Review No Man's sky

Saturday, 1 October 2016 17:00 GMT, by Gregoire Charlier (Speedy) and Thomas

Sometimes, one can stumble upon a bit of history through a game that’s been going up and down the hills. And sometimes, this game intertwines with one of the biggest videogame publishers you can think of, and this publisher promises the earth with its own magic wand: money.  Well, this story is the story of No Man’s Sky: A modest and (dare I say it?)  relatively small publisher called Hello Games meets Sony who sees in this project a good reason to propel No Man’s Sky into the stratosphere of video gaming, which is commonly called E3.  Unfortunately, the British video game developer is struggling to keep up while on the other hand, Sony is getting increasingly impatient. After three years of broken trailers, tasteless presentations and unanswered questions, it’s time now for all PC and PS4 owner to get their tickets to outer space.

Is No Man’s Sky really the game that Sony told us it was ?  Does the latest creation by Hello Games succeed in the mission it had set its mind on ? Endless questions, endless planets, exact same answer: an interstellar silence surrounding our galaxy that leaves us quite astounded and speechless.

Hello Games, big fat pro-cedural ?

That’s how they sold it to us at Hello Games. Well, one can hardly blame them for it.  No Man’s Sky carries around 18 446 744 073 709 551 616 planets, which represents enough for us to realize we won’t have enough of a lifetime to discover them all. Sure, that’s quite an impressive number but there’s hardly a point in having this many planets if there’s nothing to do on them. So, the question that remains is : are there 18 446 744 073 709 551 616 reasons for us to land on each and every one of them? Well, nope. And that might be Hello Game’s biggest problem yet in No Man’s Sky. There is nothing to do, or at best, not enough for the player to give the slightest fudge about any of those planets. Actually, let me tell you what the planet thing is about: you explore and you craft. There’s nothing to do except walking around, gathering resources to make other resources and from time to time, you could be so lucky to take a photo with two dinosaurs, fish or even a rock.

Once you’ve gotten that out of the way, well you can rush back to your spaceship and get the heck out of there. Exploration in No Man’s Sky is not quite proportionate to the impressive numbers of planets you may or may not stumble upon. The only issue being that for most planets we have discovered,  we have ended up with the same exact type of fauna and flora or even worse, with identical twin-planets. In a nutshell, you may walk around in one part of a planet with the complete certainty that every aspect of that planet is the same on the opposite end of the same planet, thus making exploration completely pointless.

“Hang on, might you say, with a bit of justified condescendence, there are still the different animal species we can discover”. Well, not really. The species do not change from one planet to another, except for a few nuances ( like the skin colour for example), which means that if colour is not a game-changer to you, chances are you will find No Man’s sky utterly trivial.

For those who feel sympathetic to the cause, exploration will be subpar at best, and  the rest of the game will probably kill off any type of misplaced enthusiasm. Let’s talk about the inventory. The cursor has been grossly taken out of Destiny and works quite awkwardly on PS4. As for the inventory per se, you do not have one, but two: the armour’s inventory and the spaceship’s. Both are upgradable as the game goes on . However, we found ourselves joggling between both inventories most of the time, because some resources can only be stored in one inventory, and I won’t mention the menu that looks like a pre-alpha version of a farming simulator game.  When the whole point of the game lies on the sole concept of  exploration, it would be a good idea to encourage the gamers to gather resources to make them explore more… Here, the only pleasure we take is when we leave those horrendous inventories that keep getting full and slow the game down.

Once in space, it does not get much better, although in terms of modeling and atmosphere, it is  where the game gets most of its credit.  As for space battles, I would say that they are as interesting and captivating as scanning butterflies and two rabbits in a planet that’s 98% rock.

The appalling quality of the technical realisation will only bring more despair to the few of you who remained joyful. Ladies and gentlemen, you have 18 or so trillions of planets. Fantastic. However, the only thing that a game with such upsetting and pathetic textures deserves is a lawsuit. Granted, given the impressive size of the game, and the ever-so-impressive number of planets in it, we were not expecting a Naughty Dog type of game, but being offered a PS2 game that incidentally works on PS4 is… puzzling.  The planets are voided of any texture at all, the spaceship looks like a tin can and vegetation looks like it’s been modeled through the Chernobyl Engine. Sure, it’s space, planets and adventure. But if you want to sell exploration, you have to make it attractive enough.

