No Man's Sky review

Before you decide whether or not No Man's Sky is a game you'll appreciate, you must ask yourself a single tough question: How much do you value technological wonder over everyday, solid, smart game design?

From the game's announcement back in late 2013, the complex code and algorithms underpinning No Man's Sky have seemed miraculous and hard to believe. Developer Hello Games promised an utterly massive game to a scale never seen before despite being a tiny indie team previously known for a simple, cutesy platformer. To some watching the various trailers and demos throughout the past few years, it seemed impossible; to others, it felt like something they had been waiting for their whole lives.

So does it live up to those lofty expectations?

Could anything?

On a technological front, at least, No Man's Sky largely delivers exactly what Hello Games first pitched. But that unbelievable tech seems to detract from the rest of the experience. I won't go so far as to say that No Man Sky's game design is a disaster, but its mundanity can't begin to live up to the potential for awe produced by everything around it.

The sparse story of No Man's Sky begins with you waking up on a lonely planet, standing near a broken-down spaceship. Minimal tutorials introduce you to the various resources you must gather to fix and refuel that ship. Eventually, you'll gather everything you need, make the necessary repairs (by holding a button in your menu) and leave the starting planet by rocketing into space. Then you can fly to a new planet and begin the process all over again.

There are wrinkles that make each new planet stand apart, and unique situations you can find yourself in, but this is the core loop of No Man's Sky: gather, craft, travel, repeat. You can distract yourself with other, self-appointed tasks, such as chronicling every species of alien life on a planet, but in the end everything feeds back into the goal of gathering what you need in order to allow yourself to travel farther in order to gather what you need to travel even farther than that, and so on, into almost-literal infinity.

There is an end goal to No Man's Sky — to get to the center of the galaxy. Pulling this off requires dozens of hours of jumping between solar systems, gathering more resources and upgrading your equipment. In other words, there's a direct path forward that will keep you busy for a long time in a game that you could choose to get lost in forever if you wanted.

Once I started to comprehend what everything does in No Man's Sky, once I began working out the most efficient path forward, much of the magic faded. A lot of that failure to hold my imagination is thanks to the dull nature of the game's planets. Exploring them is fun enough at first, and they're very expansive, but they all began to feel very same-y — and very empty — after I had visited half a dozen or so. You can find some absolutely stunning locales, no doubt, but there are only so many times I can get a kick out of discovering yet another variety of space cow or yet another wacky giant mushroom.

I've been told that much of game development is smoke and mirrors — cleverly hiding a game's limitations in ways that the average player won't notice. If that's true, then No Man's Sky allowed me to see through its illusions much too quickly. If, after a hundred hours, I noticed the same things repeating, it would have been hard to fault the game. But it didn't suspend my disbelief nearly that long. Within the first 10 or 15 hours, it became glaringly obvious that each new planet was little more than a minor change of clothes surrounding the same exact things I had already experienced on every other planet.

Take, as an example, drop pods. One of the biggest annoyances in the early game is very limited inventory space. Within the first day of the game being out, players realized that you could purchase more inventory slots at drop pods. Great! An easy way to get past a frustrating stage of the game. And it's also reliable: Players figured out that you can use commonly found sensors to search for "shelter," and you'll end up finding a drop pod almost every time. We even made a video about it.

On the one hand, No Man's Sky needs this. Players must have a way to get more inventory space, because otherwise the inventory juggling meta-game would quickly get absurdly bothersome. On the other hand, I couldn't help but feel that stuff like this makes every planet feel identical, no matter how different they look. No matter where you go, no matter how deep into the galaxy or how obscure a corner of the universe, whatever planet you land on is going to have sensors, and those sensors will eventually lead you to drop pods.

That's just one similarity among dozens. Every planet has a healthy supply of iron, zinc, carbon and other must-have resources that you'll need just to survive. Every planet has the same structures, the same abandoned buildings with identical layouts, the same trading posts with the same single alien in the same pose looking at the same iPad-esque device. For such a massive, nearly limitless galaxy, I couldn't believe how soon into the game I felt like I had seen almost everything it had to offer.

That's not to say that No Man's Sky never captured my sense of wonder. The best moments for me were when I truly got lost, and those mostly involved space travel. Where exploring planets quickly dropped in appeal, blasting off and zooming into space, or entering the atmosphere of a new planet from space, never entirely lost the rush of adrenaline associated with it. Especially given the game's cleverly hidden loading, I felt like I had never quite experienced anything like this in all my years of gaming.

Too bad, then, that the space travel is occasionally interrupted by exceedingly mediocre dogfighting with pirates. As you progress and build upgrades for your ship's shield and guns — or just purchase bigger, better ships — the space fights get easier, but I never actually enjoyed them. That goes double for on-foot combat, which features a powerful dose of auto-aiming to make up for the slow, jerky movement in the game. In both types of combat, enemies lock on with a laser precision that felt impossible to shake, so the only real solution is upgrades to make you survive longer; the game doesn't leave a lot of room for skillful play to matter.

The shallow nature of everything other than the procedural universe creation in No Man's Sky also extends to your interaction with intelligent alien species in the game. There are a few different species you'll meet, and you can discover monoliths on planets that teach you their languages word by word. But there are no strong differences in the situations you'll find yourself in with lizard-y Gek versus interactions with the robotic Korvax. They have very slightly different personalities, but they issue more or less the same requests and more or less the same rewards.