Introduction

Since time immemorial, developers have been trying to recreate space that is infinite in size, and the first attempt was made back in 1984, when Elite was released. Despite this, there are few truly large-scale video games. You can think of Eve Online, Spore, Elite Dangerous and the recent Stellaris, but compared to the annual production line of shooters released by Ubisoft, this is nothing.

Sean Murray, the head of the Hello Games studio, fearlessly rushed to save the space sandbox genre, who presented his game No Man’s Sky to the whole world and has been sharing it since 2013. Endless world! 18 quintillion planets! Procedurally generated events!

Perhaps Sean, at numerous conferences, surpassed even Peter Molyneux himself in terms of the number of promises made per second. But did he manage to contain them all? Let's find out now!

A Space Odyssey by Sean Murray

First of all, you shouldn’t expect any unexpected plot twists from NMS, since the script for the game was written, most likely, for show. The plot itself is simple - main character(presumably a man) finds himself on a random planet next to his spaceship, the condition of which leaves much to be desired.

The task for the next hour is to repair the vehicle and fly to the stars! Or more precisely, to the center of the galaxy (yep, just like in Spore), but that's another story.

As the developers promised, the entire universe is procedurally generated from beginning to end. Absolutely similar planets cannot be found, but sometimes the flora and fauna of some of them will be repeated.

When completing the initial task, the only difficulty may be terrible brakes and periodic drops of up to 10 frames per second. In general, the optimization of No Man’s Sky is probably the most disastrous aspect of the new product, which can seriously ruin the game for a gamer.

Okay, in order to reduce the number of lags, you just need to tinker a little with the settings, after which you can freely (with drops of up to 35 FPS, for example) begin exploring the vast Universe.

To repair a starship, it is enough to find, collect and apply the necessary resources to the damaged ones components ship. The interface is not as obvious as we would like, but you can understand all the intricacies within the first ten to twenty minutes after starting the game.

And if you close your eyes to all the technical shortcomings, it’s interesting to do it. As you know, everything is learned by comparison, and No Man’s Sky, no matter how strange it may seem, is very similar to the recent The Solus Project, only more global and without any complex puzzles. Judge for yourself - there are indicators of the suit (temperature, health), there is a main character - apparently, an ordinary representative of the species Homo Sapiens, which ends up on another planet, and there is a huge, amazingly sized game world that can and should be explored.

Of course, for a technically savvy player it won’t be difficult to understand that all this is procedurally generated on the fly, but Hello Games’ creation still leaves a very strong impression. Especially when you open the map for the first time and for ten minutes you just look at thousands of stars floating by and realize your insignificance in this huge world. The magnificent Spore once provided similar sensations, and No Man’s Sky clearly follows the path of its inspiration.

Thanks to the network part, it is possible to see if another player has opened this system. Another thing is that from the very beginning you may be thrown to hell in the middle of nowhere, and then the star systems discovered by other people may not be seen for a long time (or even never).

Moreover, NMS is a real sandbox that is not going to lock you in a tight plot frame like Starbound for a long time - you just move forward, exploring new worlds along the way.

The spirit of the space explorer is fully present, especially when you use the built-in visor to scan the local flora and fauna (literally every pebble has its own name!), and then give the planet some unique name.

Despite all the scandals associated with the missing multiplayer, No Man's Sky periodically connects to the network and downloads your new discoveries, which can be given any name.

No one will just let you move between star systems, and the game here poses, albeit minimally, a challenge. For example, in order to make a hyperjump, it will be necessary to launch a hyperdrive, which in turn is powered by special warp cells.

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As someone may have already guessed, these same warp cells will have to be crafted from objects found on nearby planets using special tool under common name"multi-tool". In this case, it is worth taking into account the subtleties of certain planets: on some it can be difficult to find the vital isotope Tamium-9, so sometimes it is better to fly to a space base without wasting time, where you can often buy everything you need and get rid of unnecessary things.

