No Man’s Sky PS4 review: or, why we’re not reviewing No Man’s Sky

The sci-fi epic is boundary-pushing when it comes to gaming as a subjective experience
Blast off: No Man's Sky gives players an entire vast universe to explore
Hello Games / Sony
Ben Travis16 August 2016

“Space is big. Really big,” wrote Douglas Adams in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. “You just won’t believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is.

“I mean, you may think it’s a long way down the road to the chemists, but that’s just peanuts to space.”

Swap ‘the chemists’ for any RPG in recent memory, and it could easily be a quote about No Man’s Sky – undeniably one of the most ambitious feats in video game history.

Sean Murray and the mad geniuses at Hello Games have created a space exploration epic that isn’t satisfied with giving you a few solar systems and the odd nebula to pootle around.

Instead, No Man’s Sky boasts 18 quintillion procedurally-generated planets – and, if you’re reading this, you probably know all of that already.

Much has been made of the brain-bending stats in the game, and while it’s a staggeringly impressive creation, gamers were left asking two important questions upon release: what do you actually do, and is it any good?

No Man's Sky - in pictures

1/10

We strongly considered writing a typical review for No Man’s Sky – it’s one of 2016’s biggest releases, has been a staple of E3 for what feels like a millennium, and it’s production has been a Captain America story of the ‘little indie team that could’ being beefed up with AAA title steroids.

But the more we explored the game’s stunningly beautiful universe, the more futile it felt to try and reduce it down to a numbered score or a definitive verdict.

Hello Games / Sony

Reviews of any kind are subjective pieces of writing: there is no decisive final take on a piece of art, and different people are inevitably going to have different experiences.

And while that’s always been true, it’s something that’s amplified by No Man’s Sky magnitude. More than perhaps any game before it, it’s one where every player will have hugely different experiences within it. Players can put their stamp on the universe by naming planets, and yet it’s so huge that the chances of you ever encountering one that someone else has named are infinitesimal.

It’s not just that No Man’s Sky becomes whatever you make of it – there’s an element of luck in what the game gives to you. Essentially the whole game-world is the arse-end-of-nowhere – and while you’ll likely have seen shots of eyeball-frazzling purple skies and majestic beasts shared all over social media, you could find yourself on a murky brown apocalyptic wasteland and spend hours collecting resources just so you can blast off again.

Then there’s the expectations for the game, which have ranged widely – from those hoping for a Mass Effect-esque combination of exploration and combat, to those wanting a Minecraft-esque sense of creative freedom. A quick look at recent YouTube comments show that many didn’t realise the game wouldn’t be an MMORPG until they got it. Everyone’s take on the game will be in some way influenced by what they thought it was going to be when they started – and that will lead to feelings of either soaring enjoyment, crushing disappointment, or muted shrugs.

Hello Games / Sony

Chances are, if epic RPGs, classic sci-fi, and stupendously beautiful colours are your bag, you’ve either got No Man’s Sky already or you’re going to get it in the near future. And you’ll probably have a really good time with it. If you’re looking for fast-paced thrills and an in-depth plot, this isn’t the game for you.

We can tell you what it does, and we can tell you what our experiences in the game were – you can read some of those here in our first impressions article, and our piece on what we thought works and what doesn’t work well – and we can tell you how No Man’s Sky made us feel. For this writer, it was a mixture of skin-prickling freedom, mild tedium, and bursts of wonderment that provoked memories of listening to the Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy radio series every night while I was growing up, and watching 2001: A Space Odyssey for the first time.

But we can’t tell you what you’ll see, how you’ll feel when you first lift-off from your starter planet and blast into the cosmos. And for a game that relies so much on making you feel, that’s something you’ll have to discover for yourself.

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