There’s a sense of freedom in looking at birds flying or staring up at the stars. Being able to go anywhere you want at a whim by merely flapping your wings is something we’ll never get to experience, nor will we know the excitement of hopping in a spaceship and launching into the skies, watching our planet shrink to the size of a basketball in a matter of moments, casually blasting to planets and landing wherever we want to go for an extraplanetary stroll light years away from Earth. Visiting planets no one has ever seen, let alone stepped upon, in less time than it takes to drive to Wal-Mart is a sensational concept, and yet it’s something you’ll almost take for granted in No Man’s Sky.
It may seem a bit unrelated, but I still remember my first experience with Minecraft. I got into it long after it was popular, long after it was even on consoles in fact. But once I dove into it, all I did for an entire quarter of the year was play it. I don’t mean “play Minecraft and work”, I really mean I did nothing but play it, eat, drink, shower, and sleep for three whole months. There’s something about having an entire world to explore, so many items to craft, and such a huge amount of building to do that just makes the game so addictive. It’s an amazing thing, being able to take a wild, untamed world and mastering it, making it your home, and building all kinds of things all over it. With that said, No Man’s Sky feels like Minecraft to an entirely new level in every single way, and it does it with a ridiculous amount of style.
The game begins with you crashed on a randomly chosen planet, and it’s up to you to fix it by using your mining beam to collect the various elements, minerals, and other various types of loot you’ll need to survive and repair it. From there, not even the sky is the limit, and as you improve your ship you’ll be able to go and explore anywhere you want! By a few dozen hours in it’ll become as natural as breathing.
No Man’s Sky has a depth that’s hard to capture in words because it’s just so much bigger than any other game I’ve ever played. You can play the game as a settler by creating a base on a planet, building up farms and mining setups to where you can infinitely draw from the land, but you can also play as an explorer zipping from one galaxy to the next. I found that I was far more of a settler myself, trying to find every important resource within a decent distance and putting down roots along with a teleporter before moving on. Or at least that was the case until I decided to try out the opposite end of the spectrum and fly from galaxy to galaxy, seeing what planets I could find.
No matter how much there is to do or how many places there are to explore, a game is no good if the gameplay cycle sucks. Luckily that couldn’t be further from the truth with No Man’s Sky. You’ll get all kinds of loot as you explore planets, complete bounties, and mine for goodness, and you can then use that loot to recharge or upgrade your technology, craft more valuable stuff, just sell it to make money. Units, the currency in No Man’s Sky, can be used for everything from buying items at galactic trade terminals, buying a better multitool, purchasing ships, extra storage space in your suit, and even a fleet of frigates to send out on missions, plus so much more. All of these things come in handy for various purposes, and what’s fantastic about No Man’s Sky is that once you get a good amount of money you don’t need to bother yourself with mining less valuable things, you can just buy them and save the bit of time. See, no matter what planet you’re on, there are some things you’ll always need: ferrite (for the terrain manipulator), oxygen (for life support), carbon (for the mining ray), and sodium (for hazard protection). These are common on every planet you visit, so if you accidentally forget to bring some along or you run out, you can always get more. Heck, even if your mining beam runs out of power you can just punch something that’s made up of carbon and get more fuel for it.
Exploration itself is an amazing cycle as well. From the moment you land on a planet and step outside your ship you can scan the surroundings for waypoints. You may find skeletal remains, mounds of valuable ore, abandoned buildings, crashed ships, and all kinds of things. Making your way over to one of these and then toward another and another is addictive, and the developers know it. They tease you by spreading them out far apart enough to make them a bit of a journey, but close enough that they are always lots to go after. The crazy thing is how easy it is to forget that, hey, you have a frickin spaceship! It isn’t just for getting from planet to planet, you can just mark a location you want to visit with your visor, hop into your ship, take off and fly over, and all it’ll cost is the fuel in your launch thruster! Your ship also doubles as extra storage, and you can call it to you anywhere there’s enough room for it to land. But what’s truly remarkable about this is that even though it can take a while to get from point to point, heading back into space reminds you of just how little of a planet you’ve actually explored.
Just as the cycle is balanced, so are the methods of earning units. space stations have various types of bounties that let you do everything from taking out space pirates, finding a large amount of a particular item, killing creatures, scanning new plant life or creatures, or even taking photographs of various locations. These activities are all great ways to earn units on their own, but bounties also increase your reputation with various factions and species in addition to the great rewards they’ll give you. The balance of risk vs reward is also terrific as planets aren’t all equally safe. Some may be so dangerous that you’ll die in a mere couple of minutes while others are so habitable that you don’t even need your hazard protection and can just walk about in peace. Some galaxies are more peaceful than others, whereas others are littered with pirates that will attack if you have any valuables on your ship. And some planets have sentinels that will attack you on sight, rather than those that are peaceful until you upset them. But the more challenging a galaxy or planet, the more likely you are to be rewarded for the risk. Those extra hazardous planets are more full of valuable resources, whereas peaceful, laid back planets often have the least valuable goodies to collect. But No Man’s Sky isn’t a game without choices, and because you can just throw down a base practically anywhere you want and each space station you visit has a teleporter, you can always choose when you want to live a peaceful life, when you want to live life on the edge for seriously valuable loot, or when you want to be somewhere in between. And hey, if you never want to play the more stressful stuff, that’s perfectly okay too, it just means you’ll make units a little more slowly is all.
