No Man's Sky

This review is going off of the most recent Cosmos update, basically a new player since I never even kept playing past the tutorial until now (i.e. until the Anomaly). Conceptually, the game is great. Visually, it's pretty solid what with the different planets and orbital features and all that, pretty good variety of generation especially compared to launch. Seeing new ships is always fun and you are on the lookout for an upgrade. The problem is that this game is one of the most shallow experiences I've ever had and seemingly it has only gotten worse with time. They have added so many new systems to mess with, new things to build, custom corvettes, freighters, etc. The problem is that these systems seemingly are all added completely a la carte with basically no proper interaction with each other. So instead of having a bunch of interesting systems that can link to each other and improve them to create an interesting loop for improving, doing missions, whatever, you just have 10 disconnected islands that are totally unrelated and, frequently, don't even play nice with each other. For instance, corvettes are one of the newer things in the game (still at least a few updates old), basically custom ships made with like brick modules that snap together. Cool system, would be great if it was actually finished and had some options for customization that worked well. It still just feels like a tech demo (and a poorly done one at that). Tons of modules clip into each other, which actually isn't even a bad thing if it was intended since it gives you better variety for shapes and customization, but it is absolutely a bug since you can't do it all the time-- my ship, for instance, would let me clip on the RIGHT side of my ship, but not the LEFT, meaning I couldn't keep things symmetrical. Already annoying, but then you remember how you actually get parts: random scrap to get 99% of the time worthless parts or straight up "valuables" which can only be sold and not used. Not like money really matters anyway because you can't even use it directly to buy most parts, only a few (and it's not even based on which station you're on, it's just universal.) So the only way to get some parts consistently so you could make a competent looking ship that isn't a cargo crate with thrusters would be to use the "trading" system, which is just an arbitrary "give up to 3 parts to get a part you select" with a percentage chance to succeed on trade based on... something? It's silly regardless, why list it as a percentage when there's no issue with failure, it's really just a binary 'yes the trade will happen' or 'no the trade will not happen.' So let's say you decide to trade some of your useless parts in to get some modules to finish your brick with a thruster-- awesome, you make that trade, receive your items, go into the editor and... you don't have the items. Because while all the trading and buying happens from all your inventories (player, ship, module storage), arbitrarily RECEIVING trade items only works with your player inventory. So if you have a full inventory (which you will, because inventories are tiny in this game) those items just get deleted, no refund. Sure, ♥♥♥♥ it, fine here's my unfinished corvette that can at least barely function without those parts, let me at least put my tractor beam on it so I can salvage (the whole reason to use a corvette in the first place). Oh, hang on I put that at the wrong module that would be hard to use, let me move it-- oh, you can't move the tractor beam, it's bugged and you can only delete it. Fine, annoying, let me delete it and replace-- oh, sorry with the tractor beam deleting it doesn't refund it, it just deletes it. Go buy a new one. Finally, you burn 2 million buying like 8 new tractor beams so you can just replace them when you need, complete your corvette, and go try to land at a freighter nearby. Oh, sorry, the freighters were made BEFORE corvettes, and we didn't add proper landing to those, so you can't actually BOARD the freighter, you just float outside it on a magical landing pad made of light and then teleport on board. Oh, and that's only if the freighter actually remembers to generate one of those. So, I don't know, if you warped into a system on your corvette, got the random mission to rescue a freighter from pirates, then are told to come aboard for a reward, sometimes the game just doesn't generate a landing platform. So you can't get on board. Spacewalking, by the way, just lets you clip into the geometry of the freighter because, again, it is on its own separate island, it isn't tied back to new features. So you try to go back to a station to swap to a normal ship to land, and then your freighter despawns so no reward. And then your game crashes (unrelated to the other occurrences, it just does that sometimes). This game is a single player MMO with every update basically being an "expansion" that is totally separate from the rest of the game. And every single one is left at the simplest state you could imagine to call it a new "feature" and then left there, bugs and all. Do I give credit to these devs for continuing to provide free updates to their game? Sure. But they aren't actually making the game deeper and more interesting, they're just making it wider and shallower.

This game is "you can do anything" but "there's no reason to." There isn't, really. Farming, crafting, upgrading, exocrafts, none of that matters at all. Can you do it? Sure. Is it cool that you can do it? Sure. Is there a reason to? No. And that's the issue. In Valheim, you HAVE to cook. It's a MUST. If you don't cook, your health and stamina will never be enough. That's a system integrated into the whole structure of the game. No Man's Sky? No system is integrated whatsoever. Can you have a lil company of fighters? Yes. Does it do anything? No. Not really. You don't need to do anything. There is no reason, no purpose. Even Minecraft has a reason and purpose, because enemies do more damage in certain places. Here? What enemies? The same ones you have seen before across the entire game. There is no danger, there is no urgency, there is no engagement aside from "you can do it, so it's cool." And I think that's the saddest thing about this game. It does a lot, and the development history is one for the books. However... deep inside it's still the same as it always has been. If you visit ten galaxies, you've seen 90% of what the game has to offer. If you've engaged with 20 hours of content, you've engaged with all you need to engage with. Everything else is meaningless.

When this game launched, I bought it on PS4. It wasn't great in terms of gameplay, but the most impressive part of it was the way you could seamlessly fly between planets and enter the atmosphere, fly down to the surface, and step out without ever seeing a loading screen. The LOD loading was perfect, everything felt smooth and seamless. Sure there was never anything to actually do except point a laser at a rock for ten minutes until you had enough resources to go somewhere else, but that transition from space to the surface was magical and never got old. Ten years of updates later and there's a lot more to do, but none of it is really fun or has any purpose. They've long since abandoned the central premise of the game about being a lonely traveller trying to reach the centre of the galaxy, and made it a cosy base-building simulator. Kind of the antithesis of the original premise, being able to teleport all over the place and set up permanent structures. Why? No reason, but you can do it. Unfortunately, somewhere in all these updates they lost that only magical thing they had. The seamless transitions between space and the surface. They completely overhauled the way it was handled, and how planet generation in general was handled. So what we got was more detailed surfaces, but still no variety. You land anywhere on the planet, you've seen the whole planet. But as you fly into the atmosphere now you're not greeted by the majesty of creation any longer, marveling at the shear scale of it. Nope, now you get a patchwork grid of texture popins that occur on every machine, no matter how powerful your hardware. Just a blurry mess beyond a few squares at the centre of your vision, that morph and deform out of low resolution nothingness, and appear as a huge scar across a vaguely blurry larger planet texture. It looks horrendous, and you do it OFTEN. It looks horrendous no matter the hardware, and it makes me sad to see them burn the one thing the launch version actually did perfectly in favour of adding pokemon hologram arenas and limited-area grav gun minigames. It's all fluff, at the cost of the core thesis of what this game once claimed to be. And it's boring as hell.

I love No Man Sky and have played it for many years at this point, but I cannot recommend that anyone buy the game in its current state. Hello Games pushes out a major update for NMS every couple of months with very little regard for how the new systems they introduce interact with the old ones (the bugged interactions between Corvettes and Freighters to name one example), not to mention that the systems themselves are either half-baked at best or completely broken at worst. As of the 7.0 update, game crashes are very frequent and seemingly unavoidable, especially when it comes to multiplayer or nexus missions (I have yet to be able to complete one of the latter since the update came out). Considering how many bugs I've noticed from as far back as 2020 still remain in the game unchanged, I have little faith that Hello Games will spend any concerted effort making the game actually playable rather than a live service testbed for Light No Fire's systems. Genuinely not worth the purchase unless something changes.