OK, the warp cell is assembled, let's fly further, towards the adventures of the center of the galaxy! So monotonous game process It may seem boring to someone in words, but believe me, it’s difficult to tear yourself away from the game after at least two hours of continuous gathering of resources and creating the necessary items. Some may consider such space empty, but who said that this does not benefit the game? After all, the new product gives you unique sensations, similar to those you experience when you find yourself in another country for the first time: everything is very incomprehensible and everyone speaks a language you don’t know, but this only makes it more interesting.

In each star system there is a space station where you can stock up necessary things and talk to the alien. Well, if possible, hack closed doors with a special master key called “Atlas Pass”.

Initially, the hero does not know alien languages ​​at all, and in order to at least understand what the aliens are saying to him, he will have to look on the planets for special “stones of knowledge”, with the help of which the character learns new words. Well, tell me, where else was such a feature?

Gradually, this world begins to become more understandable when half of the words are learned, and the ship’s hold is filled to capacity with the resources necessary to continue the journey. And then the question arises: what next?

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However, the answer is found quickly - to follow an unobtrusive storyline, which seems to be there, but sort of isn’t. On the other hand, no one will forcibly drag you somewhere - do not forget that this is a free and relaxed game where you can land on any planet without any problems and discover something new.

The scope for exploration on the planets is huge - some of them can be studied for hours.

Just don’t forget that some planets are protected by so-called “guardians” who will not let anyone just collect valuable resources. True, dealing with them will not be particularly difficult, and if the character suddenly dies by accident, then his clone will simply appear at the nearest station, albeit without some of the equipment.

And what contributes to all this, first of all, is that No Man’s Sky does not pretend to be a serious space simulator of the Elite level, so controlling the ship here is very simple - standard W, A, S, D layout, plus left button mouse for shooting (there were battles in space) and “spacebar” for fast movements.

That is why the game should be considered as a meditative, beautiful entertainment that will keep you engaged for a very long time. But only on one condition.

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The planets are not as empty as it might seem at first glance - there is a chance to stumble upon such alien monoliths.

You must be very lucky. Seriously, otherwise one day a bug will happen that will ruin your entire game. And the problem here is not even the lags mentioned above - crashes also happen here and sometimes turn out to be critical. For example, there is a high probability of getting stuck in one of the systems just because the game crashes during a hyperjump.

The specified system requirements are also not true: Intel Core i3, 8 GB random access memory and a video card of the GeForce GTX 480 level is only enough to run the game at the lowest settings, and even then with brakes and periodic crashes to the desktop. Yes, the game sometimes (key word here) produces fantastically beautiful footage, but this cannot serve as any justification for such ugliness.

The generator doesn't kick up very often interesting planets, but when this happens, then you just want to stay on one of these, giving up on all the space adventures at once.

Conclusion

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No matter what anyone says, No Man’s Sky is a victim of marketing, and not the failure of the year that many are trying to make it out to be. Yes, with multiplayer and poor optimization it turned out poorly, but in all other respects the new product is an excellent game in which you can “hang” for a long time, simply traveling between numerous planets. But before you meet, you need to clearly understand what you want from the game. Cool plot? Spectacular space battles? The most realistic mechanics of interstellar flights? In that case, pass by, all this is not here.

But if you just want to feel like a space pioneer, flying through an endless galaxy, then No Man’s Sky will come in handy.;

- not really a game. This is the dream of a ten-year-old boy who was pumped up with 2001: A Space Odyssey and Silent Running, the covers of sci-fi paperback novels and the romance of science fiction writer Carl Sagan. Then the boy was given a team, a budget and the right to do whatever he wanted. The dream came to life.

No Man's Sky is ruled by naivety. No matter how bombastic the marketing campaign was, I have no doubt that when Sean Murray, one of the founders of Hello Games, said that he was doing infinite universe, this was not an advertising ploy, there was not a single drop in his words malice. Just a dream. Big, sincere and perhaps unrealistic.

In the end, everything crashed into an evil reality, where only one beautiful dreams there's never enough.

The game is like a universe

In No Man's Sky you explore space. Admire the stars. You can land on any planet and explore it far and wide. Then - in the very distant future - you will reach the center of the universe. Or you won't get there.

