Before beginning, a small reflection and a warning. The main mission of an analysis, apparently of the one who writes these lines, is to try to give the necessary information to the reader so that he knows if a game can be of his pleasure or not. Beyond the note, beyond the literary quality of the text, our mission is to provide those tools to those who are reading.
Video games, like so many things, are perceived differently according to the player, because not all players are equal and do not want the same things. A title can be very good in what it does, have zillion tens and Game of the Year and bore a certain type of player, that’s a reality.
Therefore, although it is not very aesthetic to start with the negative, we will start this text by not recommending No Man’s Sky to the players that we think will not enjoy it.
- If you do not support tedious periods with repetitive activities necessary to obtain the elements you need to keep moving forward, do not buy it.
- If you are looking for immediate action, combats made in space or on land, do not buy it.
- If you are looking for a survival game that will make things difficult for you to fight for your life, neither will Man’s Sky offer you much.
- If you hate having to manage a limited inventory, do not buy it.
- If you are looking for a spatial simulation title with “realistic” controls that take advantage of a HOTA, you will not find it here either.
- If you are interested in a space sandbox, such as transport, trade, logistics or construction, it is not your game either.
- If you like photorealism and cutting-edge graphics, you will hardly like it visually.
- And if you are looking to share adventures with friends in space, definitely do not buy it.
And what’s in between is a game very focused on planetary procedural exploration, on finding captivating landscapes and strange creatures, on naming planets, finding fragments with stories of the galaxy and its species, on progressing to obtain better
equipment and better ship and spend time traveling. The great attraction of No Man’s Sky is that: traveling, knowing and finding. Maybe the message should have gone around to avoid disappointment, instead of insisting that everything was possible,
letting fans fill their heads with fantasies. It is not that he lied, technically there are different elements such as combat and trade for example,
but they are not too developed facets. The combat on land is practically insubstantial, and the space combat is competent but also pulling the simple and with a pretty arcade touch. As for trade, it is extremely simplistic, moving away from any hint of complexity in other titles.
The game wins when we focus on its main theme: exploration. All planets usually have interesting elements, depending on their conditions. There are more empty planets, but maybe they have valuable metals that we can sell. There are others more alive,
and there are even very valuable elements, which are usually planets with a high activity of sentinels, who will try to punish our attempts to plunder the valuable
resources of the planetarium. Making money is easy, just find one of these planets and then be lucky that the space station of the system buy it at a price more expensive than the planetary average. This combination can allow us to earn millions easily, so the progression is relatively simple.
When they presented the game to us and they told us that we were going to have a big universe, they definitely did not lie. No Man’s Sky is a big game, very big, with 18,446,744,073,709,551,616 planets to be discovered by us or other players and each one
generated in a random way with different characteristics, life, fauna and flora. Any tiny point, any place we can see in the immense map of the game we can visit
it and not only that, each planet in itself is a considerable map. But what certainly leaves a satisfactory feeling is that we can say that we have stepped on a land that nobody has seen before, a no-man’s land.