In an exploration-based game, what surrounds us plays a key role. A game that’s mainly narrative will most likely emphasize on the facial features of the actors in order to make feelings and emotions more real. An exploration-based game must do just that. If everything that surrounds you is ugly and dull, chances are you will not hop into the spaceship twice. Moreover, the volumetry is nowhere to be found, and so are the particle effects, which makes sense when you see how awful the trees look.

In the galaxy, one can hardly…see

Hard to be objective when it comes to the artistic direction.  We will be completely biased on this issue, considering your experience may have been much better because you were lucky enough to have found better planets than us.

However, in the facts, in spite of some very well-designed colour effects in outer space, once you land, you will only find dullness.  We did find two or three planets that had a quite a zing to them, all others seemed empty and had nothing that could balance their technical weaknesses.  However, sea beds (when applicable on your planet obviously) seemed much more enjoyable than what is on the surface with clearer colours that gave us just this once, the willingness and enthusiasm we had been lacking so far.

The gameplay  was also a big focus point for us. Getting familiar with the controls is nothing close to intuitive, and the hugeness of the horizon does not renew the gameplay enough to give a much-needed boost to the game.  Being halfway between idle contemplation and sluggish survival game, does not play in No Man’s Sky’s favour. The game is far too easy and rather unsurprising to say the least. Every bit you do on one planet, you will do on another:  walking, jet packing, gathering resources, inventory-searching, crafting and…that’s about it.

However, Hello Games did not forget about those lazy bums who do not want to sacrifice time walking around to find resources: there is a trading part to No Man’s Sky. Whenever you find scarce material, you have the possibility to sell it in order to buy other material that is less rare but that you are too lazy to go pick up.  Sure, we cannot deny that there are some other nuances as well, but 95%  of the game is summed up by the series of events mentioned above.  Is it really something on which we can blame Hello Games? Well, not really to be fair because the game is a contemplative one. It would have worked much better had it been harder. This decision to make it easy is, in our opinion, rather unforgivable. While there are other games that chose the same path, they have met a much happier outcome.

While No Man’s Sky is clearly not a favourite of ours, it has nonetheless undeniable and unexpected qualities.  The game is full of well-thought background noises and music, from two simple piano notes to some more peaceful and relaxing music themes that fit well in the universe. Impossible to emphasize enough on the role of music in creating an atmosphere. On this front, No Man’s Sky proved itself to be a worthy contender.  The other detail that caught our attention is virtually the endless lifespan of the game. Apart from the final and only objective of going into the centre of the galaxy, the game has no end in sight.  It is of course linked to the procedural nature of the planets thus making it completely and utterly your fault if you give up on it.

No Man’s Sky’slifespan is never a problem of whether the game is going to run out of resources to keep you on your toes, but it’s on the players to decide on how long this purposeless ride will last.

To emptiness and beyond

No Man’s Sky is much to our dismay part of those game for which it’s very hard to give grades. A lot of things can drown some game experiences. The procedural nature of the game makes things much simpler for Hello games, because it’s virtually impossible for two people to have the same experience. Even though the grade does represent our opinion at this time and is not subjected to change, your opinion may very well differ from ours. However there are things that are not procedural, in particular the fact that the game is pure emptiness.  Running out of long-term content, No Man’s Sky fails to impress on longer sessions and barely makes it to the clouds above. The milky way was definitely reachable had the game shrunk their inappropriate numbers of planets and focused more on the technical aspect of it.  The very substance of it is there, but everything that would have made the game fun and enjoyable has gone astray.  What is left of this undeniable chaos is an experience that lacks surprises and fun, a gameplay that’s aimlessly floating around in the galaxy, patiently waiting to be gulped down by a much-too-greedy black hole. Much to our dismay, this 70-euro black hole got the better of No Man’s Sky.

Verdict