Review: No Mans Sky

As you may know, this is by no means a new game.  The thing I can tell you though is that it honestly feels like it is and whether that’s good or bad is up to your interpretation. No Mans Sky has just recently released its NEXT update which adds many features but mainly true multiplayer so I figured this was the perfect time for me to pick this title back up and see how it plays!

I started in multiplayer right off the bat, joining my friend in his universe! He was already a few steps ahead of me, but not too far, but I was thankful he was. My first recommendation before anything else if you do try this game is to either start from scratch or join a friend who is also starting from scratch. While being in multiplayer was great, it was also troublesome. Since my friend was on another planet already the game started me on a very inhospitable planet. I can get past that, its all luck of the roll, but what I can’t excuse was the inability to complete the basic tutorial because of this. If it wasn’t for my friend and his freighter I first wouldn’t have been able to repair my ship since the materials the game was having me seek weren’t on my planet, and then the game wanted me to fetch things in other systems all before I could even use my hyperdrive, thus forcing me to dock in my friends freighter to hyperjump and continue my quest. On top of that, the first time we tried jumping I got crashed right out of the game and we had to reattempt the jump.

After we got past those issues we had a lot of fun! Playing with a friend is a blast, setting up bases, hunting down whispering eggs or even doing missions from the freighter were all a lot of fun! It wasn’t without its issues though. For example, you can only have one freighter in a system, if a friend has theirs then you’re unable to bring your own in. Unfortunately, we were able to accidentally get around this when I jumped my freighter into the system my friends’ freighter was in, thus causing them to merge into some sort of super freighter at the spawn point, forcing my body out of the ship and bombarding me with solar radiation until I lay dead. The funny thing is, later on, my friend tried jumping into a system my freighter was in, but because I had summoned it away from the spawn the game then decided that it would do a check and wouldn’t allow the jump since another freighter was already in the system.

The game still has plenty of other bugs as well. Multiple times I’ve responded to distress calls from NPC freighters under attack, and when they summon me to their bridge to thank me, the hallway between the stairs and bridge will be missing thus dropping me into space to further solar bombardment. Other times I’ve been able to get to the captain and he just doesn’t allow me to communicate with him and finally another time I did get to the captain, and I did communicate with him, just for him to thank me, offer me his freighter for free, yet when I attempted to claim it, it was still asking for money that I couldn’t afford, and when I would converse with him further it would explicitly say how happy I am the crew stayed aboard after giving me their ship, even though in reality it never happened.

Another thing I was disappointed about was that the trading system that got implemented somewhere along the line seems to have been scrapped. The systems still have different economy types, and they still say they specialize in different trade goods, but those trade goods are nowhere to be found. As one of my favorite things to do in EVE was mine and haul, or Mabinogi was traveling between cities participating in commerce, the lack of a trade system was really disappointing.

All in all, there have been a lot of positive development in No Mans Sky, but if you think that means its finally bug-free you’d be wrong. Is it worth a play? Definitely, especially if you can pick it up on sale, or if you already picked it up during the hype of its original release. I hope to see this game work out its troubles and continue to evolve, but for now, despite its positive improvements and great features, I’ll have to give this game a 7 out of 10.

Update.
Immediately after I published this story No Mans Sky patched to version 1.55 which restored the trade system that appeared to be missing from the release of NEXT, which has been enjoyable to take part in. Though with each patch comes not just fixes but nerfs and more bugs, so for the time being my rating still stands.