No mans sky game review. The space of a naive dream. No Man's Sky review. What are they doing in the universe?

The ship flies at several speeds. A conventional engine does not provide you with very fast movement over the surface of the planet. You can turn on the accelerator by pressing the corresponding key on the gamepad. At the same time, do not forget that a running engine consumes fuel, which tends to run out at the most inopportune moment. Therefore, it is advisable to have a supply of elements like Plutonium or Tamiya-9 with you. Once in orbit, you gain access to the pulse engine. With its help, you can quickly move between planets within the current solar system. But if you want to leave this very solar system, here you will have to build a hyperdrive and refuel it with warp cells, or use the help of black holes, which play the role of teleporters in No Man’s Sky. In this case, you can navigate using a three-dimensional map of the universe, on which the galaxies where you can go are marked.

The main character's spacesuit, called the Exosuit in the game, is also very important. It is also equipped with slots for storing resources and technologies. If all slots are full, you can send some of the collected resources to the cargo compartment of your ship using material teleportation technology. Each additional technology that improves your suit takes up a separate slot. The suit, like the engine of your spacecraft, consumes energy. With its help, it protects you from the harmful effects of certain planets, such as acid rain, radiation, cold or heat. Do not forget to check the charge level of the life support system from time to time, otherwise at the most inopportune moment you will find yourself far from the ship without the necessary resources to recharge it. I’m glad that at least the jetpack built into the suit does not require fuel and recharges automatically.

Your best friend in this game is the Multi-Tool tool, which I already mentioned above. It combines the properties of a pickaxe, a shovel, and even a weapon for self-defense. You can also improve it by discovering new technologies during your travels. When extracting resources on the planets you discover, do not forget that greed is punishable. For example, if you decide to clean out some local cave from Plutonium deposits, the so-called “Guardians” may react to this - robots of unknown origin who protect the fragile ecosystem of each planet and try to punish especially zealous hunters for valuable resources. You can shoot the guards using the blaster built into your Multitool, or you can simply escape from them. If luck did not smile on you and you still died, get ready for the fact that you will have to find the place of your death, because all the resources you collected will remain there. If you manage to die before you can get your property back, it will be lost to you forever.

Space battles are implemented rather strangely and extremely inconveniently. Once the space pirates attack you, it turns out that your pulse and hyperdrives refuse to work until the battle is over. And hitting the enemy with ship cannons is something out of the realm of science fiction. Aiming is incredibly difficult, and navigating in three-dimensional space when fire is coming at you from five directions is even more difficult. Of course, I'm not a big expert in space simulators, however, something tells me that this is not the strongest part of No Man's Sky. So it turns out that in such skirmishes the easiest way is to die and be resurrected at the nearest space station, instead of frantically aiming at the tiny pirate ships flying around you at enormous speeds. Fortunately, the game is automatically saved with enviable consistency.

As you explore planets, you may come across several types of objects that are of particular interest to you. First of all, these are planetary stations. Here you can find new technologies, communicate with aliens, and also activate a device that marks other “points of interest” located on this planet on your scanner. It will be important for you to visit alien obelisks. Around them you can find stones, with the help of which the main character will gradually learn the languages ​​of the three main alien races. So, word by word, you will learn to understand the space wanderers you meet. Obelisks also contain a kind of test, when the player is asked to make an important choice, as a result of which the obelisk can either reward or punish him. Depending on your actions, the reputation of the main character in the eyes of all three alien races will constantly change. And this, in turn, will affect your relationships, including in terms of trade.

The crafting process in the game is done quite traditionally for this kind of sandbox. Hover your cursor over an empty slot in your inventory, turn on the crafting menu and select the object you want to create. If you have all the resources necessary for this, the object appears in the slot. Crafting is the second most important activity in the game No Man's Sky, so it is recommended to master it first. It is especially useful to always have materials with you that are used as fuel for your ship and energy for your spacesuit. Without this, there is a high risk of dying in the unfavorable conditions of an alien planet. Before you can create anything, you must first obtain a blueprint (recipe, description - whatever you want to call it) of this object or technology. You will receive drawings while exploring planets, as well as when communicating with aliens you meet.