The pursuit of scale has reached its climax here, which is rather good. Eighteen quintillion algorithm-generated planets are here because they are needed. Not so that you visit them all, on the contrary: so that you realize that you will never see everything, so that you stop trying to keep up with every blip on the radar. Here you want to walk, you want to look around and be a pioneer. Just for the sake of the process itself.

The creature generator very rarely produces someone cute (there are only dickosaurs, seven-assed monkeys and Cronenbergs around - the developers asked themselves when they gave players the right to name animals), and there are a limited number of types of planets and parts that make up animals, vegetation and ships. There will be enough land everywhere to land a ship (that is, no gas giants or oceanic planets), and sooner or later you will think that those crabs or floating kites have already been seen somewhere.

But in practice, the parameters that the generator operates on are enough to paint with broad strokes the image of some special place, the like of which you will never find. Almost every planet has at least something memorable.

You can do piracy in space - but don't expect it to backfire on you in a big way.

No Man's Sky is a great contemplative game. There are truly magical moments in it: for example, when the planets in the sky align in a particularly beautiful way, or when you first see someone’s ship landing over the horizon, and you think - is this player alive or not? He may not be alive, and Murray’s long-standing stories that you can meet another player here may turn out to be fiction... but the illusion has already taken shape. Whether it’s true or not, why do we need to know?

The last one is worth hanging on to. Contrary to its sci-fi premise, No Man's Sky is a religion game. There is a lot to be taken on faith. She throws up hypotheses, and they are physically difficult to verify. After all, is it really possible to get to the center of the universe? We had already reached the center of the galaxy, and saw... something there. Is it worth continuing? This question is answered simply: what if there really is something more there?

Robot guards look after the planets. Almost like GTA cops, they level up if you interfere with the planet's nature in front of them. But in reality they don't interfere very much.

Game as a game

In those moments when No Man's Sky doesn't excite the imagination, it tries to pretend to be a normal game - or rather, a completely ordinary survival simulator. You have life support systems, engines, guns - a lot of different things that need recharging different types fuel. Fuel needs to be extracted. Resources for the necessary upgrades too. And the pursuit of all this one day begins to drown everything good and eternal within itself. Romance is replaced by angry pragmatism, expressed in numbers. Counters, sliders, free cells, occupied cells. Money. Upgrades. Real life begins to seep into fantasy.

Everything about resource management and survival in No Man’s Sky seems to have been completely transferred from the game about a lone astronaut, right down to the interface. But there, crafting, optimizing inventory junk, and maintaining normal vital signs worked better, since the game itself was entirely about them. There, the developers managed to balance everything so that the game systems themselves built the narrative, made you nervous and go out of your way to survive.

In No Man's Sky, all this is just a distraction. Yes, at first, a lack of resources can create emotionally powerful emergency situations: you run out of fuel in your life support system, you are in a panic looking for something to refuel it and... last moment you find a tree full of carbon. But once you get used to it a little, understand what is where, and unravel the principles of building local worlds, the extraction of resources for self-sufficiency will become a simple formality, which will soon develop into a tedious obligation.

You may or may not meet such handsome men. The enjoyment of the game greatly depends on how lucky you are to stumble upon a cool planet.

And in everything that doesn't involve numbers, No Man's Sky space is a no-brainer space. Here you don’t have to learn to fly: to arrive somewhere, you just need to aim at the target and hold down two buttons. Rare battles on the ground can only be slightly annoying; shootouts in space stop fraying your nerves as soon as you attach a homing laser to the ship.

And despite the freedom, space in No Man's Sky is a controlled space. You can go anywhere, but sooner or later you will still, as if by chance, stumble upon a quest bunker, some important anomaly for history, or space raiders. I never once felt that I had found something because I was specifically looking for it - more often than not it was that interesting thing They slipped it under my nose, marking it with an icon. Eventually? I'm not a space explorer, but an amusement park visitor.

These guys (like everyone else) don’t ask unnecessary questions like “Why were we born?” and just walk through the fields like fools.

