![]() Using the thumbsticks to navigate your cursor over the grids of your three different inventory screens (for your suit, your ship, and your multitool) just feels like the wrong tool for the job, especially since it doesn’t snap into position and can often land right in the middle of two options. In a game with so much inventory management the experience of actually managing it is important to get right – and No Man’s Sky botches it with a clumsy cursor-driven interface. As always in this genre there’s a compulsive collector’s urge that drives me to spend time meticulously gathering stuff, but it’s still a chore and the way tiny bits of material defy gravity and hang in the air after you’ve destroyed the parts that were holding it up instead of falling into an easily targetable pile make trying to get all of it an annoying chore. Worse, few of the upgrades I’ve worked for felt like a significant improvement, with the exception of improvements to my warp drive and simple updates that upgrade my mining speed and rate of fire. The issue here is that No Man’s Sky doesn’t do anything interesting with that foundation to distinguish it from the last game in which you harvested resources and combined them into other things, and so it’s unremarkable. There’s nothing inherently wrong with resource harvesting, mind you - many great games are built on top of it. “Most of the moment-to-moment gameplay in No Man’s Sky is a typical and dull resource-harvesting grind, running from pile to pile and hoovering up minerals and elements like iron, nickel, and plutonium. In general, No Man’s Sky does a poor job of teaching you how to play, so you should expect to lean heavily on external guides if you don’t want to waste time figuring out its opaque systems for yourself. Things as fundamental as how to switch your multitool from mining mode to combat mode and back to more nuanced things like how ship upgrades depend heavily on placement to function best aren’t addressed at all. While the tutorial is sufficient to get you up and running with your handy jetpack, basic crafting skills, and a working spaceship capable of interstellar jumps toward the goal of reaching the center of the galaxy, there’s a huge amount of important information it never introduces you to. It’s a great moment of glory, and one that’s badly needed as virtually everything between those moments is a repetitive, frustrating, and confusing slog. That’s an experience I’ve always wanted in games, and No Man’s Sky pulls it off. But then you get in your ship and fly straight up off the surface and clear the atmosphere of a planet directly into space, then zip over to a neighboring world and land on its surface without any loading, and it’s hard not to be impressed. ![]() This is the most crash-prone PS4 game I’ve ever played. So are the crashes, of which I’ve experienced about a dozen so far. ![]() Especially when flying fast and low over a planet – as you do frequently when hunting for rare resources or buildings – the pop-in is tough to look past. Because the draw distance for high-detail models is so short you’ll constantly see objects phase in and out with a distracting dithering effect, and the frame rate frequently dips below the 30 it shoots for just from panning around the environment. However, when you start moving around some of that beauty is lost. Landing on a new planet is usually an impressive high point because visual variety is No Man’s Sky’s strong suit. “Other worlds I’ve visited since have run the gamut between similarly exotic and as barren and desolate as Mars or the moon, with interesting features ranging from labyrinthine caves to impossibly floating islands and otherworldly rock formations. ![]()
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