Visually the game looks pretty good. Despite the fact that most planets are more or less similar to each other, sometimes you will encounter truly colorful worlds. Of course, the landscape, flora and fauna are generated procedurally from elements pre-drawn by Hello Games studio artists and within specified parameters. So it’s unlikely that the game will be able to create something completely unique. Something that was not originally intended by its creators. However, during your travels you will see many amazing creatures and unusual plants, admire alien sunsets, fluorescent caves, underwater life, acid rain and icy blizzards. In this regard, the game really perfectly conveys the atmosphere of science fiction books about travel to other planets. Another undoubted advantage of No Man’s Sky is the post-rock soundtrack. It was recorded by the British band 65daysofstatic. Additional procedurally generated background music for the game was programmed by composer Paul Weir.

But the weak point of the game is the variety of gameplay. Or rather, in the absence of this very diversity. After literally a few hours of playing, you realize that you have already tried literally everything in No Man’s Sky, and new planets and space travel no longer give you the same excitement. The game turns into a tedious simulator of a space miner mining for resources so he can go to a new galaxy where he will have to mine resources again. And so on almost ad infinitum. The plot in the game is limited to small text inserts and communication with the spherical creature Atlas, which gradually leads you to the logical conclusion of the story. But the endings of the game (and I found only two of them) are so ambiguous that they can disappoint even the most unassuming players. It’s no joke, play No Man’s Sky for about 40 hours, and at the end you get something completely incomprehensible as a reward.

Procedural generation of worlds is, of course, good. Similar ideas have been nurtured by programmers for a very long time and were even implemented to one degree or another in games like Elite. Generating a universe is only half the battle. But filling it with activities that are truly exciting for players, interesting quests, and even populating it with intelligent life - the problem, as we see, is still very relevant to this day. While playing No Man’s Sky, for some reason I immediately remembered the mobile toy Out There from the mi-clos studio, released in 2014. There, a lone astronaut tried to return to Earth, finding himself in an unknown corner of the universe. He also had to repair his ship, collect resources, learn alien languages ​​and communicate with aliens as he moved from one planet to another. But even this tiny mobile game had much more varied gameplay, which once again proves that the essence of a good game is not the number of planets available to you, but the quality of the gameplay.

Pros:

• A procedurally generated universe with 18 quintillion unique planets.
• You can discover truly beautiful planets. Or you may not open it.
• It’s quite interesting to learn the languages ​​of alien races and complete obelisk tasks.
• Magnificent music perfectly brightens up cosmic loneliness.
• The crafting system in the game is implemented quite successfully.

Minuses:

• At the last moment, the multiplayer component was cut from the game.
• The incredible monotony and monotony of the gameplay negates all the advantages.
• Space battles from which it is almost impossible to emerge victorious.
• There is always not enough space in your inventory, which quickly becomes annoying.
• The endings of the game will disappoint even those who didn’t expect anything from it at all.
• The game No Man's Sky could not bear the weight of expectations placed on it.

I wouldn’t dare call the game No Man’s Sky bad. The developers at Hello Games have done a truly excellent job of creating a huge world full of solar systems, planets, nebulae, asteroids and black holes. Despite this, No Man's Sky at this point feels more like a technical demonstration of what procedural generation can achieve, rather than a fun game that you'll want to spend a week or two playing. Even the most avid fans of science fiction will get bored with the game very quickly because there is simply nothing to entertain yourself with, and the ending is not worth the effort put into achieving it. The picture is somewhat brightened up by glimpses of the plot, communication with aliens and obelisks, as well as a pleasant soundtrack, but on the scale of No Man’s Sky this is just a drop in the ocean of endless flights from planet to planet and monotonous resource extraction. I bet the game 6 points out of 10 and I really hope that the developers will be able to diversify their project by releasing patches and additions in the future.

In two years, visionary developers turned a tech demo into a full-fledged game, and we are glad that they did not give up

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Call me a zealous nonconformist, but I've always liked No Man's Sky. Yes, as a game the project was far from perfect - in fact, I myself once wrote in a preview I don't understand how to play this game. But as a cultural phenomenon...

Just think about it!

A whole world that is stored on ordinary hard drives. On the other side of the screen is a real galaxy with 18.6 quintillion stars. All that remains is to launch artificial intelligence with self-learning there. So the birth of virtual life is not far away!

What if we ourselves live in such a world, procedurally generated on the computers of other creatures for whom we are virtual creatures? This theological conspiracy theory will be cooler than any pasta monsters!