Everything would be great if No Man's Sky could create stories from gameplay situations. But this is not and not even . The algorithms here create stunningly beautiful galaxies with stunning beautiful planets, where stunningly beautiful (if you don’t get too close) nature blooms, but there is no life in all this.

Ships, like almost everything in the game, are created by an algorithm from many modules.

No Man's Sky, despite its name, is full of people. You don't feel truly lost, because almost everywhere you are greeted by intelligent races, flocks of ships, robot guards, space stations and other traces of those who came here before you. You are constantly being led somewhere. They are constantly showing something.

But now you come to space station, and there’s a lonely alien standing there... That’s all. The landing bay constantly receives new ships, and you can even talk to their pilots - but only to trade and exchange ships. The planetary fauna, no matter how wild it may seem, either rushes at you or runs circles around you. You can feed the dinosaur, and it will spoil resources. That's what emergence is all about.

Game like an aquarium

Because of its purely “game” moments, No Man’s Sky resembles an old domestic one. You complete one identical mission after another, walk along the typical corridors of planetary stations and along the way you think that the game could be something disproportionately greater. Only here it is even more upsetting. Even after all the accusations of monotony, after all the attempts to rationalize and explain what is happening in No Man’s Sky, you continue to feel something mystical. Some well-hidden truth that you want to get to the bottom of.

Sometimes you see something you haven’t seen before, and such discoveries, even very small ones, make you move on.

I’m sure that No Man’s Sky will continue to be solved - as it was solved, for example. Only in this case is between us and the answer to the question “is it possible to reach the center of the universe?” It’s not the search that lies, but tens of hours of routine work. Roughly speaking, the answer will be known (or not) by the one who first accumulates enough fuel. It's so primitive. Perhaps somewhere there will be something that you will have to puzzle over. But how long will it be until then?

* * *

No Man's Sky tries to pretend to be an ordinary, familiar and understandable game about numbers and progression... despite the fact that its best moments- those when you, not understanding anything, bewitched, go to the horizon to find out what is there. Not the kind where you're frantically mining plutonium to fuel your engine because you want to get out of here as quickly as possible. These points are perhaps necessary to underscore all the others. But here they do not emphasize, but draw all attention to themselves.

Shocked in 2016 gaming industry. But not the endless universe with billions of planets, but a resounding failure Hello Games studio. This is due to many things: loud advertising campaign publisher, the overly talkative studio head Sean Murray, trailers with content that did not make it into the final release, as well as the wild imagination of the players who imagined No Man’s Sky as an ideal space simulator. For two years, the indie project was a symbol of unfulfilled hopes and disappointed expectations. However, just recently the NEXT update was released - a free improvement to No Man's Sky, which added the promised multiplayer and new content. But does this make the game better?

At first glance, definitely yes. A clear and quite tangible progression has appeared in the game. From now on, the main goal is not reaching the center of the Universe and not the Atlas quest chain. No Man's Sky added an extended storyline and many third-party activities among the emerging galactic factions. Various merchants and researchers give the player tasks, for which they are rewarded with special currency. For it you can buy equipment blueprints and various improvements that will make the gaming experience easier. By the way, special currency can also be obtained for discovering new objects and entering them into the general encyclopedia.

All restrictions on the construction of bases have been removed - now you can have an infinite number of stations in various parts of the Universe. In addition, we expanded the functionality of construction and crafting, thanks to which now in No Man’s Sky you can not only observe, but also fully create.

Improved generation system. The planets have become more diverse and interesting to study: giant oceans, forests, scorched wastelands, lifeless moons. Until absolutely different worlds It’s still a long way off, but compared to the release, the progress is noticeable. This can also be said about animal world: Now the animals are much less likely to resemble those made of laughter for the sake of mutants from Spore.

Among other things, Hello Games did a good job of working out the underwater depths.

The start of the game has been reworked. Now all the player’s initial steps (repairing the ship, extracting the first resources, the first flight) are determined by the plot, which is conveyed through messages on terminals and messages left behind.

All these innovations mitigate many of No Man's Sky's problems, but don't cure them. The most important problems remained untouched. The Hello Games project is still quite crude, boring and extremely unpleasant in terms of gameplay.

