No Man’s Sky has come under fire from angry gamers, but is it really that bad?

YOU may be aware that rather a lot of gamers are very angry with No Man’s Sky and their reasons are not entirely meritless.

IT’S cold outside, there’s no kind of atmosphere and I’m all alone, more or less.

Besides being the opening lines to the Red Dwarf theme, this is the setting I find myself in as I delve into No Man’s Sky, the epic space exploration game developed by independent studio Hello Games for the PlayStation 4 and PC.

The game’s key premise is simple yet appealing — namely, you’ve got a vast universe to explore, discover, name planets and creatures in, trade, fight, and generally fulfil your fantasies of being a dashing space explorer.

While the internet is chock-full of first impression reviews, I figured it was better to spend a bit of time with No Man’s Sky and see how the magic of a procedurally generated universe holds up after you’ve visited more than a handful of planets.

The game opens with you and your damaged spaceship stranded on a planet and the galactic equivalent of roadside assistance nowhere in sight. You have to get yourself up and running as part of the extended tutorial, mining resources to refuel and repair your ship, then it’s off to infinity and beyond.

Part of the game’s challenge is the environment wants to kill you and pretty much every planet you visit is hazardous in some form or another — be it freezing cold, irradiated, full of things which want to eat you, cliffs to fall off, oceans to drown in, or sentinel robots who are not happy with you plundering the planet’s resources for your own selfish purposes.

In fact, one might go so far as to say that travelling to the different planets is to fly into some sort of zone, which contains danger. Ultimately, the goal in No Man’s Sky is ostensibly to reach the centre of the universe, where Something Awaits.

Space, as Douglas Adams famously noted in The Hitch-Hiker’s Guide To The Galaxy, is big. Really big.

“You just won’t believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it’s a long way down the street to the chemist, but that’s just peanuts compared to space,” he wrote — and the same is true of space in No Man’s Sky, with approximately

18,446,744,073,709,551,616 (yes, that’s a real number and not the result of my cat walking on the keyboard while I’m typing this review) planets technically present.

Of course, if you have even a quark-sized interest in gaming, you probably know all this anyway; No Man’s Sky having been at the head of its very own epic prerelease hype train. You may also almost certainly be aware that rather a lot of the passengers on said hype train are Very Angry Indeed with the game, for reasons which are not entirely meritless.

Despite essentially being an indie game from a small studio, No Man’s Sky presently has a AAA-level $80+ retail price tag on it. Personally, I think that’s excessive for what the game is.

There’s quite a few flaws in the game, ranging from user interface issues to random crashes to the excessive price tag to the disappointingly short draw distance and obvious texture pop-in, to the lack of promised features such as multiplayer, and the curious absence of fairly important things like planetary maps.

The whole thing has a rather unpolished and unfinished feel about it, and inventory management is not a streamlined process either.

The game’s visuals are quite striking, however, being vaguely reminiscent of 1970s sci-fi book covers, with a hint of overworldly tranquillity about it all. In fact, exploring the game’s world is often akin to travelling through a prog-rock album under the influence of the kind of pharmaceuticals which normally require a prescription from a particularly co-operative GP.

In many ways, No Man’s Sky is a space-based version of open-world survival games like The Long Dark. The story is largely one you make yourself, exploring the game’s world (or universe), discovering what’s there, wandering planets on foot in an exosuit mining resources and trying not to die horribly in some frozen wasteland, irradiated hellhole or carnivorous space dinosaur stomach.

The gameplay itself isn’t especially complicated; resources are obtained by using a mining laser on planetary deposits, with said resources being converted into fuel for your starship or combined with other resources to make upgrades such as better engines — or sold for currency, which can be used to buy better ships, parts and resources.

Mining too much of anything attracts robotic armed sentinels, forcing you to fight them or leg it — although it also at times creates an amusingly Rick and Morty-esque feeling of being Rick Sanchez looting a planet of anything even slightly valuable because screw you, universe.

No Man’s Sky is quite a lonely game, and calming in its own strange way. Even though there are aliens in the world, they are scattered alone in trading outposts and observatories across the universe, or piloting trading ships.

Understanding them effectively means learning their language, obtained from various knowledge stones and monoliths scattered about the planets. It’s time-consuming and it is quite frankly bizarre that a universe with warp travel, spacecraft and a galactic trade network doesn’t have the equivalent of a translation app or Babel Fish in it.

Much has been made of the procedurally generated nature of the planets, and while the sense of wonder is very real for the first half a dozen planets or so that you visit, afterwards you can soon start to see the basic archetypes at play — this is a jungle planet, this one is an irradiated wasteland, this one reminds me of Canberra, this one is a desert — and the novelty wears off. The same is true of the fauna; the various space dinosaurs and assorted creatures all start to get pretty samey very quickly.

Having said all that, I’m enjoying No Man’s Sky. The “here’s a universe, have fun” approach is not everyone’s cup of Ceylon’s finest, but I happen to rather like it; I like to explore and discover; the journey itself is part of the adventure and all that. Some of the landscapes the game generates are truly breathtaking, which further adds to the experience.

It’s not a game I can see myself playing for hours and hours at a stretch until the heat death of our universe, but it lends itself well to a sporadic hour or two at a time — even with its flaws.

If the thought of being more or less alone in an infinite universe fills you with an existential dread, then No Man’s Sky is not your game.

If, however, like me, you see 18 quintillion worlds to explore and think “challenge accepted”, then good news, everyone! It’s time brush up on your spacefaring cliches, don your spacesuit, grab your towel and prepare to get lost in space.