In short, I have always perceived No Man’s Sky not so much as a game, but as a milestone in the development of technology. Well, yes, the first damn thing is lumpy, it’s an everyday matter. But, for example, the idea of ​​a procedurally generated galaxy was already adopted in the second Beyond Good and Evil, so the project left its mark on game development. And, most likely, it will come back to haunt you more than once in the future, so whether it is playable or not is not so important.

But the developers thought differently. Two years after the release, scandals and friendly spitting on the entire Internet, they rolled out version 1.5 (or simply Next), in which they greatly changed the game balance and still turned No Man’s Sky into an exciting “survival game”. And if you did not return the money to Steam after the purchase, you can simply assume that until that moment the game was in a very crude early access, and now it has finally been released.

I see a purpose, but I do not see obstacles

The main thing that has changed is that actions become more meaningful. Previously, we were simply thrown into virtual space, and to the question “what to do?” They answered “whatever you want!” And it seems like the right principle. Don't we always demand freedom from games and swear when we are led by the hand? Well, it turns out that without this is also bad, especially in our high-speed era, when not everyone can afford to thoroughly understand unfamiliar rules.

No Man's Sky now constantly challenges the player. It all starts with the basics: we find ourselves on an alien planet with virtually nothing, we only know how to run, jump and get resources. The game tells you that first you need to fix the scanner, and now we can already see that there is something useful in a small radius. Then we have a visor that gives detailed information about every object we encounter and allows us to look into the distance.

Then we are smoothly brought to the spaceship and allowed to fly. Then build a base. And after that - jump to a space station and do trade, fly to a neighboring planet and build a base there, assemble a warp engine and move to another star. And there will be space battles, and management of the merchant fleet, and quests and orders from intelligent life forms, and much more.

Commanding frigates is a very successful “game within a game”, similar to expeditions from Warlords of Draenor. We select a target, equip the ships and wait for several hours in the hope that they will return with loot.

The entry curve into No Man's Sky has now been carefully calibrated. You won’t get confused anymore, unless you pick up too many side quests and don’t know which one to take on first. If you follow the plot, there are almost no lags in the gameplay: you are always learning something new and improving the old. The gameplay changes and is expanded, you feel progress - and this is extremely important for games in general.

If you want to live, know how to provide for yourself

At the same time, the game follows rules typical for the survival genre. In the wild, the character is constantly in danger. If the planet is hot, you need to regularly add resources to the cooling system; if it’s cold, then to the heating system. All active actions consume “life support”, which here replaces hunger and thirst, and its restoration also requires resources. Sometimes disasters such as firestorms or acid rain occur - it makes sense to wait them out indoors, otherwise the indicators will decrease too quickly.

Shelter can be found, dug, and built. This sky is not so “no man’s”: on each planet there are both inhabited and abandoned buildings, discarded containers of humanitarian aid, fragments of equipment, ancient artifacts, capsules with technologies and much more that is clearly of artificial origin.

All this is adjacent to dense thickets, flocks of animals, and fossil deposits. Using existing tools, they can be processed into resources (many here will remember the last Prey) through a special distillation apparatus - convert some chemical compounds into others, and then from all this create what you need: spare parts, upgrades, building materials. And the terramorphing device allows you to dig caves or, conversely, build up soil, giving the planets a look to your liking. Then we will be able to build a house and furnish it with furniture and useful units - complete freedom of expression.

Also in No Man’s Sky Next, full-fledged multiplayer has appeared, so you can explore worlds with a group and bring guests to the hacienda to show off! A third-person view has been added and the ability to customize the hero’s appearance—you can even turn him into a representative of a different race. Although it is not a fact that he is a person, everyone calls him “Anomaly” and constantly encourages him to find out who he is and what is happening around him. And collecting information about the world and the player’s role in it is now much more exciting - unless, of course, you managed to spoil everything for yourself.

Imperfect space

At the same time, No Man’s Sky is still far from ideal. The same survival mechanics require constant grinding of resources: to run around the planets you need protection and life support, to fly on a ship - fuel, for a mining laser - charges. You'll spend a lot of time just digging and processing minerals. For this reason, by the way, I would not recommend high difficulty levels: they doom you to additional constant grinding. However, if you like difficulties...