The game has a convenient and flexible photo mode with which you can create real magic.
For example, you can change one landscape to another only through the settings.

The spaceship is poorly controlled: the clumsy teapot is reluctant to obey commands and does not allow it to land accurately at the desired point on the planet. But if you can still minimally move around the Universe on the keyboard, then on the gamepad the vehicle is simply uncontrollable.

Any player action is slowed down by stupid, unnecessary work. For example, you need to fly from the starting planet on a starship. What needs to be done for this?

First, fix the ship. Repairing and charging engines requires resources. To get them, you need to use a laser, which also needs to be charged with other resources.

Secondly, it may happen that the necessary substances will have to be obtained in harsh conditions: The planet may experience acid rain, firestorms and other disturbances. In order not to die, you will have to charge the suit and life support systems. And charging requires resources.

Thirdly, often necessary chemical elements may be hidden in special breeds or not found at all. Then you will have to collect simpler reagents in huge quantities in order to create necessary materials, which the player is not yet able to obtain or cannot obtain at all.

Spaceports have become large and densely populated, but the local contingent looks more like mannequins than living beings.

And so with every step in the game, regardless of the goal. Actions and interesting activities lasting a couple of minutes are stretched out for hours due to the intermediate work of charging countless batteries. In this way, the developers wanted to introduce elements of survival and add realism and atmosphere to the exploration of the universe: it would be foolish to think that exploring space is an easy and inexpensive activity. However, in this regard they greatly overdid it. The constant need to collect consumables, resources and fuel does not add either hardcore or atmosphere. This is just a primitive, vulgar grind that even MMO games don’t allow themselves these days.

The initial quest line does not perform its function as it should. For example, the guide tells the player that he needs to build a special device for the next action. However, the training is slow to clearly say exactly how to build it - the necessary button to open the inventory and other information can only be found in a separate text submenu. The developers considered it unnecessary to simply display a hint on the screen. That is, instead of clearly teaching and explaining the first steps, they prefer to hide tasks necessary knowledge and confuse the player. In addition, the quality of the assignments leaves much to be desired. When, in the middle of the plot to find information about yourself, the player has to pause for the obligatory construction of a wooden hut, you just want to throw up your hands.

The menus and interactions in the game are made very clumsily. The simplest actions, such as turning on a flashlight, require going through two or three submenus. Even multiplayer emotes like greetings or gestures require the player to navigate to separate interface windows instead of a convenient wheel attached to one specific key. Game menus, crafting tabs, even the simplest settings - all of this suffers from inept design, forcing the user to perform unnecessary actions and waste their time. This problem in No Man's Sky has remained since release, and with the advent of new features it has only gotten worse.

The menu below is responsible for all crafting windows, appearance settings and emotions.

But one of the main problems is multiplayer. No, his very appearance is very big step for No Man's Sky. Its absence in the release version was the most main reason public hatred for the game. But the problem is that it was made for show. The presence of a friend as a full-fledged, living astronaut is the only thing the co-op can offer.

If you don’t really like to bother with crafting, then No Man’s Sky will seem like hell to you.

Even the simplest research with a friend is quite problematic. While exploring the area, scatter in different sides is not difficult. And what’s the point of two players going into a cave where one player can easily explore and collect supplies? It will be more useful to scatter in different directions in order to collect more resources, which can be exchanged if necessary. Only in the end the user plays alone: ​​the only difference is that now somewhere over the hill there is guaranteed to be a friend with whom you can exchange loot. And this is the only thing that co-op brings useful to the game.

This is one of the most significant events of this year. The game from the indie studio Hello Games may well immortalize itself in a game design textbook as the most... great game, created at the time of August 2016. But this textbook should be called something like this: “How not to make video games.”

Hello Games has taken the rest of us one step further towards procedurally generated video games, as their creation takes up less than 4 gigabytes. Who knew that the result would be so bad? There is no smell of revolution here, because the game turned out to be simply boring for most gamers.

