the required advancements and fly off to the next planet and find something interesting to play. This is fault of procedural generation, a randomiser won’t always provide you with the perfect landscape but it should be at least interesting every time. Despite the pretty much non-existent multiplayer besides possibly finding someone’s 45th already discovered creature “Banana Rider 82”, You’re not completely alone. You’ll regularly run into other sentient aliens. Language is an interesting barrier and a means of progression. Uncovering ancient ruins or knowledge stones gives you additional words you can use to piece together each conversation and meeting. Soon enough, you’ll be able to garner a strong enough alliance with the Vy’keen, Gek, or Korvax that they’ll heal you or your shields. If you’re lucky,
they’ll give you a multi-tool that is slightly worse than the one you already found on the wall behind them. These aliens are interesting and the concept of discovering their language, attitudes, and likes to progress easier in their alliances is great – the let-down is that it goes nowhere. Siding with one race doesn’t grant you much more benefit than another, and they’ll all provide similar options and honestly they aren’t that intriguing or motivating to keep you exploring. Automated drones called Sentinels patrol the universe, ranging from passive to chaotic but typically don’t pose much of a threat unless you continuously mine fauna and kill creatures. Aggressive ships in space are far more of a difficulty, mostly due to the terribly inadequate ship controls. After death you return to the last time you exited your ship or closest save point,
making No Man’s Sky one of the more casual survival games out there with death becoming a mere inconvenience rather than a real threat. What really works with No Man’s Sky is from its technological standpoint. Despite the repetitiveness in some of the procedural generated elements, it is quite astonishing what Hello Games’ were able to do here. Crazy flapping cowant eater contraptions and tiny elephant monsters running around planets are nearly always an exciting experience. The soundtrack composed by British post-rock band 65daysofstatic or 65DOS is also generated procedurally and may even be the best part of the game. It’s atmospheric, it fits the mood of the game, it feels like it’s your theme. The seemless traversing from planet surface, to space, to space station, to another planet