All sorts of little things like limited sprint and constant overheating of the “miner” are also annoying. Well, in fact, you have to dig and run all the time, why put an artificial framework on it? The procedure for calculating planets also leaves an imprint: if you fly over the surface on a ship, the objects below you do not always have time to be drawn, and you will not be able to see everything. If you don't want to miss anything, walk or ride moon rovers (though it's slow). Or land, look around through the visor, place a marker, climb back and fly where you need to - just keep in mind that the marker may suddenly disappear. Either a bug or a feature that encourages you to remember landscape landmarks.

Things are also bad with attempts to ignore plot markers and do something of their own. Yes, you can do that. Get on a ship and fly anywhere and do whatever you want there. At least by upgrading a spacesuit or, say, saving money for a ship of a higher class. But it will be monotonous work to extract a large amount of resources, grind, elevated to the absolute level (yes, approximately like in the 2016 version). It is much easier to achieve the same thing by simply moving along tasks - so at least the activities will be varied.

No matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t start the review without a personal introduction. About a week before the release of No Man’s Sky, people around me began to discuss the project, telling how much they expected from it. About the same story was happening online: ratings were posted around that No Man’s Sky was the most pre-ordered game on gog.ru, and later on the Steam service the game started extremely successfully. I followed the game from the moment it was announced, I liked what I saw, but I understood that not everyone would like the final game. Even you, dear readers, showed mature skepticism towards the project, and it was understandable to me. But when, after the release, everyone started spitting and screaming about how clumsy and wrong No Man’s Sky was, I just silently turned on the game and went on another journey.

Although the game has been in development for a long time under the supervision of Sony, No Man’s Sky is a game from independent developers. The Hello Games studio had previously created only a few casual games, but now it has taken on a large-scale and extremely ambitious project. In general, the final product proved that the developers still have talent. It would be a sin not to admire the local landscapes, and the lack of loading between leaving the planet and entering the new atmosphere is bravo.

No Man's Sky is an adventure game. It's about survival in the vast expanses of space, where you are just a grain of sand in the ocean. Here you can arrange a shootout with the guardians of the planets or attack harmless or predatory animals. You can start a cosmic mess or try to fight off pirate ships, but the shootouts here are quite boring and always depend not on your skills, but on the quantity and quality of your improvements. The emphasis is on research, and all such combat skirmishes are not particularly encouraged.

The game begins on an unnamed planet. Your spaceship is destroyed, its wreckage and your supplies are scattered around. The first step is to repair the ship. To do this, we need to explore the surrounding area and collect useful minerals that we can use for useful purposes. Resources are hidden in crystals lying around the area, in flowers, in monolithic stones and other objects. We extract resources using a splitter cannon, which rips useful resources out of an object.
Be prepared that your training may take an hour or two. The training was leisurely, you will have to run around in search of minerals, get acquainted with the local flora and fauna (if, of course, it is on your planet), and also visit the first abandoned stations. Here you can find useful drawings for future improvements to your ship, suit or splitter, gain resources, and meet aliens.

The language of aliens is absolutely incomprehensible to you at first. They utter some kind of gibberish containing some kind of request. You can judge its message only by the intonation of a casual acquaintance. This is where a simple and interesting mini-game begins. The hero tells what the stranger he meets is doing and offers to choose which item of equipment to give away. If you guess correctly, you will receive a pleasant bonus in return and an increase in your relationship with the race. If you didn’t guess: either nothing will happen, or you will lose the respect of the race.

But the situation with understanding other races can be corrected. With the right decision in the described mini-game, the aliens can teach you a word from their race. When studying planets, it is easy to come across mysterious monoliths left over from an ancient civilization. There are usually stones around them, interaction with which will increase your vocabulary. Here, near the monoliths, the same mini-game is usually located, only the stories here, although short, are extremely intriguing.

On planets you can also come across lighthouses. Interacting with them will allow you to open one of the proposed points on the surface of the planet. So you can find an abandoned factory, a planetary trading station, a tracking station that gives a general idea of ​​the planet.

After such a study of the surrounding area and interesting finds, it’s time to return to the ship for its subsequent repairs. We fill the engine with fuel and take off. Yes, the worlds of No Man's Sky look even more beautiful from the air. Asteroids are rushing around, inside of which useful fuel for the ship is hidden. New, unexplored planets can be seen in the distance, and somewhere nearby there must definitely be a space station. Here she is!

