"No Man's Sky" Review

I was in the process of writing an article about the morons giving No Man's Sky 0/10s on Metacritic so I could talk about how I no longer wanted to bring up any criticisms so as to avoid having anything in common with these neanderthals. However, I then learned that supreme fans of No Man's Sky have been literally threatening people with death for daring to criticize the game.
So, with that in mind, I'm just going to do what I normally do and say what I think, and if you are the kind of lifeless, unwashed, neckbearded, shallow little mite of a human being who will threaten to kill somebody over their opinions over a bunch of pixels on a screen, then I'd like to invite you to take your filthy cheeto dust-covered, sausage-like fingers one of four places: 1) somewhere where you can get the serious psychological help that you need, 2) back to the Meninism subreddit, 3) back to Facebook to continue complaining about the friend zone, or better yet,  4) back to playing No Man's Sky, since you seem to love it so much.
We good?
Alright. I hate people on the best of days, but No Man's Sky has seemed to bring out the worst in people on both sides of the spectrum. On one end you have the kinds of neolithic jock types who wanted Grand Theft Auto in space despite the fact that the game was never advertised as such, and on the other end you have the entire anime body pillow market who are literally threatening to kill people. For once, the douchebags I used to hate back in High School and I will be saying the same thing: It is just a video game. Chill out. I'm all for being impassioned about a game if you loved it or hated it. If you hate a game, by all means, rail on it! Really give it what for! That is the only way this industry can improve, and heaven knows I did this with Bioshock: Infinite. But the minute you threaten violence because people disagree with you, you become exactly the kinds of people that the insufferable soccer mom arm of the nanny state thinks all gamers are, and I would like to ask you to stop fouling up the air in my hobby.
From my introduction so far, it may seem like I didn't like No Man's Sky, but that just isn't true. I did like it...for a while, at least. But the fact remains that it has some really serious problems. At time of writing, I haven't yet completed the main story. I was going to hold off on writing this review until I had done so, but at the moment I still have something like 17700 light years to the end, and I don't think I'm going to finish. I'll discuss this at length later on, but I no longer have the motivation to finish No Man's Sky, so I'm just going to go ahead and write the review now.
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If you haven't heard of No Man's Sky and don't know what I've been talking about, allow me to fill you in. No Man's Sky is the largest video game ever created. There are something like 18 quintillion planets in the game, and if everybody on earth were to discover something new every second of every day, in 10 years we may not have even discovered a fraction of what exists.
How was this feat accomplished?
Using a method that I despise and that I have been protesting since Skyrim used it to develop side quests: Procedural generation. Basically, the developer doesn't create the content; the developer creates a program that creates the content from a pool of possibilities randomly.
I really wish that game developers would get over their toxic fascination with procedural generation. Whenever you have procedural generation, it shows because you can feel the lack of passion. I don't care if my experience is different every time. What I care about is that it feels like work went into what I'm experiencing, that what I'm playing was built with passion!
That being said, No Man's Sky has the best procedural generation I have ever experienced. That does not mean that it is perfect or that everything feels like it was made with love, but despite the reptition in the structures of the planets and the animals, things don't really feel random. Maybe you have experienced more procedurally-generated games than I have and you disagree with me, but compared to the "retrieve the Willy Williamson's Imperial Bow of Intensive Eternal Burning from the Chattering Wizard" side quests of Skyrim, No Man's Sky's randomness feels a lot smoother. If developers are going to insist on not actually making the content of their games, they should go about doing it in this way. I say that right now so that you have it in the back of your mind as you read the next few paragraphs.
Also, the thing about No Man's Sky is that it is a difficult game to judge. Everybody's experience is going to be somewhat different. I mean, you'll be doing the same thing no matter who you are, but the actual planets and animals you come across will be different for everyone. So just know going forward that this review is based entirely off of what I experienced. It is possible that you have exclusively experienced interesting systems, but I have not, so this review will reflect that.