Indeed, despite its apparent atypicality, No Man's Sky is a rather boring game, and to understand this, you don't need to visit all 18 quintillion planets that the developers are so proud of. Almost everything in it can be seen in just a few minutes funny few hours.

Starting the game and generating planets

No Man's Sky starts very cheerfully and perfectly sets you in the right mood. There are endless spaces around unknown planet, there is nothing useful in the backpack, all the equipment became unusable after the ship crashed. This world will become a sandbox for the player until he understands how to collect basic resources and create useful items from them.

While going through this preparatory stage the game is naturally amazing: everything here is truly created randomly, without any logic familiar to us, earthlings. No one knows where a new player will end up in No Man's Sky - on a lifeless radioactive cobblestone, on a blooming and fragrant paradise, or somewhere else. The first two hours are real magic.

Every new item, which the player repairs during training, gives him new opportunities. For example, a scanner allows you to inspect the area for resources and interesting places, and with the help of a jump pack you can go around uneven terrain. At these moments, you want to forget about everything and just run forward towards adventure.

There are a lot of things on the planets: vegetation, rocks, caves, optionally animals and plants. There are also objects of artificial origin: abandoned settlements, crash sites, factories controlled by aliens and robots, mysterious obelisks storing the knowledge of alien races, trading posts and much more.

What is especially surprising is how cleverly the developers arranged the interaction with intelligent aliens and their electronic terminals. All messages are presented in an unknown language, which at first cannot be translated.

You have to choose options at random. However, as you study the special stones of knowledge that are found everywhere on the planets, you can add new words to the dictionary, and then the speech of the next talking turtle gradually acquires meaning.

However, due to the poor localization, this element of the game evokes mixed emotions, because the translated words in the messages do not agree with each other. Instead of “hello, friend,” you have to read something like “greetings friend” with a sour expression.

Gameplay of No Man's Sky

No matter how cool the first planet is, you still have to leave it in order to move forward. The first takeoff is very promising: a real fire of enthusiasm burns in the chest of the newly minted researcher.

However, he is not guaranteed a way out, because outside the planet the player is waiting for a rather empty system, in which there is nothing but a star, other planets, many drifting asteroids and a space station.

After visiting the latter and talking with a single alien caretaker, the player receives a hyper-drive diagram. It can be used to move from one system to another.

The game has no goal as such, although after the first hyper-jump there is a meeting with a certain entity that calls itself Atlas. This mysterious introduction takes place only to instruct the player to fly to the center of the galaxy. What is there is the main intrigue of the game, which by and large has no effect on gameplay. It is possible that the developers will simply make fun of the player in the style of Adams.

- Forty two! - Lunkkuool squealed. - And that’s all you can say after seven and a half million years of work?

“I checked everything very carefully,” said the computer, “and I declare with all certainty that this is the answer.” It seems to me, if I’m being completely honest with you, the whole point is that you yourself didn’t know what the question was.

- Answer to main question life, the universe and everything in Douglas Adams's The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

Regardless of the goal, the gameplay will include the same set of actions: landing on a planet, collecting resources, searching for buildings with completing monosyllabic quests with three answer options, selling everything unnecessary at the station, creating improvements and flying to another system.

At the moment of awareness of this constantly repeating algorithm, all magic dissolves. It doesn’t matter what planet you land on, everything happens the same way: collecting resources for the next upgrade of equipment, weapons or ship, searching for special places with valuable technologies and artifacts for sale, and, ultimately, taking off and then jumping somewhere else. And so on ad infinitum!

Yes, of course, there are some differences, and sometimes they even affect the gameplay. For example, the planet may have aggressive fauna or even acid rain. In space, sometimes you meet space pirates, and then you dive into an absolutely single-celled “shoot-up” without any variability. All this does not affect the gameplay, it only stretches it out a little, forcing the player to be distracted from the endless “farming”.

Collect resources to upgrade equipment, which will allow you to collect resources faster! Upgrade your weapons to quickly deal with the robots that guard resources in order to collect them! What a revolution!