As we approach the entrance to the station, we are picked up by a beam and taken straight to the landing site. There's no one inside, but your arrival certainly attracts other ships. You can chat with their owners, bargain, and try to buy their ship. Space ships here are generated randomly, so sometimes extremely strange exhibits fly here, and sometimes quite desirable ones. Actually, buying a new ship is the only way to change the appearance of your ship.
Here, at the station, there is a trading post, where you can sell unnecessary resources and buy the ones you need. At first, the required resource will be ingredients for warp cells. With warp we charge our interdimensional engine, which allows us to travel from one galaxy to another. Later you will find blueprints for all the ingredients of the warp cell and you will be able to prepare it right on your knees.

Somewhere around this point, you will definitely start to feel less than pleasant about the local system of inventory and installation of improvements. I'll start with the main thing - any installed improvement takes up an inventory slot. Improving the suit and vital systems will take up the inventory of the suit, improving the plating or engine will take up a spaceship cell. Considering that there is always little space, this is simply a treacherous stab in the back. It’s good that when a more useful improvement is found, the old one can be dismantled and forgotten.

Another inventory problem is in the system of collecting elements or improvements. I'll tell you about the most severe example: a thing required 5 elements of one type and 1 of another. Don't forget that we are creating a new item in an empty cell, so we will need another free one. Total: seven cells to collect one item, which will now occupy her for a very long time. To free up such space, some useful things from a rather tight inventory will have to be thrown away or sold. By the way, you can increase the number of inventory slots, but this is not done for money. While exploring planets, you can not only pick up another upgrade blueprint, but you can also increase the capacity of your suit or ship by one cell for free.

So, the systems are charged, improvements are installed, the ship is functioning normally. We open the map of the universe and... our eyes widen! There are thousands of bright galaxy dots around, forming an attractive pattern. Where to fly? Which way to choose? Although... Do you see a huge white spot in the distance, as if watching you? The game tells us that we need to go exactly there, to the center of the universe. But why? The one walking, or in our case the one flying, recognizes this. But the road will be long, because at first we will only be able to travel on the warp between neighboring galaxies. Only improving the engine will teach the ship to jump far ahead, brutally consuming fuel cells.

And after the first warp, you begin to understand what’s really wrong with No Man’s Sky. From planet to planet, from galaxy to galaxy, you have to perform the same actions. We jumped on the warp, landed on the planet, collected resources, collected new cells on our knees, found a couple of blueprints for improvements, flew to the space station, sold all the excess and... jump to the next galaxy, where we repeat the entire described scheme again! This is where you begin to understand that exploring new planets is wonderful, but the presence of a plot, some change in the gameplay, the presence of at least some action would make this amazing game even better.

The game is saved by the skill of the project's artists. Jumping into a new galaxy definitely results in another “Wow!” coming out of your mouth. Yes, all the worlds and planets here are generated procedurally, on the fly, but the laws for them are written correctly, and the elements from which the structure is made are polished to a shine. The planets offer amazing views, eccentric animals warm your soul, and the mysterious remnants of an ancient race spark your imagination. It’s a pity that all this idyll is brought down by such trivial things as: “your life support system is low,” “you can’t take off because the engine has run out of fuel,” “the cutter’s battery is low,” and so on. All this makes it slow down to collect resources and immediately send them to the right place. If only they could come up with an auto-replenishment system...

Although the local worlds are surprising in their colors, they look as if we are exploring not the universe, but several galaxies. Space stations are the same from world to world, planetary stations also differ little from each other. The remains of an ancient civilization are another reference in favor of the version I voiced about being in a narrower space than stated. But you definitely won’t get tired of the soundtrack. The musical team 65daysofstatic set the very right mood for everything that was happening. I’m even glad that now even more people will become acquainted with the work of this wonderful group.

I definitely want to commend the creators of No Man's Sky for bringing their ambitious project to life. The game will make you feel like a speck in the ocean. There are very few dangers awaiting you, so you can devote yourself entirely to exploration and survival. The latter does not come down to shootouts and the search for the necessary resources, but to the banal recharging of important systems and the search for ingredients for these actions. The game is able to please the eye for a long time and a lot, it perfectly manages to create a mysterious atmosphere, but the entire gameplay instantly slides into self-copying. Arrived, charged, flew away - repeat until arriving at the center of the universe. As a result, you can quickly get tired of the game, but the desire to return here for a fresh portion of impressions appears again and again.

