Much improved and addictive, but still flawed
It seems unfair to Subnautica. Subnautica developers have achieved success with their game with far greater efficiency, fewer resources and a much lower price tag than the No Man’s Sky developers. And now, after a colossal failure of a launch, No Man’s Sky has borrowed a bunch of features from Subnautica that made that game a success, and unfortunately for Subnautica, surpassed it by having the allure of space travel and larger scale. I wonder if we, as wallet voters, should consider whether it is acceptable that more and more games are sold half empty and the revenue is then used to fill them out months or even years later.
But whatever, better late than never.
In its current state, this game is the closest any game has come to being a worthy sequel to Freelancer, something I have been anticipating for a long time. The game now has a variety of good features working for it: the presence of a cockpit view, the various air traffic and the possibility to communicate with different alien races create immersion; the main story (however barebones it may be) and side quests create a thread that the player can follow to explore the world and enjoy the game’s content; and there is a plethora of interesting things to do, like commanding freighters, planetary exploration and base building. No Man’s Sky is becoming a really fun sandbox.
Unfortunately, these fun features come at a price. The game has a variety of issues, though there is a way to fix some of these issues, which I will discuss at the end.
Firstly, the rules that govern the gameplay feel very contrived and disjointed. It’s a weird game. It does not feel like a coherent whole, but instead, it feels like a bunch of separately built mechanics, awkwardly stacked on top of one another. For example, if you follow the story, you are rewarded with a capital ship very early in the game. The developers clearly wanted to shove this new feature into the player’s hands as quickly as possible, but forgot that at this point in the game you are probably still flying in your small cheap starter ship, and yet you are suddenly given this capital ship for no reason. Another example is that you have a mining beam that you use on objects on the ground (including plants!), but if you want to actually MINE the ore in the earth, then you must use a deformation beam, because mining under the surface uses the ground deformation mechanic and it’s a different mechanic than the one for mining the rocks on the surface. Everything feels kind of forced and weird like that, from the way blueprints for crafting are found in very specific capsules underground to the way all the planets, even the supposedly undiscovered ones, have drones on them that will attack you just for gathering resources.
Secondly, the game looks like crap. This is of course a matter of personal taste, but to me, it looks like the developers tried to use lots of style to cover up the low resolution and the low polygon count that’s necessary to allow such a large and alterable world to exist. On top of that, the visual style that was chosen is light-hearted and cartoony, which can detract from immersion for those players who prefer a more serious tone. Finally, regardless of your taste in style, the stylisation just doesn’t look that good. For example, the clouds are always purposefully out of focus and flying through them, which you will be doing often, is an unpleasant experience. Light sources have a blinding glare by default, which can sometimes turn the entire screen white.
Thirdly, No Man’s Sky is a survival game at its core, which means that you are constantly having to worry about refilling various bars that become empty overtime. There are no bars for hunger and thirst, but don’t worry, there are plenty of other bars to compensate for that.
Finally, the game is still several patches away from done. The devs recently added player customization. If you are going to add player customization, then clearly you are also going to add ship customization. In fact, in a space sim, the latter should really come before the former. No Man’s Sky does not yet have ship customization, possibly indicating that this will be added in the future. Furniture currently does not align with the floor and that is just one of several bugs I encountered.
I mentioned that there was a fix for some of these issues. There is: modding. Thankfully, the devs enabled modding for this game and several mods have already fixed some of the more annoying things about the game. There is, however, an issue with these mods. As already mentioned, the game is still subject to major patches, and the mods may have to be updated after each patch. If the original maker doesn’t do this, then back you go to the way things were before.
In short, the latest version of No Man’s Sky has enough features to keep you entertained. Additionally, there is a modding community that may become this game’s saviour, mending the bugs and questionable design choices. However, the game is still an awkward arrangement of pieces that don’t quite fit together. In spite of its flaws, out of all the space sims released in the recent years, this is probably the best one at this moment.
