Review: No Man’s Sky (Steam)

No Man’s Sky is a game about exploration and survival in an infinite procedurally generated universe.

Pros:

• Gorgeous graphics with a bright lush colour palette.
• Space exploration game. Fly, walk and even jet pack across the infinite amount of worlds.
• Find new plant life, Planets, Creatures and even rocks! Doing so allows you to record them by uploading to the server and even renaming them.
• Mine materials, Using the proper element symbols from the periodic table, You harvest materials to craft,sustain life and upgrade/repair items/crafts.
• Find bases/settlements/ruins. Hit the marker at these places to rename and claim them. They all vary, Some allow you to call in your ship or some will give away locations of key places to visit.
• Interact with alien races, Learn words of their language so you can understand what they are saying.
• No in game loading.
• Full controller support.
• Can re bind keys on both keyboard and mouse and the controller.
• Steam achievements.
• Steam cloud save.
• Upgrade/craft new tech to your suit,ship and multi tool.
• Multi tool-Weapon you use to mine and shoot things.
• Jump pack to help navigate the terrain.
• Buy/find/repair new ships. Ships come with tech and different amounts of storage.
• Storage: You can beam materials to your ship from your suit or vice versa.
• Trade stations/Terminals to buy/sell materials.
• Procedurally generated worlds so you never know what you are going to get.
• Many weather types from harsh hot deserts to ice cold snow capped levels.
• Storms randomly appear and seriously hurt your tech. You get the strong wind, Sound effects etc.
• Graphic options: Window mode, Monitor, Resolution, V-Sync, AA, FOV slider for ship and on foot, Gamma, Anisotropic filtering, Texture detail, Shadow detail, Generation detail, Reflection detail, HUD on/off and Max FPS.
• Can invert controls.
• In game journey milestones that once completed bring up a cool scene with a pleasant tune.
• Crack terminal number codes to reveal points of interest.
• Scan: Shows up material types, Settlements and ruins.
• Ruins and stone pillars can be found that when triggered reveal a translation word of an alien species.
• Story is in there but the best parts of story telling is the interaction with aliens. You get a paragraph setting the scene, Reads like action games past and is really well done.
• Lovely soundtrack.
• Hack terminals with a beam on it and choose one of four options to reveal certain points of interest.
• Loot boxes are everywhere and contain materials and items.
• Blueprints: Needed to craft new items and upgrades, These are found in terminals, boxes, drops etc.
• Sentinels: These beings will attack you if you shoot doors or take too much materials or aggravate the wildlife. They will grow in severity ala GTA games and more powerful sentinels will turn up.
• The game is very relaxing and allows you to play how you want to play.
• The whole not knowing feeling really fuels this game.

Cons:

• Constant frame drops especially for the first five minutes.
• Slowdown in built up areas.
• Controller can have issues especially with moving diagonally, You get a slow laggy response.
• Very repetitive experience.
• Some wont like the lack of help or guidance.
• Space combat is a huge let down, Its slow and clunky and is not a fun experience at all.
• Lacking actual game play.
• Sound can cut out.
• No multiplayer (Its here just so I can say I put it in)
• Anything you name only saves on that one planet even if you find the exact same thing on another planet.
• You have to save manually at save points or by exiting your ship.
• Pop up can make cruising the planet by ship quite hard.
• Core components of your suit like health cannot be dismantled to free up space once you upgrade it. Also you cannot move them around for organisation purposes.
• Get a lot of “already known” blueprints really quickly.
• Atlas (story) markers have a habit of disappearing.