Video Game Review - No Man's Sky

In 2011, Minecraft was released by Mojang who would later give the rights to Microsoft after failing to find any more original ideas for the game. When it first came out, it set the standard for procedurally generated games and for a while, not one similar game to it could top it. In other words, it simply worked for Minecraft and nothing else. Now an indie company called Hello Games have stepped in with their own take on the genre called No Man's Sky. A sci-fi action adventure game with over a billion planets to discover and every user will be thrown on a different planet every time. I think that's as procedurally generated as its going to get. So the question is has it topped the standard set by Minecraft or is it just another game that tried, but ultimately failed? We'll see about that. So let's go exploring the galaxy:

While the game is open ended to an extent, you start by repairing your ship and then from that point on, you can do whatever you like (within reason of course). What you can do is one of four things which are exploration, combat, survival and trading. As you explore, you can use your multi-tool to scan areas and have planets, creatures and whatnot, registered to The Atlas which serves as the game's main source of information. Like Minecraft, in order to get better gear, you need to mine for materials using your multi-tool which as I previously mentioned, acts as a scanner, a mining gadget and can be used in combat as a battering ram or a gun. You can very well use hyperdrives to get to planets, but it can be limited depending on what things you use and what things you make in the game. Its kind of like entering hyperdrive in sci-fi franchises like Star Wars and Mass Effect and you really feel like you're entering hyperdrive as you play. There are space battles you can take part in and you can spend the game learning alien language which becomes important in space battles because the aliens may choose to be hostile or engage in combat, butting helping in the different factions' battles will allow them to help you in turn later on. Sometimes, harming alien creatures or taking resources from planets can gain you a wanted level kind of like in GTA which can attract the attention of drones, giant sentinel robots, certain factions and even entire armadas so be careful. Any discovery you make can be uploaded to The Atlas and for certain things, you can name them. And yes, while it does need a bit of work done, this game does indeed have multiplayer.

So I'd say it is a step up from what Minecraft gave us, but it does need some work. Multiplayer needs work so that players can see each other. Also despite having a gaming PC which I bought No Man's Sky for, it locks itself at 30FPS which isn't a bad thing as such, but it just makes it play like its PS4 counterpart which kinda sucks in a way. Other than that, the rest of the game is great and over time we may see it become a better game than it is currently. I even hear that VR may become a thing in the game, but we shall see. 8/10