No Man’s Sky – Review ( Xbox release)

No Man’s Sky has made it to the Xbox, 2 years after what can only be described as a horrid flop on the PlayStation. I haven’t played the PlayStation since the good old days of crash bandicoot and metal gear solid and so I can’t pass any judgement on the games initial release other than what I have read.

I am a huge fan of Frontier’s Elite franchise and so was eager to see what Hello Games take on space exploration was.

The game starts you on a random planet having just crashed your ship. Your pilot is equipped with a clever exo suit which has life support, it provides you with oxygen, and hazard protection which keeps you safe from the many varying planetary conditions such as flesh peeling acid rain, Spaceballs freezing ice, scorching firestorms and all sorts of radiation.

No Man’s sky has a basic, and I mean very basic, the first mission which aims to guide you through the initial skills required in order to gather resources/materials and craft them into parts needed to repair your crash starship.

If you don’t learn quickly then you are likely to land yourself an instant death; I found myself starting on a planet with frequent acid rain storms and struggled to find the resources needed to recharge my exosuit hazard protection. I realised that the initial “walkthrough” had switched from the primary objective to a secondary one; unfortunately for me, the primary objective was an upgrade to my suit’s visor which would have given me the ability to scan the environment for resources.

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This scanner has an important role to play, each new planet you discover is full of randomly generated flora and fauna, a vast array of weird and wonderful looking plants and beasts. You can scan each of these to provide you with discovery data and information on which resources can be extracted from them. You can upload your discoveries to the global database in return for in-game currency used to purchase upgrades for your exosuit and starships.

The core gameplay mechanics had me feeling a bit like this was Minecraft in space. You have a mining laser, you shoot the plants/rocks and extract materials. This laser has a secondary function in which you can build up terrain or bore holes in it; this latter feature is used to find rare and useful hidden items underground.

The game features base building if you particularly like a planet you can create a base which can now be placed anywhere, on a mountaintop, underground or even underwater. Your base can include starship launch pads and healing items etc. I found this feature somewhat strange as the main quest leads you on a continuous journey to the centre of the galaxy.

Now considering this game is all about exploration, I found it very frustrating to do. The survival mechanics mentioned earlier have what I feel is a significantly detrimental effect on exploration at the beginning. Many a time I found my self-landing on a new planet,  taking a stroll with a few jumps thrown in via the assistance of my rocket pack and suddenly falling victim to frantically trying to locate some oxygen or sodium to boost my various hazard protection or having to dig a nice deep tunnel underground to hide from the storm’s effect, this could lead to several minutes of watching green rain, not my idea of fun. You can craft various battery packs to instantly regenerate your hazard protection but on starting the game your exosuit and starship have very limited space to hoard resources. I found much of my time hiding from extreme weather conditions and constantly juggling my inventory and I just found it incredibly frustrating. This gets easier later with finding drop pods to enhance your exosuit capacity or land vehicles which make travelling across planets and carrying items much easier. At the beginning though, I couldn’t help but feel like I was stuck in a continuous loop without achieving anything and I didn’t know what I was grinding towards. There is no obvious progression or end goal, but I couldn’t help but continue to roam around aimlessly, bumping into new hidden settlements and ancient alien artefacts: I think the not knowing what I would bump into, the intrigue, kept me looking for more.

I found it quite strange though that even with all the strange creatures, random settlements, starship flying overhead and various space stations dotted around, I always felt alone, everything felt empty. No Man’s Sky does have a multiplayer in which you can roam about the planets, building bases with friends, but with a very limited combat system in which you only have a few floating sentinels to annoy, I can’t see the draw.

There is no doubt that No Man’s Sky is a pretty game, it offers rich environments with pretty scenery though it is prone to some texture popping even on the Xbox One X, it certainly isn’t for those looking for any form of realism, the planets feel quite small and there isn’t really any sense of distance when travelling between planets. Flying the starships is fun with an arcade-like combat system.

Though I won’t be, I can see that this is a game that some will be happy spending hundreds of hours running around picking up plants and hiding from rainstorms in a quest to learn the languages of the several different races of aliens you can encounter.

From what I have read about the launch on PlayStation, it is clear that Hello Games have spent a lot of time and effort to improve the content available even if the core gameplay is a bit repetitive. Overall it is a good game with plenty to do.

Our review on first launch can be found via https://www.thevideogames.co.uk/no-mans-sky-review/