Illusion game, screen game

It is the monotony that completely kills the desire to explore, turning the gameplay into a meaningless routine. In this, No Man's Sky has gone even further than t, because Mojang's game at least gives you the opportunity to create something, come up with entertainment for yourself, while Hello Games does not provide any alternatives.

Even trading stations and posts on planets are just an illusion. Merchants do not trade with each other, and the stations themselves receive their goods literally out of thin air. Therefore, there is simply no meaningful trade in this game and there cannot be, because the goods are not interconnected by production chains. Of course, no one expected Hello Games to create a realistic economy, like, for example, . But this “illusory nature” of what is happening extends to almost everything that is in this game.

Multiplayer could have saved the situation, and then traveling together with voice communication could significantly extend the enjoyment of the game. Alas, the developers abandoned the idea of ​​​​a cooperative game, and they did it at the very last moment, because after the release in Europe, boxes with the game were discovered, on which the icon with the network component was bashfully taped over. It is quite possible that many bugs at the start of sales are associated precisely with alterations at a late stage of development.

The game, which, according to the promises of the developers, was supposed to surprise the player constantly, stops doing this after just a few hours. Dialogues with aliens are repeated, the buildings on the planets are the same over and over again, and interest in exploring the planets completely disappears, because you have to do the same thing on them.

Comparing with other “sandboxes”, one can come to the horror conclusion that the “revolutionary” No Man's Sky does not provide anything at all except the monotonous exploration of planets and collection of resources. This is absolute emptiness and a complete lack of variability for the sake of maximum repetition.

Graphics and technical execution

If the game definitely didn’t work in terms of gameplay, then with graphics everything is a little more complicated. On the one hand, Hello Games was able to bring early concepts to life and created a very nice visual style. Often on planets there are very beautiful views, which you just want to capture and show to someone.

On the other hand, the drawing distance in the PlayStation 4 version is simply nonsense - objects appear at a distance of 15-20 meters, and everything that is further turns into a mess of acidic colors.

At the same time, the developers were never able to implement 60 frames per second, although they repeatedly mentioned their intention to do so. It’s very disappointing to see this on a platform that has , which, by the way, also runs at 30 fps and often demonstrates very vast spaces.

In addition to weak graphics, the release version of No Man's Sky boasted an abundance of bugs. The developers have already released three patches that fixed the most annoying crashes and glitches, but they did not solve all the problems.

Crashes on PS4 have been recorded several times, which is very rare. How it happened that Sony allowed such a crude product to appear in its store is absolutely incomprehensible.

The game's release on PC was little better due to terrible optimization. Indeed, 30 fps on PS4 is a fairy tale compared to what owners experienced personal computers. Don't believe it system requirements, which include Intel Core i3 and Nvidia GTX, because the game runs disgustingly even on an i7 in conjunction with a GTX 970. It’s simply impossible to call it anything other than counterfeit.

Controls and sound

Perhaps these are the only entities against which it is difficult to make serious claims. First of all, I would like to thank the 65daysofstatic team for their decent work on the soundtrack, which gives the game a good atmosphere. The rest of the sounds that can be heard on planets and in space are perceived neutrally, be it the rustle of acid rain or the cry of some strange creature.

With the controls, everything is also quite acceptable: playing on a gamepad is quite comfortable, but this is mostly due to the fact that the game does not require anything at all except navigation and pressing a couple of buttons. Continuing to talk about controls, one cannot help but note the fact that the developers were clearly inspired when creating the interface of their game. It's not just similar, it's almost identical, which raises some questions.

Stop it, I'll get off!

Hello Games deliberately deceived players by talking about things that were not actually in the game.

For example, lead developer Sean Murray deliberately misinformed the gaming community by repeatedly confirming the presence of multiplayer. However, just before the release, something went wrong, and as a result there is not even a co-op for two.

No Man's Sky is the biggest disappointment recent years. After all these interviews with the developers, after all the enticing videos, we received a techno-demo with minimal functionality, which is definitely not worth the 4000 that they ask for on the PlayStation 4, nor the 2000 that the game costs on Steam.

It's worth buying only if you're not afraid of the prospect of dying of boredom. But it’s better to visit some more vibrant galaxy.