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The first thing I'd like to talk about is the story. There isn't much of it, but what we have isn't bad, per se. Basically, you are a scientist who goes through space discovering planets, and there is a deity-like presence called "The Atlas" that is guiding you to the center of the galaxy. I cannot say how this turns out because, like I said, I haven't gotten to the end of the story, but from what I hear, the ending is terrible. The story moves along in a rather minimalist way, and that is neither a complaint nor a compliment. You'll be flying around and you'll occasionally get a little clue as to where to go in a Metroid Prime-esque manner (which is a compliment). In terms of things that actually happen in the story, that is about it. There isn't much to talk about. However, I will say this: The idea of the Atlas is actually pretty fascinating, and the little bits of story are well-written. So, while the storytelling is vague, the concept is compelling.
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Something that a lot of people have been complaining about (without much justification other than "I don't get to constantly blow things up") is Gameplay. Gameplay consists of a few things: Gathering resources, making discoveries, occasional combat, managing your inventory/technologies, and going to different places. The argument can be made that none of this serves a bigger purpose, that it is all in service of itself, and this argument is correct. I don't have a problem with that, so I won't be removing any points because of it, but just keep that in mind if that is the kind of thing that bothers you.
You have three things with you: your exosuit, your starship, and your multitool. Your exosuit contains your life support and environmental protection as well as your personal storage space. Your spaceship is pretty self-explanatory and it also has storage space. The multitool contains your mining beam, whatever little weapon add-ons you have, and all of your analysis gear. When you are on planets you mine for resources in order to recharge your equipment and repair your technologies, etc. As time goes on, you can find different multitools with more slots (so you can install more upgrades), suit upgrades that increase your capacity, and spaceships with more slots (once again, so you can install more upgrades). At time of writing, my exosuit has something like 30 slots, my multitool has 24, and I have a fairly upgraded spaceship with 28 that can take on a fleet of 11 pirate ships and survive. There is a pretty refreshing degree of customization involved with this system. You get to decide what your priorities are. Do you want to fill up your exosuit with a bunch of different survival technologies or do you want to have more space to carry things? Obviously that isn't a lot in terms of options, but my point is that your only restriction when it comes to filling up your storage areas the way you want is your capacity.
Let me give you an example of what I mean: There was a time when I was on a pretty barren planet, and I happened to come across a cave on my way back to my ship from a good twenty minutes of exploring. To my surprise, I found that this cave was literally filled to the brim with a really rare kind of item that was worth a lot of money for each one. I filled up the rest of my suit space with said item, transferred as much as I could to my ship and then refilled my suit space. When I'd finished, I realized there was still a crap ton of this rare item left in the cave. With that in mind, I dismantled nearly all of my life support technology and extraneous ship upgrades and picked up and transferred as much of the item as I could carry. By the end of this process, my exosuit had less technology installed than it did at the beginning of the game, and it was replaced almost entirely by this item. I then left the planet, headed up to a space station, and made a little over a million units. This is what I mean when I say that there is freedom in the inventory management systems.
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Then there is combat, which is pretty sparse. That isn't a complaint, nor is it a compliment. When you are on a planet or moon, your only combat comes in the forms of either hostile wildlife or sentinels. When you are up against hostile wildlife, it is just kind of an annoyance. All predatory creatures will pursue you endlessly until you kill them...at which point you'll typically have to deal with the other side of planetary combat: the sentinels. The sentinels are a force of robots that protect the balance of nature. If they catch you doing too much mining or attacking animals, they will attack you and give you a GTA-esque wanted level thing. I really hate to say what I'm about to say about combat with the sentinels. It is just boring. As I say that, I can feel my orthodontic work coming undone and my forehead growing into a giant primitive slab, but it is true. Even in abysmal games like Battlefield 3 there are variations within the gameplay model of "point at the thing and shoot". With No Man's Sky the only combat model is point at the sentinel and hold down the shoot button no matter which multitool weapon you use. I feel absolutely filthy writing that, but think about it like this: If somebody such as myself (somebody with a gigantic superiority complex when it comes to refined game taste) felt that the combat in No Man's Sky was boring enough to mention, that should say something.
Now, should people be playing No Man's Sky for the combat? No. However, it is something that was included in the game, so it needs to be judged. It does make me wonder why they included planetary combat at all, though. I mean, really, would the game have lost any value if you were able to mine in peace without interruptions from the sentinels? I hardly think so. Rather, I think the game would have been improved. I get that they are story material, but in practice they are just an annoyance.