When the NEXT update released for No Man’s Sky, there was already a huge universe to explore. But over the last several months there have been even more free updates. The Abyss update added a great deal of variety and reasons to explore the various oceans and waters on planets, even adding a new underwater Exocraft and the ability to build bases underwater. Then came Visions, an update that further rewarded people for exploring the most hazardous planets by adding incredibly valuable storm crystals, added amazing new creatures, new vicious plant life, rainbows, fireworks, skeletal remains and more. Perhaps most exciting of all was the addition of formal community missions in which players are tasked with doing something like scanning new things or digging up specific items and then returning to space to tell your mysterious buddies about your progress. In return you’ll get all kinds of unique rewards like emotes, decals you can throw all over your bases, helmets that make you look extra badass and all kinds of neat decorative stuff.
Don’t get me wrong though, while No Man’s Sky is vastly improved over its original state, it’s not a perfect game by any means. The developers are fixing bugs on what feels like a weekly or biweekly basis, and I’m still not a fan of the combat in the game. Luckily there are workarounds for those who don’t like it, and some of them are even funny, such as enemies being unable to attack you while you’re in a base. This also includes small bases which are super easy to make and don’t cost much in the way of resources. But hey, that’s one of the benefits to a game that you can play however you want: people who enjoy combat can beef up their multitool and ship with all kinds of weapons and defenses, then annihilate pretty much any foes in their way.
There’s also the matter of the sentinels. Sentinels are little flying armored droids that are intriguing in concept but annoying every once in a while. See, their job is to protect the universe from travelers like you, and if they’re nearby and notice you steal certain valuable resources, attack creatures, or mine resources, they’ll get angry and attack you. Killing one will just bring on even more of them (or even more vicious enemies) after a brief period, so the best way to get to safety is to run away. As long as you aren’t detected for a little bit they’ll stop looking, and even if you go right back to the same sentinel it won’t care about you unless you upset it again. Sentinels end up being an interesting part of the game, and running and hiding for a while isn’t a big problem, it’s a little annoying at times. The same is true of storms; storms hit planets and make the temperature or radiation much worse, meaning that your hazard protection will run out far faster. This often means your best bet is to either dig your way down into the ground with your terrain manipulator to create a makeshift shelter or hide inside something. In any of these cases you’ll have to wait it out, and while you can sometimes use this time to clean up your inventory or do little bits of work, it’s never really fun to just wait.
Finally, it would be amazing if the game had some sort of way to track what you needed and then marked those items in game, or even just allowed you to keep a list of the things you were looking for. The game has you looking for loads of items at any given time for all sorts of quests and purposes, and while notepads exist outside of the game, it would still be nice to track the totals easier. For example, I recently got a better multitool, but it’s badly damaged. This means that many of the slots that can house upgrades and various types of tech are locked until I repair them individually, and each requires numerous items to fix. The items required to fix them are crafted from numerous resources as well, so you’ll end up having to math out exactly what you need. 50 of these and 40 of those make one doohickey, and then 8 doohickeys, 7 doodads and 3 thingamabobs are required to repair a slot, and doodads and thingamabobs are comprised of two or three pieces as well! Just be prepared to keep some notes, it’ll save a lot of effort in the long run.
No Man’s Sky is a terrific game, in fact it’s my personal GAME OF THE YEAR. It’s complex enough that there’s never a shortage of things to do, bounties to complete, and units to be made, and dozens of hours of story missions that guide you through all of the various tasks and challenges in the game, but at the same time it’s also easy enough to stop playing for a month and come back without needing more than a half hour or so to reacclimate yourself to the controls and what you were up to. I love it so much that I even watch people play it on Twitch when I can’t play it myself, and if I could get any game in the world on Switch from any point in the past or present so I could play it portably it would absolutely be No Man’s Sky. It’s every explorer’s dream, and it’s ridiculous just how much this game is improving, for free, even now. Heck, I had several more things I was going to comment on as negatives that have been fixed in intuitive ways in the last few months. It’s a shame that the game had so many issues when it first released; if it was in this state the day it came out I’d guess it would be a much more popular game. If you’re a fan of exploring, crafting, space, or adventure, don’t sleep on No Man’s Sky!
A review code was provided for this review.