The long awaited and much scrutinized day has come and No Man’s Sky has finally released for the PS4. For those unclear on the game’s premise, No Man’s Sky is a game about exploration and survival in an infinite procedurally generated galaxy. By exploring, players gain information about the diverse flora and fauna of the 18 quintillion planets they can visit and can submit their info to the Atlas, a universal database that can be shared with other players of the game. It released on PS4 on August 9th in North America and August 10th in Europe, and will arrive on PC worldwide on August 12th. A full and proper review of this massive game is coming soon, but until then here are some initial impressions after several hours of play.
The game’sfocus is on exploration of the galaxy and survivaland these systems involved are deeper than expected coming into the game. The main goal is definitely exploration for the sake of discovery, but often you are exploring for a reason. For example, when you start the game you are exploring to find components to fix your ship. If you are unfortunate enough to spawn on a radioactive planet, you will need to salvage some materials to keep your hazard protection powered up as well as your life support as you venture further from your wreck. After gathering the core components needed for this, you’ll then need to find some material to charge the ship. There is an element of objective based content that helps to give a bit of a nudge to your explorer’s heart.
After your ship is up and running, you can explore the present planet or head off to the next one. You’ll unlock another mission once you reach outer space, but there’s no particular rush to head into space unless you want to. Each planet has a wealth of natural and archaeological resources that can be explored and gathered for sale. You can take these earnings and acquire better looking and better performing gear and ships.The game isn’t a race, and players are encouraged to stop and smell the alien roses.
Once you decide to explore you’ll likely notice early on is that inventory management can be a bit awkward. You have two inventory systems to start with in your ship and your exosuit. As long as you aren’t too far away from your ship you may easily transfer items between your exosuit and your ship. When you are acclimated to the proximity needed, it will work, but this is hopefully a system that can be refined with future updates. While you’re on your own, it becomes cumbersome managing space for everything you are gathering, particularly in the early going when you aren’t exactly sure what you need to keep. Later on, upgrades to your gear improves the inventory options.
In addition to exploring the local environments you can also work on fixing various pieces of equipment like your scanner (which is super helpful for locating resources) or your scanner analyzer which lets you scan the local fauna, animals and minerals then upload those discoveries to the network. It seems you can only upload discoveries for the planet you are actually on; once you leave, you won’t be able to do so until you are at least back at least in the atmosphere, so keep that in mind and upload your discoveries at regular intervals if you’re trying to contribute to the lexicon of player knowledge.
The controls work well, but you may need to tweak your sensitivity out of the gate. The opening tutorial throws one thing after another at you, but the instructions arrive in very small text boxes on the bottom right hand side of the screen. It is sensible to have these be unobtrusive, but it also makes them somewhat difficult to notice when you are looking around in a new alien world, and a slight adjustment in placement would be very helpful.
Overall, early impressions of the game are positive. The game is expansive and holds a lot of promise, and as such I am hopeful it will hold my attention. While the systems seem a bit overwhelming at first, once you get the hang of them they clarify down to more understandable goals of explore, gather, upgrade, repeat. What remains to be seen is if the game will become repetitive or even lonely as the universe unfolds and the scale of it all sinks in. Or can the gamekeep the sense of wonderand excitement of getting to that next valley, ridge, lake, planet, or system that it does at the start? If it can, No Man’s Sky can keep gamers, explorers and cosmic wanderers busy for many hours to come. Perhaps even a quintillion.
For a sense of the environment and unique experience check out this footage of 20 minutes of no narration exploration, and check back with us for our upcoming full review of the game.
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