No Man’s Sky (PS4)

Few games have ever received as many free content updates as 2016s No Man’s Sky, and there’s probably never been a better time to Jump in your ship and take to the stars in this ambitious project which has come on leaps and bounds in the last few years.

Shooting For The Moon

If I had reviewed No Man’s Sky at launch this review would have looked extremely different. Hello game’s project started to turn heads a few years before it came out. Press conference footage from 2014 and 2015 showed off the game’s procedurally generated universe of seemingly endless planets, each one filled with exotic flora and fauna, which again was procedurally generated and unique to each planet. The game promised seamless interplanetary travel, hopping in your ship and flying over to another planet with no loading screens.It would also have survival and crafting elements, as well as ship to ship combat and space stations. One of the main selling points of the game was that it was so vast and diverse, that no two players’ experience would ever really be the same. Every individual would get to plot their own unique journey through the stars. A publishing deal with Sony meant No Man’s Sky was able to get some serious promotion, and a lot of attention for a game made by a very small team in Guildford.

Crashing Down To Earth

It’s safe to say that people were champing at the bit to get their hands on No Man’s Sky by the time its release date rolled around, and the game sold incredibly well. However this initial excitement started to die down very rapidly once people actually got hands on with the game. I was one of those people who played the game at launch, and it’s not that No Mans sky was necessarily a bad game, it just didn’t feel fully formed. It had delivered on a lot of the promises it made.

It was a sprawling almost endless procedurally generated universe, however there was a distinct lack of variety in this generation which led to a lot of its planets either feeling barren and lifeless, or filled with plants and animals that looked very similar to things you had seen before. Its combat felt extremely limited, as did its survival and crafting mechanics, which made the game feel like a tedious slog rather than an engaging gameplay loop. Its story boiled down to little more than a few text logs and map markers to chase down to simply be rewarded with more text logs and more map markers.

The game’s economy seemed a bit stacked against you. Wanting to buy a new ship, and releasing that it would set you back millions of credits whilst you had just spent the last 4 hours scrapping together a measly few thousand was quite demoralising. The game wasn’t exactly unplayable, but it didn’t really have enough going on to make it very playable either. Initially I dropped off around the 12-15 hour mark when I had the realisation that I had seen just about everything the game had to offer in this short amount of time. Visually it was a very beautiful game to look at, but scratching at its surface it quickly became apparent that No Man’s Sky didn’t really have a lot of meat on its bones.

New Horizons

The reception to No Man’s Sky was not great. People were upset, they felt more had been promised than they had got at launch. Hello Games listened, and committed to a roadmap of major updates to help get the game on track and majorly improve many aspects of the gameplay. With the February 2023 release of the Fractal update, No Man’s Sky has now received twenty four major content updates since release. This is a pretty impressive amount of free content, and Hello Games don’t appear to be done just yet, as Fractal looks to be just the beginning of their plans for the game in 2023.

This review would turn into a small book if I went into detail about each of these updates so I’m not going to do that, but I will touch on some of them, as there have been significant overhauls to almost every aspect of the game. What once felt like a game lacking in things to do, No Man’s Sky is now an almost overwhelming wealth of activities and objectives to chase, and it’s clear that a lot of love, care and community feedback has gone into this glut of updates.

Anyone who made arguments against No Man’s Sky in 2016, might want to rethink them as now players have access to base building, settlement management, guild alliances, and personal capital ships just to name a few. The main story quests have been fully reworked and are far more involved than the original iterations. The procedural generation got some fine tuning and where once there was stale repetition, now there is variety in abundance.

Now at the 70 hour mark I feel I’m still discovering plants and wildlife like nothing I’ve seen before in the game. The game now also has fully fledged multiplayer.

In the beginning, although technically everyone was in the same universe at the same time, the closest you could come to interacting with another player in No Man’s Sky was finding a planet that someone had renamed. Now the game has multiplayer missions, simple grouping up mechanics, and community goals for everyone to work together on and share the rewards. All of this is available from the game’s multiplayer hub, The Nexus.

How on earth do you find The Nexus in a seemingly endless universe I hear you ask? Well the game has a very clever solution to this problem, you can simply warp The Nexus to you wherever you are in the galaxy (How is this possible? The answer is essentially space magic, just go with it). Among the big seeping changes were also small improvements to the games crafting, economy, menus and survival mechanics which all now feel like they are no longer actively working against my enjoyment of the game.

Steadying The Ship

At Its core No Man’s Sky is still the same game. You are still a lone traveller amongst the stars, mining resources, crafting materials, and hopping from planet to planet to make discoveries along the way as you push on through the universe. But now that universe just feels so much more alive. The game feels like it’s reached the level that people’s expectations were at launch. No Man’s Sky always had a visual take on Sci Fi that felt unique to itself, from its ship design to its alien races, and it has retained this and even iterated on it across the course of its life span.

Breaking through a planet’s atmosphere to scan the surface below, knowing you are the first player to ever be here is something that never grows old even after the hundredth time of doing so. The sound design is fantastic, and the soundtrack lends itself beautifully to that sense of exploration and discovery. One of the more unique mechanics No Man’s Sky has(and has had since launch) is how it treats language. Each alien race has its own language, and you don’t speak any of them. You have to learn them word by word by interacting with people, or finding knowledge stones scattered across planets, and slowly you can start to work out what these aliens have been trying to tell you this whole time. With all this new content the games onboarding for new or returning players has clearly been given a lot of thought, and for someone like me who has been away for multiple years, it did a great job of helping me get my space legs again.

Anomaly Detected

However, No Man’s Sky is by no means a perfect game. Chances are if you don’t like survival and crafting games, you are not going to like No Man’s Sky. As I said, these systems have vastly improved since launch, but there can still be some tedium in gathering the right resources to power your ship or tools, when all you want to do is get on with a mission. Combat is another aspect that got reworked in a previous update, but for me it’s still not that enjoyable. Killing the game’s main enemies, The Sentinels (little floating robots who don’t like you mining resources) feels more like swatting annoying flies buzzing around your head. And they have a very tiresome habit of turning up at the most inappropriate times. The game also still has some performance issues. Coming in or out of a planet’s atmosphere can be a bit jittery, and pop in is quite common in new areas of planets. But who knows, maybe these grievances I have will be solved in future updates, along with more new content to keep this game ever growing in scope.

Yes Man’s Sky

Coming back to No Man’s Sky after all of this time, and all of these updates has been a great experience. As I mentioned early on in this review, No Man’s Sky was never really a bad game, just lacking in things to do. Now there are things to do aplenty! The once lacklustre game play loop has diverged into multiple more interesting game play loops. You can spend some time running missions for the trade guild to gather resources until you tire of that. Then you can find a planet you like and set up a base all of you own. Once you’ve spent all your money sprucing up your base, you can send your capital ship on an expedition to make you some more. Found a settlement? Take charge of it and start bossing everyone around. Pop to the Nexus and hangout with some friends. Then you can realise you haven’t moved the main quest on in thirteen hours so maybe you should do that. Or don’t, go do something else instead, The universe is your oyster!