or otherwise, was almost entirely devoid of challenge, which is a problem as I played with custom settings dialed to their most difficult options. Essentially, I played survival mode on steroids, and it had all of the impact of a wet napkin.
This circles back around to the grind being the game. If half my progression options aren’t needed, then it’s as if they don’t exist at all. It’s not just combat that’s the issue, as glaring a problem as that may be. It’s the fact that without friction, the act of gathering resources isn’t true gameplay.
I covered this in my piece titled “The Survival Genre is Broken“. In it, I mentioned that without danger, resource gathering ceases to be gameplay at all. It becomes just a chore. There are no time limits, pushing to move faster on a mission or a resource-gathering excursion, and very little in the way of danger from enemy sources. You are essentially just pushing a button until your laser gathers the thing, then moving to the next thing to gather. Without any sort of friction, it’s a time sink, not gameplay.
Many planets have the inherent danger of hazardous weather, but not much else. Even angering the sentinels has very little consequence, as it’s easy to evade them even if you choose not to fight.
This lack of friction sullies a fair amount of the gameplay. It’s hard to be excited about more powerful ships, fancier multitools, and a plethora of weapon upgrades if you never felt they were needed in the first place. Furthermore, it makes the resource grind feel like a time waster rather than engaging gameplay when there’s nothing to threaten you while you do it.
The way resources are laid out and how they interact with some of your tools is also somewhat questionable. My partner only played on a handful of planets for her cooking adventures because she never needed to go elsewhere. I rarely found a use for many higher rarity materials beyond the main quest items, leaving you little reason to farm them.
There’s a logic gap in some of your tool usage as well. The game essentially makes sure that every planet has the basic suite of materials needed to fuel your gear. It’s likely to ensure you’re never stranded or in an unwinnable situation, but it’s a rather clumsy solution as it means fuel usage is essentially fake.
For example, your terrain manipulator is what you use to dig up resources such as copper. It uses Silicate Powder as fuel, but you gather Silicate Powder whenever you dig literally anywhere. Essentially, you are gathering the fuel for it every time you use it. It’s impossible to run out.
Starships are similar. The pulse drives use Tritium, which comes from asteroids. No matter where you are flying around in space, there will be asteroids to shoot and gather Tritium, so the fuel system doesn’t actually exist. You can’t truly run out, and there’s no need to manage it or even care about it because of that.
No Man’s Sky desperately needs some friction in its design to make the rest of the game truly shine.
Problem #3 Broken Multiplayer
As I mentioned at the beginning, I dove into my true No Man’s Sky adventure with some friends. Well, I attempted to at least. The multiplayer system was almost entirely busted. Nothing ever went right. We would party up and not be able to see each other in-game. Anytime it seemed to be working, it would suddenly cut out at random times, booting one or more of us from the group. Rejoining was a crapshoot on whether or not it would fix the issue, and it would be only minutes before it started acting up again.
There would be times when it would appear to be working, but we would clearly be desynced. One player would see things the other couldn’t. Numerous times, I would try to help a friend with pirates and be completely unable to damage them. There were times I would try to take my friends away in my Corvette, but they couldn’t see it, they only saw me floating in the air.
Sentinels would bug out when multiple players were around, half the time, they wouldn’t attack at all, and the other half, they never stopped unless you entered a space station or switched systems.
Even in the fleeting moments that the multiplayer worked, the game made almost no attempt to accommodate the concept. There’s not much to actually do together beyond sharing resources, and bases were a nightmare. Other players could use and build in a person’s base, but if the owner left the system, the other players could no longer interact with it.
This led to us attempting to build separate bases near each other, which defeated the purpose of cooperation in the first place. We ended up mostly playing as if we were playing a single-player game, occasionally showing up to gift someone a resource they needed, and not much else.
With the glitching, instability, and desync issues, the multiplayer aspect of No Man’s Sky is nearly unplayable. At the same time, even if it worked properly, it’s not supported all that well despite appearances.
Verdict
In many ways, No Man’s Sky is the best space game I’ve ever played. Its exploration is unparalleled, it has an insane number of things to do, and the seamless nature of its grand scale is phenomenal.
In other ways, it’s the worst space game I’ve ever played because it soils my reality. It has ruined other space games for me. I don’t think I can go back to loading screens to land on planets. I don’t think I can go back to games that claim to be a sandbox, but have a trivial number of things for you to do.
The thing is, I don’t think there will ever be another game like No Man’s Sky. Not with the current state of the industry, I don’t think another game will ever come close to capturing the vastness of space, the joy of exploration, and the pure freedom that those things offer together, and certainly not as seamlessly as No Man’s Sky does it.
This leads me to holding up No Man’s Sky as the magnum opus of space games, except the problem is, it’s not, and if it never becomes that, I’ll be forever left wanting, having a taste of what could be, and leaving me with a thirst that can never truly be quenched.
The failed balancing act, the broken multiplayer, and the lack of friction, especially the lack of friction, all pull No Man’s Sky down from the throne where it should be, from where it realistically could be, given Hello Games’ track record of updates. Yet, Hello Games is also working on Light No Fire, and any given update to No Man’s Sky could be its last.
So here I hold out hope that an update can address my feelings. Make survival mode hard, give the game the friction it needs to make it all feel meaningful. Retool the balance and fix the multiplayer.
Heck, I’d be willing to throw down cash for a paid expansion at this point, because after almost 10 years of free overhauling updates, I think Hello Games has more than earned the right for further monetization. Which is a lot more than you can say about a certain other space game that seems to be happy to stay in perpetual development while fleecing folks for money.
No Man’s Sky is a game I love to play, yet often find myself asking myself, ” Why am I doing this?” as I stare blankly mining a rock while in no danger for a new upgrade I won’t need. It’s like being in a perpetual mobile game dopamine treadmill, but without the horrid monetization aspects. Yet, the beauty of space can’t be denied, and I always want to fly to just one more planet. Just one, more, planet.