You'll notice that I haven't yet talked about ship combat. That is because I actually quite liked it. There are plenty of better ship combat systems in the industry, sure, also your ship tends to turn around much slower than enemy ships and it is a little bit clunky to restore your shields in the middle of combat, but other than that the ship combat is actually really enjoyable. Fanboys are probably about to write me about how I just complained about planetary combat being point and hold shoot button while ship combat is exactly the same thing. That is true. You are correct, fanboys. I did complain about that just a paragraph ago. However, when put into practice in ship combat, this same point at the thing and hold the shoot button system feels faster paced and more challenging. You see, when you are shooting at a target moving as fast as enemy spaceships, you won't get far pointing directly at them. Rather, a little icon will show up somewhere in their path, and your objective is to aim at that to factor in distance and speed and the like. The enemy ships whip around and dodge constantly, so it becomes this practice in predicting their moves and adjusting your aim accordingly. You don't succeed in doing so very often, but it is quite a thoughtful kind of combat. For me, it was satisfying to hear the "thunk" of an enemy ship's engine giving in and to watch them spiral out of control. My only complaint is that there was perhaps not enough of it. I know that many people would disagree with me on that, but that is what I think. Not only that, but the ship combat seems to happen at exactly the same point: 10-20 seconds away from a planet. I don't know. Maybe it would have become more of an annoyance if it happened more often, but this game really needs to play to its strengths more. So, to summarize: less sentinel combat and more focus on ship combat would have greatly improved the game, but the existing ship combat is satisfying and engaging.
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Now, before I really start ripping into No Man's Sky, let me talk about the meat of the gameplay: the planets and the exploration. Nowhere is my assertion that everybody's experience is different more true than right here, though from what I've heard it sounds like others have had similar experiences. One of the many problems with basing your entire formula off of random selection from a pre-set pool is that nearly every outcome will be the same thing but with a different color palette. When I started playing, I would visit maybe one system a night. I would crawl across every planet for a while even if the planet was totally boring. Now I visit maybe four or five systems a night and only get out of my ship for a substantial planet crawl if the planet is beautiful. The major problem with the planetary exploration is that 9 times out of 10 the planets are exactly the same (that is to say, absolutely hideous and just plain lifeless), and only on the 10th time do you get an interesting, different kind of planet. The same thing can be said of the plants and animals you come across, but instead of 9 out of 10 odds of coming across exactly the same thing, it is more an even split of 9 out of 10 and 10 out of 10. The point is that most of the time there is no variety to be found and what you have is just boring, and boy, oh boy, are we about to talk about that.
Here's the thing: A lot of folks were angry because they wanted Grand Theft Auto in space. That would have been cool, but it is not this game. These folks who are on the 0/10 side of the argument cry foul and complain that the developers lied about the game and misrepresented the way the game would be played. That isn't true. From the beginning, the developers made it clear that this was going to be a game about exploration and discovery, and anybody who argues otherwise was never paying attention and instead just filled in the hype glasses with what they wanted. I just don't see why it is worth getting angry about promises the developers never made when there has been plenty of actual blatant lying and misrepresentation of the game to get angry about instead.
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[I want to say this right here at the start so there is a higher chance for you to see it. This section is about the lying and misrepresentation that has surrounded No Man's Sky, so now is as good a time as any to say that literally none of the images I'm using in this review are from the finished product. All of the images in this review are screenshots from earlier demos.]
The time has come to show my true colors: I never bought the hype for No Man's Sky. I consistently said it was going to absolutely blow. I looked at the demos that Hello Games used at E3 and the like and I thought, "that will maybe be 1% of the entire game, and the rest will be nothing like it". To put it into perspective, the E3 demo for 2014 (pictured above) had the developers playing on a planet painted in a vibrant orange. Everything moved at 60 frames per second. Wildlife moved smoothly and believably through the grass. There were two giant dinosaurs playing in a river. One was using its tail to bathe itself in the river, and the world just generally looked alive. Then the developers got into a ship and flew gracefully up inbetween the necks of the dinosaurs. In space, you could see what kind of planet distant planets were just by looking at them (in other words, you could see oceans and mountains from space). I forget whether or not this next thing was in the 2014 demo or the one from a few months ago, but either way. In one of the demos, the developer engaged enemy starships and tried to retreat onto a planet. The enemies followed him, and what ensued was a ship battle on a planet, with every ship whizzing through the planetary structures and shooting.
