No Man’s Sky

★★★★★

“You’ve played for 985 hours. Would you recommend this game to other players?”

Um, yeah, I guess so?

Seriously, Though

I picked up No Man’s Sky in spring 2021, long after the disastrous launch, and with several years of improvements to the game. By the time I got around to it, it was really good! (It also overheated my CPU the first time I played. I eventually discovered the heat sink was completely clogged with dust.)

The graphics are amazing. Gameplay switches smoothly between spaceflight, walking and ground vehicles, and between solo and multi-player scenarios. The story is…kinda loose. It’s not so much “story” as it is a collection of lore, which you uncover through the main missions and random exploration.

Computer-rendered scene of a person in a spacesuit looking across rolling hills and strange plants toward a large metallic structure in the distance, with an even larger metallic sphere floating above it. The sphere reflects the foreground, which looks enough like the background to seem almost transparent. It also has spider-like legs, suggesting landing gear. Red patterns are painted on both structures. The hills fade as they recede farther into distance, and fluffy white clouds drift across the pale blue sky.

I soon realized that what I like about No Man’s Sky is that it combines aspects of Minecraft (which I played a lot of during the late 2010s and into 2020) and Wing Commander: Privateer (which I played a LOT of back in the 1990s). Both open-ended, self-directed sandboxes. Like Minecraft, you seek out resources and build equipment and bases. Like Privateer, you fly through space and do different types of missions depending on what you feel like that day.

And the many references to classic works of science-fiction certainly don’t hurt!

Updates and Expeditions

They’ve continued adding to the game, and several times a year they’ll release a major update and run a time-limited expedition focusing on the new/updated elements. Expeditions often force different styles of gameplay, and then convert to a normal game when you finish it (or when the event ends).

  • In one, you couldn’t travel between systems using your ship, but had to rely on portals instead.
  • In another, you couldn’t set up planet-side bases until the end of the expedition, but you could buy a freighter.
  • For a horror-themed one this past Halloween, you had to actively maintain your character’s sanity, while occasionally letting yourself slip out of reality enough to interact with the cosmic horrors, but not enough for them to kill you. It was really interesting, but hard to keep up with.

So I’ve got my original game save that’s been continually updated (with the occasional glitch and one really painful bug), that I’ve been playing on and off for almost 4 years, and other saves that started out with various expeditions.

A night landscape with blue hills and stars visible in the distance. A robot drone floats at the left, shining a red light at the ground and aiming its camera at a person in a spacesuit standing near the right edge of the frame.

Cosmic Similarity

The universe of No Man’s Sky is practically infinite, with planets, space stations, system economies, plants, animals and minerals, and of course Sentinels – lots and lots of Sentinels – generated procedurally as players visit them. But each planet is a single biome (like Star Wars), space stations all have the same floorplan per type, same for crashed freighters, and so forth.

After a while you stop noticing the differences between two cold planets, or two radioactive planets. So the maps are different and the plants and animals look different – they’re both cold, and the both have frost crystals. A high-toxin world and a high-temperature world don’t really differ except in which resource you use to recharge your shielding and which resources you find. It’s no longer as fun to fully explore star systems you pass through.

A lot of the gameplay is the same thing you’ve done before, just dressed up differently and with better equipment or more inventory slots.

And yet here I am almost four years later, still firing up the game several times a month, salvaging derelicts, upgrading my ships and freighter, fighting pirates, smuggling, trading, building bases, mining, farming…and yes, exploring.

More info at No Man's Sky.