Everyone's expected space epic has finally come out. Almost immediately - on PC and PlayStation 4. The game was postponed more than once, and countless rumors and speculations appeared around it. But the release of the game did not clarify either - some scold it with all the words, others praise it, and the score on Metacritics is doubtfully low - 71 points. ZOOM understands all the intricacies.

19 August 2016 09:52

In fact, until the last moment it was not clear what kind of No Man's Sky would be. The developers promised a lot, but some did not believe these promises, while others perceived them somehow in their own way. so that, on the one hand, the developers fulfilled all their promises, on the other hand, the expectations of many players were still deceived. Why?

In No Man's Sky, everything is near

Elite is to blame for everything. It was she who, back in 1984, showed what space adventures can be, immediately heading for realism. Further parts only developed this concept - a rigorous physical model forced to read a lot of instructions in order to even just take off and successfully land a starship. Large planets in Elite were more dangerous than a desire to explore them: the gravity of such sub-stars could be much stronger than the capabilities of the ship's engine.

Therefore, fans of Elite, represented by No Man's Sky, were just waiting for another Elite with the opportunity to finally get out of the ship and walk around unknown planets on foot. what difference does it make in the end?

Pulse jump helps you quickly cover huge distances

However, No Man's Sky is not Elite at all. Not a piece. And here's why.

Arcade

If you have played Elite (from the first to the third part) or Elite Dangerous, then in No Man's Sky you will sorely lack realism. Well, at least some. Take the same flights in a spaceship. Do you want to fly to a distant planet and land on it? It couldn't be easier, aim at it, turn on the pulse engine, and don't worry about changing course when approaching and planning a landing trajectory. Gravity does not affect your ship, even if the planet is large.

Typical artifacts of procedural planetary generation

And the planets themselves, not to say that they are interesting. Even here, several problems (quite typical for the basic understanding of space) have not been avoided. For example, all planets have the same climate over the entire surface. And animals on them do not particularly choose where it is more comfortable for them to live. Unless, birds always fly, and fish always swim in the water.

This was embarrassing even in Star Wars, when we were shown supposedly different planets, while all of them were filmed somewhere on Earth. And for some reason the filmmakers did not care at all that one single planet could replace a whole bunch of planets in terms of climate diversity.

There is also something to see under water - sometimes key points appear right under the water, and this is also a bug

And also this eternal inventory question. All items and resources that you collect are added to cells. Resources can be stacked in large quantities (for example, 250 units of gold in one spacesuit slot), and items - strictly one at a time, even the same. And there are always not enough cells, but that is not the problem.

The problem is that the spacesuit compartment is similar to the spaceship compartment for storing individual items (but you can put more ore in one spaceship compartment than in the spacesuit compartment). While upgrading a suit by adding one cell at a time is much easier and cheaper than buying a larger spaceship. At the time of this writing, the author has a 38-cell suit and a 21-cell spaceship. Quite strange, don't you agree?

Emptiness

There are various resources in abundance on the planets, various similarly generated animals live on many, but at the same time you will not find a city or at least some settlement anywhere. Even the rest of the settlement. Only lonely engineering structures, haphazardly, but evenly scattered across the planet.

If you turn around, you will not guess that there are some buildings nearby.

So, all the study of the planets comes down to finding these structures and looking for what is valuable in them. Well, you also need to look for resources - without them, you can't even take off from the planet. And also to scan animals - they give money for this.

Animals are very different. This we have not shown you jumping, uh ... udder

However, not everything is smooth with scanning either - animals or plants that look exactly the same on the same planet can be recognized by the scanner as different objects. Well, no matter how much we played, we never found any animal or plant that is the same (according to the scanner data, not in appearance) for any two planets.

And also, like Dark Souls, you will learn the history of this world step by step, if you are not too lazy to read the text near the monoliths and ruins.

Loneliness

You are one in the entire universe. Yes, occasionally you will meet NPCs (non-playable characters) - in shelters, at space stations. You can even talk to them, or even bargain, but they will only sit or stand. You will never see an NPC like this walking the planet.

Trade port on the planet. Lots of empty chairs only add to the feeling of loneliness.

