No Man's Sky Review (Funky)
This is without a doubt the most enjoyable game I have played in years.
I played WoW since 2005 but stopped enjoying the game years ago. I cancelled my subscription after the recent Blizzard implosion, but struggled to find an alternative.
While looking for pictures of spacecraft for a 3D printing project, I saw one that looked cool, and after a bit of Googling I discovered it was from some game I’d never heard of called, “No Man’s Sky”.
I picked it up in the Steam sale, and I can now say that This is the One. The game I’m happy wasting my life on…
OK, before I get into a review, I just want to quickly address the sudden rash of negative reviews that have followed the most recent game update. Ignore them. They are written by childish super-nerds who are upset about one change to the game – the inventory system. They think that review-bombing will somehow make the developers reverse the update. I really hope it doesn’t.
Not gonna lie, the old inventory system was a mess. When I started playing about a year ago, I really struggled to make sense of the inventory system, and I’ll be honest, I still hadn’t really figured it out by the time the patch dropped yesterday! Never mind – it’s fixed now, and new players need never try to figure out why there was a ‘Technology’ inventory, but you could also put technology in the ‘General’ inventory. Nor why you had a ‘Cargo’ inventory that was essentially just the same as the ‘General’ Inventory, but you couldn’t put technology in it. Depending on the difficulty level you had chosen, the number of items you could stack in each inventory slot varied, and was different for Cargo and General. Unless it was the same, which it was on some difficulty settings. You see my point?!
The inventory has been vastly improved and tidied up, making it easier to use and massively more intuitive for new players. In doing so, the update has removed one of the more nerdy and, quite frankly, irritating features. Long story short, you used to be able to exploit an odd quirk of the inventory menu to build a starship with excessively powerful systems. Externally you had a ship about the shape and size of an X-Wing, but with weapon and shield systems more like a Star Destroyer. It just didn’t fit with the whole ‘exploration’ theme of the game, and it was really tedious and time-consuming moving all the upgrades from slot to slot in your inventory to find the ‘optimum’ combination.
It was also pointless, because building a ‘super starship’ is totally unnecessary. You can enjoy the game with the default ship you get on starting a new character. More to the point, you can also buy and use other starships, store them in your Freighter’s hangar bay, and call them up at will. Every space station has ships you can buy. So does every Trading Post. When you get your Freighter or Capital Ship, it is visited by ships you can buy. Every single ship is different (they are Procedurally Generated by the game), and you can add any of them to your collection and fly them.
If you put all of your time and effort into one ship, you are missing out on a huge part of the game – collecting and outfitting a hangar full of ships!
That’s what the min-max moaning kids don’t understand. The latest 4.0 update hasn’t ruined the game. It’s brought everything closer together. Maybe this isn’t even the right game for them, because it’s not about building the silliest, overpowered starship in the universe. You can do that if you like, but you are missing out on all the other ships you could build.
To be completely fair, before the 4.0 update you couldn’t move ship upgrades between ships, so building a viable fleet of ships was a big investment of time and Nanites. If you spent a load of hard-earned Nanites on an upgrade, it was stuck on that ship forever. I have many cool-looking ships in my hangar, but I didn’t fly them, because my ‘main’ had all the upgrades on it.
Well, the most recent game update has fixed that. Now there’s a reason for collecting loads of ships. Each ship has space for fewer upgrades than before, so it’s not as easy to make a ‘super ship’, but that means you can build specialist ships instead. The game already had Fighters, Explorers, Haulers etc., but they were essentially all the same. Now you can actually use them for their purpose.
If I am going to a far-away Blue system, I can jump in my Solar ship and use its upgraded Indium Drive. It has minimal shields and weaponry, but that’s the risk you take if you are exploring an unknown universe at the limit of your range. If I do get bounced on arrival, I carry uninstalled shield and weapon modules in the hold, but I have to swap out the jump drives to fit them. Rather than spoiling the game, I find it adds to it. There’s a risk to every flight so you have to prepare in advance.
If my next mission is to defeat a pirate band, I’ll take my fighter. It has no upgrades to the jump drive or landing thrusters, but it does have lots of firepower and shields, and some upgrades to improve manoeuvrability. I also have a Hauler, which is moderately armoured to manage pirate attacks, and has lightly upgraded drive systems. I even have a little shuttle craft with not much of anything, which I use to fly between the frigates in my fleet to carry out repairs. And yes, you land on the frigates, get out of your shuttle and go aboard the frigates to do the repairs.
You can switch the loadout of your ship in a few moments if you need to re-role it. Later in the game you get upgrades to your Freighter that allows you to teleport items down to the planet’s surface, so even if you forget to bring your Infra Knife module, it’s still accessible. And if you decide that you would prefer to completely switch ships, you can do that. Fly to the Space Station in your long-range shuttle, pick up a bounty-hunting mission, dismiss the shuttle, summon your fighter instead and shoot some bad guys.
And if you find a ship that’s even better than the one you have, you can asset-strip the old one, scrap it and refit all the upgrades to the new ship with no loss.
Prior to the 4.0 update the game had lots of elements which didn’t fit together very well. That’s understandable, because each element was added in a different update. Now, they gel far better.