SherlockSparG's opinion

Hello Games did not add a multiplayer mode to their ambitious brainchild. It's important to clarify here, so that no one is left confused: Inhuman Sky doesn't actually have any co-op play options, and all you can do online is publish the objects you discover and assign them to your name. Although No Man's Sky is a “sandbox”, there is some semblance of a plot, where you are asked to follow the instructions of Atlas. At the very beginning of the game, you will have a choice: explore the world on your own, gradually making your way to the center of the universe, or obey the instructions of a bright red ball.

Color spectrum No Man's Sky overflowing with poisonous colors that contribute to rapid eye fatigue, especially when contemplating local beauties for a long time. Although, it is likely that you will not be able to spend long sessions playing the game, since doing the same thing over and over again is very tiring. I advise you not to strive to get to the center of the universe as quickly as possible, but to gradually move towards your cherished goal, obtaining various resources and drawings, accumulating units (game currency), improving the parameters of the suit, purchasing more capacious space ships and cool multitools. Thus, the probability that No Man's Sky

The review is based on the digital version of the game provided by the publisher for PS4.

In 2016, it shook the gaming industry. But not the endless universe with billions of planets, but the resounding failure of the Hello Games studio. This is due to many things: the publisher’s loud advertising campaign, 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 has added an expanded storyline and many third-party activities for 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. We are still far from completely different worlds, but compared to the release, the progress is noticeable. This can be said about the animal world: now 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 the problems of No Man's Sky, but do not 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 extracted in difficult conditions: there may be acid rain, fire storms and other disturbances on the planet. In order not to die, you will have to charge the suit and life support systems. And charging requires resources.

Thirdly, often the necessary chemical elements may be hidden in special rocks or not found at all. Then you will have to collect simpler reagents in huge quantities in order to create the necessary materials through routine crafting and processing that 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 in no hurry 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, tasks, instead of clearly teaching and explaining the first steps, prefer to hide the 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 a very big step for No Man’s Sky. Its absence in the release version was the main reason for the public's hatred of 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, running in different directions 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.

The long-awaited space epic is finally out. Almost immediately - on PC and PlayStation 4. The game was postponed more than once, and countless rumors and speculations appeared around it. But the release of the game did not bring clarity - some criticize it with all words, others praise it, and the score on Metacritics is dubiously low - 71 points. ZOOM understands all the intricacies.

August 19, 2016 09:52

In fact, until the last moment it was not clear what No Man's Sky would be like. The developers promised a lot of things, but some did not believe these promises, while others perceived them somehow in their own way. In reality, it turned out so that, on the one hand, the developers fulfilled all their promises, on the other, the expectations of many players were still deceived. Why?

In the space of No Man's Sky, everything is nearby

Elite is “to blame” for everything. It was she who, back in 1984, showed what space adventures could be like, immediately setting a course for realism. Further parts only developed this concept - a strict physical model forced one to read a lot of instructions in order to even just take off and successfully land a starship. Large planets in Elite posed more of a danger than a desire to explore them: the gravity of such sub-stars could be much stronger than the capabilities of the ship's engine.

Therefore, fans of Elite, represented by No Man's Sky, were waiting for just another Elite with the opportunity to finally get out of the ship and walk through uncharted planets on foot. Unless the planets will not be real, but fictitious, generated by a cunning algorithm. Well, okay - what difference does it make in the end?

Impulse jump helps you quickly cover vast distances

However, No Man's Sky is not Elite at all. Not a speck. And here's why.

Arcade

If you played Elite (from the first to the third part) or Elite Dangerous, then you will sorely lack realism in No Man’s Sky. Well, at least some. Take the same flights on a spaceship. Do you want to fly to a distant planet and land on it? There is nothing simpler, aim at it, turn on the impulse engine, and do not worry about changing course when approaching and planning the landing trajectory. Gravity does not affect your ship, even if the planet is large.

Typical artifacts of procedural planet generation

And the planets themselves are not exactly interesting. Even here, it was not possible to avoid several (rather typical for the basic concept of space) problems. For example, all planets have the same climate over their entire surface. And the animals on them don’t really choose where they live more comfortably. Except that birds always fly, and fish always swim in water.

This was confusing even in Star Wars, when we were shown supposedly different planets, but they were all filmed somewhere on Earth. And for some reason the filmmakers didn’t care at all that one single planet could replace a whole bunch of planets in terms of climate diversity.

There is also something to see underwater - sometimes key points appear right under water, and this is also a bug

And also this eternal question with inventory. All items and resources that you collect are placed in cells. Resources can be added in large quantities (for example, 250 units of gold in one spacesuit cell), and items can be added strictly one at a time, even the same ones. And there are always not enough cells, but that’s not the problem.