Yes, it wasn't in Elite either, but in Elite you were also chained to the starship, so everyone was in the same position. NPCs were on an equal footing with you - and this created the illusion of life.

If this NPC could walk, it might be somehow more fun

At the same time, in No Man's Sky you will see many starships flying here and there. But this is just scenery, except that some starships may turn out to be pirates and try to attack you (but only in space) - then you have to shoot back.

In the hangar of the space station. Other starships are just a showcase. You can buy them

At the space stations, you will also see starships arrive and depart. They will be parked in the common hangar for all, you can even buy any starship you see on the space station, but you will never see someone entering or entering it.

Monotony

Each star system will necessarily have one trading space station. When you warp (hyperjump), you will invariably find yourself somewhere near her. Space stations come in different shapes, but everyone's hangar looks the same. From the hangar - two doors are stable.

The caves look beautiful. But monotonous

To the right is a door accessible to everyone. There is a trading terminal and some kind of clerk (but there may not be a clerk).

Trading terminal interface

To the left - access via the Atlas Pass map of the first level, there will be a suit upgrade - adding one inventory slot. By the way, this is one of the reasons why the carrying capacity of your suit will quickly become more than that of the most massive starship.

Spacesuit inventory (top) and starship (bottom)

There are monoliths on the planets - the remnants of ancient civilizations, from which you will learn the language of alien races by one word (however, if you are lucky to find a monolith, and not a slab, then you can learn as many as 3-4 words from it). Moreover, the monoliths themselves look the same for all races.

But still, the landscapes of No Man's Sky can be admired endlessly

Unless, there are several forms of the monoliths themselves (and even "like ruins" come across). But by their form it is impossible to determine which race they belong to.

What's above is not what's below

Another strange moment: No Man's Sky in space and on the planet are like two different games. In space, you can shoot the ship's cannon at asteroids and extract valuable elements from them: tamium-9, iron, aluminum - as luck would have it. For the planet, such mining is extremely difficult and you only have to use the multitool that your hero is holding in his hands. Cutting huge blocks of gold or heridium is tiring, but you have to make money on something?

Moreover, the ship's cannon is generally useless on the planet. She cannot land the steel door of the factory, for example - this is also only a multitool. If pirates attack you while approaching the planet, then as soon as you enter the planet's atmosphere, they will lag behind you. Well, as they lag behind ... they will wait in orbit. In principle, there are no battles in the planet's atmosphere here, and occasionally starships flying against the background of the sky are just decoration, you cannot interact with them.

The very control of the starship also differs depending on whether you are in space or on a planet. In space, it is quite possible to crash into something: into a space station or into the same asteroid. It won't work on the planet. You can "fall" on the planet vertically down, but when approaching the surface, the spacecraft itself turns to be parallel to the planet. It is impossible to make a complete “loop” here.

You won't be able to crash into the mountain either - the starship will automatically change its vertical position. And landing is done with a single button. In general, controlling a starship on the planet resembles an AfterBurner-style arcade game.

On the one hand, there is a logic in this - they say that they there, in the future, have not learned to land spacecraft automatically, if any plane on autopilot can already be landed? On the other hand, in the same Elite there was an autopilot, but the arcade game did not become from this. Although, of course, most of all we like how they did in Elite Dangerous with landing on space stations - everything is in manual mode, you even need to keep track of the site number and not sit on someone else's, otherwise they will be fined, or even use force.

By the way, in multiplayer in Elite Dangerous it often happens that all the stations at the station are occupied and you are denied permission to land. But there is no multiplayer in No Man's Sky as such.

Disadvantages? Nonsense!

It would seem that we are listing continuous shortcomings and the reader should already have formed a conclusion: “No Man” s Sky is a bad game. ”But this is not so! We continue to play NMS with gusto even now. Believe me, it is impossible to tear yourself away from it, even in spite of all the bugs and lags, of which there are many even in the version for PlayStation 4. Despite the fact that the console version works smoother than for the PC, and there are almost no FPS drawdowns on the PS4.

Indeed, for all its shortcomings, No Man's Sky is addictive for a long time. Unless, it's still a game not for everyone. That is why we concentrate on the shortcomings - so that you know in advance what you should not expect from the game.

