"No Man's Sky"

In the novel “Restaurant at the End of the Universe”, science fiction writer Douglas Adams wrote: “In the beginning the Universe was created. This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move.” As I saw the early reviews for “No Man’s Sky” begin to pour in, I thought of this quote and wondered at all of the middling scores and responses to the game, especially because the very same media hyped it through the roof before launch. After having played it on my friend’s computer for a fair number of hours, I cannot help but wonder if Adams had a point.

    The game “No Man’s Sky” is a sandbox-style space simulator that was released on August 9, 2016 for the PC and PS4. The first two hours were the best part of the game for me. You start off on an uncharted planet with a broken spacecraft. Before you can even get into space, you have to harvest the materials on the planet to repair and fuel your craft. My “Minecraft” senses immediately began to tingle, and I hacked away, harvesting carbon and other materials with glee. After a period of time, I was able to put together my ship, and it needs to be said that repairing and building up your ship for the first two hours really makes it feel personal. Granted, everyone gets the same ship to start with, but because of the time and investment that you have to put into repairing the ship, it really feels like your own. It is the same feeling that one would get from purchasing a first car. Yes, it’s probably a rust bucket and is barely functional, but it’s your rust bucket. With this in mind, I jumped into space, excited to see what awaited me in the universe.

    The answer of what waited beyond? Not that much. “No Man’s Sky” claims to have a vast universe of stars and fully explore-able planets just waiting to be harvested for resources and to trade with alien bases, as well as randomized flora and fauna on all of those planets. While the idea of over 18 quintillion different kinds of planets to explore sounds tempting, when the random generator only changes the layout and textures between planets, it does not really lend itself to much consideration and exploring. It is basically like having planet-sized “Diablo III” dungeon levels, but unlike “Diablo III”, the creatures look goofy because they are also procedurally generated. No thought or design went into these creatures, and as a result, I cannot take the game seriously despite the nice graphics (though there is some laughably bad graphical pop-in entering and leaving a planet’s atmosphere. Throw in some pretty terrible bugs and glitches (at least on the version I played) and you have a somewhat boring game that is let down more by its execution than by its concept.

    However, if “Destiny” has proven one thing, it is that any game can be made better with expansions and patches. While new patches for the game continue to come out, what I would really like to see is an expansion of content. The developers have created a huge universe, perhaps one of the biggest ever, yet there is nothing on any of the planets to make me care about looking at them. So, as it stands, I cannot recommend this game. For alternate recommendations, I point you towards “Minecraft” if you’re into building things, and “Endymion”, a pre-access Steam game that already has more content and does a similar thing to “No Man’s Sky” at a fraction of the cost