It turns out, I was wrong about that demo being 1% of the game.
It was actually 0%. There is nothing like that in the entirety of the game.
The game is incapable of rendering items that are too far away. It is impossible to tell what kind of planet a distant body is until you actually land. The look of the planets before you get to them are sometimes entirely different colors, and when you enter the atmosphere the surface is, without exception, a fuzzy pixelated mess. Wildlife shows no intelligence at all. Predators don't chase other life forms to try and eat them, herbivores don't eat the various flora, and all animals simply avoid the water altogether. Everything moves at 30 frames per second on the PS4 version (and don't tell me it's because it's a console. Sean Murray demoed with a PS4 version four months ago where it was running at 60). When you take off in your ship, the ship just leaps up a certain distance, making the flying through the necks thing impossible. Enemy ships will just wait outside the planet for you and will not follow you if you go to a planet.
I understand that sometimes there are graphical downgrades and things like that in-between demos and the release. However, functional downgrades are absolutely unacceptable. Let us take a moment and think about this. This game is created procedurally, which means that the programs came first and the rest of the time has been spent doing bug testing and the like. This kind of implies that in 2014, the developers had already created the program that procedurally generates the planets and animals.
With that in mind, there are only two explanations that I can think of:
1) The original program could generate things like in the demo, but the developers actively sabotaged their own work in favor of not having to delay again, or
2) The developers hard coded a planet and some animals for a demo to make the game look good and lied by saying it was randomly generated.
Either way, Hello Games blatantly misrepresented the kind of exploration experience people would be having (not the kind of gameplay people would be experiencing). That alone would be bad, but there was an interview with IGN something like four months ago where once again the content was misrepresented (albeit to a much lesser extent). Once again, in this PS4 demo, everything ran at 60 fps and planets were rendered accurately from space.
I am inclined to believe that the second possibility is the truth here: the demo content was all hard coded to fool people into buying the game. However, if the first possibility is actually the case, then I feel inclined to place less blame on Hello Games and more on the insufferable fan boys. You know, the people who THREATENED TO KILL THE MAIN DEVELOPER WHEN THE GAME GOT DELAYED FOR TWO MONTHS?! If Hello Games decided to put out a lesser product out of self-preservation, then it is hard to blame them. If this is the case, then the fan boys are to blame for just about every piece of negative criticism that they threaten to kill people over.
However, like I said, I am inclined to believe the second possibility, so the blame is on Hello Games for now. They lied and misrepresented the depth of the game's living worlds, and it shows.
This is, of course, to say nothing of multiplayer. If you are a veteran Right Trigger reader, you know that I typically describe people who can't play a game without multiplayer as having "tiny dinosaur brains," so I couldn't possibly care any less about whether or not the game has multiplayer elements. To the best of my knowledge, the developers have been saying that the odds of meeting another player are pretty much zip for the entirety of the development time. However, users have tried to orchestrate meetups and found that not only were other players not in the game, but planets were in entirely different times of day when players were playing at the same time. I don't care that there isn't any multiplayer, but it is really telling of the kinds of developers we are dealing with that they bold-faced lied about something as small as that!
So, what we have here is a fraudulent product on just about every front. You know what makes it worse? Since starting on this review, I've become aware of even more lies that Sean Murray told throughout the development process. If you want to learn more about Murray's lies, watch Angry Joe's review of this game. Is it fair to take off a point because the developers lied? Normally I would say that one should judge a game exclusively off of what made it into the final version, but when the lies and misrepresentation are as intense as they have been for No Man's Sky, it is the kind of thing that must be punished. Even if I ignored everything I've mentioned in this entire section, the game has serious problems. I mean, we haven't even started talking about the technical problems that this game has.
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I've already talked about the draw distances a little bit, but I haven't yet given you a clear idea of just how bad it is. In your ship it is especially bad, and the thing is, that might be understandable given how fast you are typically going in your ship. What is less understandable is when this crappy draw distance is carried over to walking. It isn't a constant thing, don't get me wrong, but it happens often enough to be noticeable. What is mind boggling about it is that if you stand on high ground, you can see for miles. However, when you are walking, things that are pretty close will materialize slowly in front of you. If the draw distance problems were just in the spaceship, it obviously would still be unpleasant, but from a technical standpoint it would at least be understandable. As it stands, though, you are never quite safe from as-you-walk rendering.
