Today we’re going to talk about a game I played a lot on my last vacation: “No Man’s Sky”. Space adventures always excite me, especially when combining action elements with exploration and the sense of solitude of space. When the game came out it was more of a disappointment – but what about now, seven years later?

Games that really disappoint me on the first try have a hard time recovering. Especially when many of the shortcomings were concealed or are clearly due to a lack of interest or effort on the part of the developers, I see no reason to give the product another chance. However, the observations I made with Hello Games made me try again.

Because no matter how unspectacular the first release was, they quickly tried to follow up. Don’t get me wrong, it was a major disappointment when the many promises made before were almost completely unfulfilled (or indeed were fulfilled, but in practice turned out to be quite unspectacular – think of the procedural world generation). However, over time, practically everything that was promised was handed in later – that doesn’t make it good, but it’s a bit of consolation.

And as the game progressed, it became a viable candidate for the stream as well. Since I was on vacation, I was able to really get involved in an extensive story game again, and “No Man’s Sky” promised a lot of hours of play in space – so what could go wrong?

So we started our journey. We are thrown in the third person perspective, already in a space suit on an alien planet – we don’t know who we are, where we are or how we got there – all we know is that we have to find our spaceship. We can do this quite quickly because it is marked on our compass.

When we got there, we found that it was broken – no problem, we found the necessary parts pretty quickly in the area. We also learn the basics of the controls and the functions of our suit. These will be expanded later, but always explained well. There are various modifications that we can install or remove at will – depending on what the situation requires. This is exactly how the modifications of our spaceships and other means of transport work later – all in all very well thought out.

We can buy the modifications on space stations or make them ourselves with plans we have bought or found. If you have all the necessary components, you can craft directly it in a free inventory slot. Later, the inventories of the spaceships can even be accessed from a distance, which makes it easier to both produce and sell items.

I could go into countless points about exactly how the game works – the existing alien races, the economy, the history of the universe and what missions we pursue. However, I would like to cut this short at this point for one reason: disappointment.

Because one thing you don’t realize until very late in the game is how empty it actually is. I don’t know if you can explain it if you weren’t there or played it yourself, but I’ll try here. However, there is a very clear spoiler warning – I am going to the end of the main story!

Personally, I got lost deep into the game’s background stories – listening to the tales of the characters, trying to learn languages (yes, that’s a very cool feature in this game!), trying to grasp the histories of the planets – to understand the universe as a whole. And there are very interesting approaches to how certain alien races relate to each other, why it is like this, and how it was in the past. There is inexplicable messages, inexplicable phenomena and a special kind of alien that, as if by magic, can bridge infinite distances in the shortest possible time – all of this promises secrets that need to be uncovered.

But then you reach the end of the main story. And that, from my point of view, was just a giant middle finger to the player. Basically you create a new universe, land there and start over – cool. Nothing is explained, all the exciting story threads end in nothing and you just have to accept that the game actually had no idea what it wanted. There are huge gaps and logic errors and the game just wants you to go on a grind again – thanks for nothing.

What made me particularly angry was that the story doesn’t even end consistently, as badly as it was done already. Because at the end of the main quest, the old universe you came from is destroyed. After that, however, you can travel there again and again – otherwise you would lose any progress you have made so far. It doesn’t make any sense at all and from my point of view it’s just a way to keep the player at least a little happy – probably nobody would start from the very beginning. Especially not with the knowledge that the two main quest lines are really just coordinated time killing.

One could argue that it’s not about the quests themselves – the exploration and cataloging of the worlds is the focus of the game. I have to disagree strongly with that. Each world may be unique and have unique plants, minerals and animals – but in theory they are just the same ~100 assets arranged differently. For example, there are about five types of plants that are dangerous to us – they are simply called a little differently on each planet. You can build a base anywhere again, which is quite funny at first, but at the end of the day I ask myself: why?

It must be mentioned at this point that “No Man’s Sky” is now definitely designed for multiplayer. However, I couldn’t imagine the game being that much more fun like that either. Sure, building the first bases, exploring the first planets – I had a lot of fun alone, would be even more fun in a group. But then you realize how empty and repetitive the game really is. And that was very disappointing for me.

I played the game a bit further after the first universe, but it just didn’t make sense to me anymore. I was very disappointed with the pseudo-philosophical main story that just repeated flat-out questions of life – the rest of the game is technically sound but irrelevant, I would definitely advise against playing it.

How did you like it? Did you play or watch No Man’s Sky? What was your impression? Feel free to join the discussion on Discord!