Every single star you see is a place you can travel to. This is not a drill

By Tamer Asfahani

No Man’s Sky

Developer: Hello Games

Publisher: Hello Games

Platforms: PC, PS4, XBO

THERE IS more empty space in space than there is matter, the vastness is incomprehensible and the proportion of physical elements, such as planets, asteroids and other debris are almost irrelevant in comparison. No Man’s Sky launched a few years ago on the PlayStation exclusively, but failed to deliver on what it promised to be, becoming a void larger than space, but since then Hello Games has been hard at work making this game what it was supposed to be on launch and releasing it across all platforms.

I’ve spent over 90 hours playing No Man’s Sky (NMS). I still don’t really know what I’m doing. It’s a literal universe and each star has its own solar system. Each solar system has varying numbers of planets orbiting the star, and each of those planets are peppered with resources, fauna and flora, life forms, abandoned buildings, crash sites and alien artifacts. Each planet has its own atmosphere and no two planets are the same. There are literally hundreds, if not thousands, of stars and respective solar systems to explore. In the time I’ve been playing, I’ve only explored four or five solar systems. I haven’t even visited all the planets in those solar systems.

The first thing to note is that it’s lonely. So very lonely. And not particularly intuitive. There’s no clear directive and, for completionists like myself, it’s a nightmare. There is just too much to do, but half the battle is figuring out how to do what you want to do. Aside from mining materials, researching materials comes in the way of side quests which are a little bit laborious. Finding a spaceship to fly around in is easy enough, but for the first few trades you don’t really understand the complexities of the space ships, how they differ and what you can install on them. Let alone crafting fuel and installing attachments and upgrades. This applies to your exosuit too, the armour that protects you from all the different elements on the planets you’ll encounter which vary from radiation to very sub-zero temperatures, firestorms and acid rain. The exosuit and your spaceship in the early stages of the game are key to your success. Especially if you’ve not had a chance to build a base on a suitable planet. In fact, I found later on the base is completely unnecessary with the addition of Freighters. But we’ll get on to that.