Would you like to know what else you are never safe from?
Crashes. Of the game variety, not the ship variety.
In the earlier hours of the game, I had no problem with crashes. However, once I got a few days in I had to constantly get to save points because I could never tell when I was going to crash next. Opened up the options menu? Crash. Died in ship combat? Crash. Walked into a building? Crash. Booted the game up? Crash (this happened multiple times). Entered a cave? Crash. Left a planet? Crash.
Hopefully I've gotten the point across by now. The game crashes constantly, and it often crashes right when you boot the game up. I tell you what, I would feel a lot more sorry for Hello Games if their game could be counted on to at least function. It really takes away from the joy of exploration when you have to constantly worry about the game crashing and your progress since the last save point being thrown out the window.
All this discussion of crashes brings me to another technical problem that will be getting its own spot on the negatives list: the autosave. There are literally two instances where your progress is saved: when you exit your ship and when you manually activate a save beacon. You never have the option to save at will. That means you can lose literally hours of progress when the game crashes if you find yourself on a planet without many save points. It is the same problem that all Bethesda sandboxes have, except they at least give you a manual save system. Why there isn't an option to manually save from the pause menu in a game this size is beyond me. I once lost a good forty minutes of progress because my game crashed as I was touching a save beacon, and I got lucky there because it was only 40 minutes. Think about that. In No Man's Sky, you are lucky if a crash makes you lose only 40 minutes of progress. That is how terrible the autosave is in this game.
Then there is a really, really, really small thing that has really, really, really large implications. If you are a programmer like me, then you may know about a thing called "Lorem Ipsum". For the uninitiated, if you are designing a web page and need to know how text might look when displayed but you don't actually have the content yet, you use filler text typically in the form of "Lorem Ipsum"s. Well, get this. If you pause the game and the content hasn't yet loaded, for a split second you can see the words "Ipsum Lorem" displayed where animal names or question marks would normally be. Does it affect the game in any way? Absolutely not. However, it does make one wonder what else the developers overlooked.
Beyond these technical issues there are a bunch of really wonky design choices and mistakes. If your ship is too large you take fall damage when you get out of it. Sentinels don't attack predators, but they'll attack you for defending yourself from the predators. You can lose your wanted meter by entering a building. If you mine a large deposit of a mineral awkwardly, there will be pieces of the mineral just hovering in midair. Your suit AI tells you your life support is low when it is at 75%. You can warp items to your ship from anywhere, but you can't warp items from your ship to your suit unless you are close. You can't re-rename your discoveries. You can't get back to places you've discovered easily. There aren't any maps of the system you are in, nor are there any maps of the planet you are on, so it is impossible to get back to landmarks you have claimed. The profanity filter blocks the word "spiked". Your mining laser doesn't stop shooting when you stop pressing the button. Sentinels will attack you for mining small rocks but not giant outcroppings made entirely of a mineral. Journey milestone notifications take up your entire field of view and prevent any gameplay functionality from working for a good 10-15 seconds. You can learn words in other languages that are literally never used. Observatories and transmission towers give you the exact same puzzles every single time. After a few hours you will exclusively find blueprints you already know. I could go on for pages about the millions of tiny design flops, but I will move on for now.
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So at this point I've referred to the game as fraudulent (remember what I said earlier? All the images in this review are fake. Just thought I'd bring that up again) and downright broken at times. However, if you recall from the beginning of this review, I said that I did like the game for a while. How can that be? Well, I also mentioned that I never bought the hype. I thought No Man's Sky was going to totally blow, so my expectations were remarkably low. I don't think that is why I enjoy it, but it definitely works in the game's favor. Snarkiness aside, though, when you land on a beautiful planet once in a blue moon, the game truly shines. I also believe that I enjoyed the game because of the way that I approach the gameplay.
