Gaming: Despite all the hype, action game No Man's Sky fails to deliver

No Man's Sky is a game made by a small British indie studio called Hello Games, most famous for their Joe Danger series. With No Man's Sky the studio set out to do something different, it promised unlimited exploration with a universe that expanded as far as you would take it.

Instead of manually building this vast universe the team was going to use algorithms to build a procedurally generated world. While their universe is certainly huge and expands beyond limitations, there isn't much to do on any of these worlds. This is where No Man's Sky fails.

The game starts off with you having crash landed on the planet where you have to gather resources, to keep yourself alive and repair your craft so you can get off the planet. It's the sort of menial grinding labour that you escape from in the real world by playing videogames on your computer. Needless to say, it is the last thing you want to be doing for entertainment.

Collect some iron, make metal panels to repair the ship, look for power sources to power your suit, spacecraft and a mining gun. It should be mentioned that none of this has been explained to you. It feels half baked, and trying to figure out how to work things will add to your frustration. There are also random sites on the planet that you can visit. Nothing really happens there either, you may learn some new words, or discover an abandoned base, which will allow you to save your game. Even when you manage to repair your ship and take of from the planet, there is nothing interesting in space, just some more rocks to mine and planets to visit.

Though some planets have more interesting things to find than others, they are few and far apart. After a while the planets seem to meld into one another with no way for you to distinguish the first one from the last one you visited, everything after a while seems to be a repetition with minor changes. Even the weird animals will stop you from caring for anything other than the fact that you need to bulk up your spacecraft and collect resources. Sure, there are a few interesting conversations here and there, but nothing that will have you coming back for more.

The gameplay is also limited. You can't go all out and destroy everything in sight, this is because the aiming mechanism and your character's ability to avoid harm is so bad that you will die, in most cases in the first five minutes.

Even the dog fighting with space pirates is badly done, and nowhere near as entertaining as you would imagine a space dog fight to be. Considering the game is around 30 hours long if you want to just complete the main objective of reaching the galactic centre, constant pirate attacks can get annoying very fast.

For a game that is so vast we wish the developers had taken some time to add polish. A decent tutorial and some intuitive controls could have gone a long way in reducing our focus on the lack of anything interesting to do in this unlimited universe.

No Man's Sky
Rating: 1/5
Developer: Hello Games
Publisher: PC, PS4
Platform: PC
Price: PC Rs 1,799; PS4: Rs 3,999
Video link: https://bit.ly/2b3jb8I