The problem is that a spacesuit cell is similar to a starship cell for storing individual items (but you can put more ore in one starship cell than in a spacesuit cell). Despite the fact that upgrading a suit by adding one cell at a time is much easier and cheaper than buying a more spacious starship. At the time of writing these lines, the author had a suit with 38 cells and a starship with 21 cells. Quite strange, wouldn't you agree?

Emptiness

There are various resources in abundance on the planets, many of them are home to various similarly generated animals, but you won’t find a city or any settlement anywhere. Even the rest of the settlement. Only lonely engineering structures, haphazardly but evenly scattered across the planet.

If you turn around, you won’t even guess that there are any buildings nearby

So, all exploration of planets comes down to finding these structures and looking for what is valuable in them. Well, you also need to look for resources - without them you can’t go anywhere, you can’t even take off from the planet. And also scan animals - they give money for this.

Animals are very different. We haven’t yet shown you the jumping uh... udder

With scanning, however, not everything is smooth either - animals or plants that look exactly the same on the same planet can be recognized by the scanner as different objects. Well, no matter how much we played, we never found any animal or plant that was the same (according to the scanner data, not by species) for any two planets.

And just like Dark Souls, you will learn the history of this world step by step if you are not too lazy to read the text at the monoliths and ruins.

Loneliness

You are alone in the entire Universe. Yes, occasionally you will meet NPCs (non-playable characters) - in shelters, on space stations. You can even talk to them, or even trade, but they will only sit or stand. You'll never see an NPC like this walking around the planet.

A trading port on the planet. Many empty chairs only increase the feeling of loneliness

Yes, in Elite this was not the case either, but in Elite you yourself were chained to a starship, so everyone was in the same position. NPCs were on equal terms with you - and this created the illusion of life.

If this NPC could walk, maybe it would be somehow more fun

At the same time, in No Man's Sky you will see many starships flying here and there. But this is just decoration, except that some starships may turn out to be pirates and try to attack you (but only in space) - then you will have to shoot back.

In the space station hangar. Other starships are just window dressing. You can buy them

At space stations you will also see starships arriving or departing. They will park in a common hangar for everyone, you can even buy any starship you see on the space station, but you will never see anyone leaving or entering it.

Monotony

Each star system will definitely have one trading space station. When you warp (hyperjump) you will invariably end up somewhere close to her. The shapes of space stations vary, but the hangar looks the same for all of them. From the hangar there are always two doors.

The caves look beautiful. But monotonous

To the right is a door accessible to everyone. There is a trading terminal and some kind of clerk (but there may not be a clerk).

Trading terminal interface

To the left - access via the Atlas Pass map of the first level, there will be a costume upgrade - adding one inventory cell. By the way, this is also why the carrying capacity of your suit will quickly become greater than that of the most massive starship.

Inventory of a spacesuit (above) and a starship (below)

There are monoliths on the planets - the remains of ancient civilizations, from which you will learn the language of alien races one word at a time (however, if you are lucky enough to find a monolith and not a slab, then you can learn as many as 3-4 words from it). Moreover, the monoliths themselves look the same for all races.

But still, you can admire the landscapes of No Man's Sky endlessly

Unless, there are several forms of the monoliths themselves (and even “ruin-type” ones come across). But by their shape it is impossible to determine which race they belong to.

What's above is not what's below

Another strange moment: No Man's Sky in space and on the planet is like two different games. In space, you can fire a ship's cannon at asteroids and extract valuable elements from them: tamium-9, iron, aluminum - depending on your luck. But on On the planet, such extraction is extremely difficult and you have to use only the multitool that your hero holds in his hands. Sawing huge blocks of gold or heridium is tedious, but you have to make money from something?

Moreover, the ship's cannon on the planet is completely useless. She can’t knock down a steel factory door, for example - that’s also only done with a multitool. If you are attacked by pirates while approaching the planet, then as soon as you enter the planet’s atmosphere, they will leave you behind. Well, when they fall behind... they will wait in orbit. In principle, there are no battles in the planet’s atmosphere, and the occasional starships flying against the sky are just decoration; you cannot interact with them.