Let me give you an example. I was on a frozen planet. This was the first time I had ever been on a frozen planet, and I accidentally parked my ship on top of a giant cliff and jumped down. At the time, I didn't know that the jetpack could let you climb anything without using fuel, so I thought I was screwed. I went and found a signal scanner and looked for a colonial outpost, only to find that the nearest colonial outpost was a half-hour walk away. I knew that I had no choice: I had to walk half an hour if I wanted to be able to progress. That would have been no biggie were it not for the fact that it was a frozen planet. Storms were constantly brewing, and I constantly found myself having to desperately search for zinc to refuel my thermal protection. About halfway through my journey, I decided to go to higher ground to see if I could see the outpost from my position. I got up to higher ground and my heart sank. There was an ocean between me and the outpost. Another storm started going and I found myself swimming an ocean, my thermal protection dropping even faster from the water temperature. Eventually I made it to the outpost and called my ship. That, I feel, is the way that No Man's Sky needs to be played: as a moment-to-moment kind of experience. No Man's Sky is at its best when you are experiencing things organically. So, if you have the game or are hoping to buy it, your best bet is to make your own fun.
Perhaps that makes it sound like the game isn't fun on its own, but creating your own fun in this kind of environment wouldn't be possible if the game weren't so well structured for moment-to-moment gameplay. I know I have been merciless with No Man's Sky, but there is fun to be had in what is here. It is just the fact that what was demoed through the years was so much better that makes it tragic. I started this review about half a week ago, and here at the end of the process I have been playing No Man's Sky for two weeks, and tonight, I finally got bored. It took a good two weeks for me to get bored with No Man's Sky, so make no mistake: despite how disastrous the game is in its current state, there is still some fun to be had. However, there are plenty of games on the market that offer more content, more stable technology, and a more fulfilling experience for a fraction of the price.
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We've come to the end of the review, dear readers. No Man's Sky was the most hyped game of this year, and it provoked extreme responses on either side of the enjoyment spectrum. There have been death threats, there have been people crying foul and claiming the developers lied for the wrong reasons (essentially not grilling them about what they should be grilled about), and I find myself conflicted. On some levels I think that Sean Murray and Hello Games brought this on themselves with years of misrepresentation, but at the same time, I look at Sean Murray and see a guy who legitimately has passion for his ideas. So, on one hand, I think Murray earned his negative reviews, but on the other hand I think the guy did what he needed to given his toxic fan base. I mean, really, when people are threatening to kill you because you delayed the game (to improve things), it is hard for passion to win. I so wanted to support a passionate indie developer, but even though I had some fun with No Man's Sky, I can only give it a hesitant recommendation. Obviously the idea was solid, but its execution was less than average.
Look over what I've said, evaluate what you want out of a game, and if you find that this is the kind of game you want to play, then I would recommend that you go ahead and spend your money on it. If you are a little hesitant, then I would still ultimately recommend giving it a shot. Either way, wait for a sale. In its current state, No Man's Sky isn't worth the $60 price tag.
At the same time, I would like to send a message to Sean Murray (who most likely will never read this review in his entire life because I'm still way too small time): please don't let the negative reviews prevent you from making more games. We need more developers with the kind of passion that you have radiated throughout the development process. Just, next time, do one of two things (depending on which of the two possibilities I mentioned earlier is true): 1) Be more honest about what your game feels like from the get-go, or 2) recognize the fanboys for what they are: sad little people who aren't evolved enough to process negative feelings in any way other than threatening violence. They aren't going to kill you, no matter how much they threaten it. You've got a spark that the industry has been lacking, Sean Murray, don't let it go out, no matter what.
And also, again, just don't lie. It is literally impossible to get away with lying about content in this industry. You will be found out, you will be called out for it, and you will deserve every criticism you get for it.

So, let us begin holding our breath in anticipation for the final score. Here is a review of the negatives that I will be penalizing the game for:

Blatant misrepresentation of functionality - 1
Constant technical problems - 1
Millions of wonky design choices that add up -1
Nearly all planets/animals/minerals/plants/structures/battles/NPCs are exactly the same -1
The worst autosave of any game since the invention of progress saving -1
Boring, unnecessary sentinel combat - 0.3

It breaks my heart, but No Man's Sky earns the lowest score I've given since adopting my new scoring system:

4.7/10 - Slightly Below Average

Better luck next time, Sean Murray, better luck next time.