No One’s Sky

Josh Jacoby, Cutting-Edge Writer

For anyone who has been watching gaming news  for the past few months, it would be hard not to know about Hello Games’ new game: No Man’s Sky. For those who do not know, No Man’s Sky is a free-roaming, space exploration game with bits of survival and role-playing game thrown in for good measure. However, with a horribly rough launch on Windows/Mac and gameplay elements not living up to expectations, No Man’s Sky has received flak from both players and critics alike.

Since its announcement in December of 2013, the anticipation of this game’s release from the community has been astronomical — pun intended. This level of excitement is likely the reason why the game has taken so much criticism these past few weeks after not delivering the perfect game everyone was waiting for. From the start in 2013, Hello Games has been promising a game with infinite possibilities in planets to explore, animals to discover and alien races to befriend.

Yet, it is seen that the best laid plans of mice and men are always oft to go astray because even with a multitude of delays in releasing the game, many features were left out. This includes different classes of ships, desert planets, water planets, orbiting planet, customizing ships, trade-ships, multiplayer and large ship battles. Ultimately, the lack or reduction of these features, and the extremely frequent lag-spikes and crashing, have a lot of people frothing at the mouth. People who once supported No Man’s Sky, speculating that it would become “one of the greatest games ever created,” are now waiting for Steam to refund their 60 dollars. “It should have been called ‘No Man’s LIE’,” cries popular YouTuber Angry Joe.

Survival elements are also more prominent than people had expected. Inventory management, resource gathering and suit upgrading are actually dominating aspects of the game. So much so, that these survival aspects become the bulk of the gameplay. This is extremely asinine to a large number of players who wanted to explore planets instead of sitting and mining a large rock.

Consequently, No Man’s Sky has suffered a lot in sales because of all these negative aspects. In fact, the playerbase of No Man’s Sky has dropped more than 90% in the past three weeks from day one. Going from 157,000 concurrent players to 10,000 concurrent players (GameRant.com) just goes to show just how disappointed people were with this game’s launch and gameplay. Steam, Amazon and Sony have been giving refunds regardless of playtime (against most of their terms of refund policy) because so many people have asked.

In all, No Man’s Sky has been a fun and interesting game for some, but an immense disappointment and frustration for others. For these reasons I would give No Man’s Sky a 6/10. If you would like to try the game for yourself, it is available on PS4 and PC for $60 on Steam, Amazon or a local retailer.