Controlling the starship itself also differs depending on whether you are in space or on a planet. In space, it is quite possible to crash into something: a space station or the same asteroid. It won't work on the planet. You can “fall” vertically down onto a planet, but when approaching the surface, the spaceship itself turns around to be parallel to the planet. It is impossible to make a complete “dead loop” here.

Crashing into a mountain will also not work - the spaceship will automatically change its vertical position. And landing is done with one single button. In general, controlling a starship on a planet is reminiscent of arcade games in the spirit of AfterBurner.

On the one hand, there is logic in this - they say that they there, in the future, have not learned to land spaceships automatically, if any plane can already be landed on autopilot? On the other hand, the same Elite had an autopilot, but this did not make the game an arcade game. Although, of course, what we like most is how they did it in Elite Dangerous with landing on space stations - everything is in manual mode, you even need to keep track of the number of the site and not land on someone else’s, otherwise they will be fined or even use force.

By the way, in multiplayer in Elite Dangerous it often happens that all the landing sites at the station are occupied and you are denied permission to land. But in No Man's Sky there is no multiplayer as such.

Flaws? Nonsense!

It would seem that we are listing continuous shortcomings and the reader should already form the conclusion: “No Man's Sky is a bad game.” But this is not so! We enthusiastically continue to play NMS even now. Believe me, it is impossible to tear yourself away from it, even despite for all the bugs and lags, of which there are many even in the version for PlayStation 4. Despite the fact that the console version runs smoother than for the PC, and there are almost no drops in FPS on PS4.

Indeed, with all its shortcomings, No Man's Sky is addictive for a long time. Except that it's still not a game for everyone. And that's why we concentrate on the shortcomings - so that you know in advance what you shouldn't expect from the game.

What's not allowed here

• Find some desert planet, climb into a cave in search of rare minerals and suddenly come across a huge cave worm there.
• Find a bottomless abyss or the highest mountain in the Universe and explore it.
• Tame a wild animal to guard you during planetary exploration, and then take it with you. (But you can still feed the animal).
• Find the North Pole of any planet. Or South. Well, that is, it is theoretically possible (they determined where the Sun rises, understood where the South is, where the North is), but practically, even if you somehow determine the exact location of the pole, its appearance (terrain, climate, flora or fauna) is nothing will not differ from the rest of the planet's surface.

• Find someone else's parked starship somewhere on the planet and steal it, killing the owner (but you can find a damaged starship, restore it and replace your own with it).
• Get infected with an unknown virus and complete a quest in search of a cure.
• Set up your own camp on some planet and start growing crops from other planets there.
• Rob "korovans".

What can you do here?

• Land on any planet you see.
• Wander through mountains (mostly small ones), caves, go under water (if there is any on the planet).
• Watch sunrises and sunsets to meditative music.
• Freeze, overheat, get poisoned by a toxic atmosphere or radiation (after some time, when the suit’s protection drops to zero).
• Find a huge deposit of gold, destroy it completely and sell all the gold for lots and lots of money.

• Go far from the ship's landing site and then stomp painfully and for a long time (or find the ship's calling mast). Well, or die, appear at the location of the last control point (most likely, next to the ship), fly by ship to the place of death and pick up all the loot.
• Stop doing everything the game offers and explore the worlds on your own.
• Get caught in a storm, in acid rain, and wait out the bad weather in the nearest building or in your own spaceship.

Total

Thus, No Man's Sky is indeed a very strange and contradictory game. Despite the fact that the game's shortcomings can be listed endlessly, it is really good - and it's even difficult to explain why exactly. It's just catchy, despite everything. In this sense it’s like Minecraft: sketchy graphics, lack of adequate physics (blocks can easily float in the air), lack of any clear tasks, lack of a competitive element, loneliness.

But at the same time - limitlessness, complete (with minor reservations) freedom, meditativeness.

No one is forcing you anywhere - explore any planet as much as you like. There is no timer, there are no missions as such (unless the game asks you to follow the path of the Atlas) - you are free to invent for yourself what and when to do.

For example, we already dream of finding a planet with green grass and a blue sky in No Man's Sky, otherwise the red color starts to make us feel nauseous.

P.S. By the way, we don’t believe one iota that they ever planned to make the game exclusive to the PlayStation 4. It’s a purely PC-style, mouse-friendly interface - it’s not very convenient to use on a console. But the smoothness of the game on PS4 is commendable, even despite 30 fps.

Ratings

Graphics: 8

Control: 9

Gameplay: 6

Overall rating: 9