What is not allowed here

• Find some desert planet, climb into a cave in search of rare minerals and suddenly bump into a huge cave worm there.
• Find a bottomless abyss or the highest mountain in the universe and explore it.
• Tame a wild animal to guard you during planetary exploration, and then take it with you. (But you can still feed the animal).
• Find the North Pole of any planet. Or Southern. Well, that is, theoretically it is possible (they determined where the Sun rises, understood where the South is, where the North is), but in practice, even if you somehow determine the exact location of the pole, its appearance (terrain, climate, flora or fauna) is nothing will not differ from the rest of the planet's surface.

• Find an alien parked starship somewhere on the planet and hijack it by killing the owner (but you can find a damaged spaceship, restore it and replace your own).
• Get infected with an unknown virus and complete the quest in search of a cure.
• Set up your own camp on some planet and start growing crops from other planets there.
• Rob "cows".

What can you do here

• Land on any planet you see.
• Wander through the mountains (mostly small), caves, go down under water (if there is one on the planet).
• Watch sunrises and sunsets while listening to meditative music.
• Freeze, overheat, poison yourself with a toxic atmosphere or radiation (after some time, when the suit's protection drops to zero).
• Find a huge deposit of gold, destroy it completely and sell all the gold for a lot, a lot of money.

• To go far from the landing site of the ship and then painfully and for a long time stomp back (well, or find the mast to call the ship). Well, or die, appear at the place of the last control point (most likely, next to the ship), fly the ship to the place of death and pick up all the loot.
• Give up on everything the game suggests to do and explore the worlds on your own.
• Get caught in a storm, under acid rain, and wait out the bad weather in the nearest building or in your own starship.

Total

Thus, No Man's Sky is a really very strange and controversial game. Despite the endless number of shortcomings of the game, it is really good - and it's even difficult to explain what exactly it is. It just clings, in spite of everything. it is like Minecraft: schematic graphics, lack of adequate physics (lumps can safely float in the air), lack of any intelligible tasks, lack of an adversarial element, loneliness.

But at the same time - infinity, complete (with minor reservations) freedom, meditativeness.

Nobody drives you anywhere - explore any planet as much as you like. There is no timer, no missions as such (unless the game invites you to follow the path of the Atlas) - you yourself are free to come up with what and when to do.

For example, we already dream of finding a planet with green grass and a blue sky in No Man's Sky, otherwise the red color starts to feel nauseous.

P.S. By the way, we will not believe one iota that the game was ever planned to be made exclusive to the PlayStation 4. Here is a purely PC interface, "sharpened" under the mouse - it is not very convenient with it on the console. But the smoothness of the game on PS4 is commendable, even despite the 30 fps.

Evaluations

Graphics: 8

Controls: 9

Gameplay: 6

Overall rating: 9

No Man's Sky is the perfect example of how to create hype for a product. For three years, the small studio Hello Games excitedly talked about the endless universe, the random generation of planets and creatures on them, trade with aliens, space exploration and complete freedom of action. There was practically no specifics: the images showed landscapes and some dinosaurs, the videos did not give an idea of ​​how to play it all. If you look at the promises, then the developers have fulfilled almost everything. The only problem is that it was originally a boring, monotonous and empty project.

The game is a space arcade game in which you can land on any oncoming planet and explore it far and wide. No Man's Sky is built on randomly generated content: all the celestial objects that you see are not created by developers, but by soulless software code. There is a set of items - like crystals of various shapes, stones, bases, and so on. The generator, at its discretion, scatters them over the surface, at the same time setting the desired temperature and weather conditions.

Despite the billions of planets that you can theoretically visit, they quickly become boring. Celestial bodies do not seem particularly diverse: lava flows through some, others look like real tropics, and still others are almost entirely covered with water. And somewhere on the fifteenth run, you realize that everything is already familiar. Each time you land on a new planet, you see another, but still similar to some of the previous ones.

An important question: what to do in the game?

The structure of the landscape does not change much. It is often just a hilly area with rare caves. And there are oddities: a cold planet, the thermometer shows -70 Celsius, and the green grass sways from the wind, there is no frost anywhere. Either exotic plants are accustomed to such conditions, or the location editor is still weird. Sometimes it is possible to determine the temperature conditions only by the sensor on the spacesuit: visually, that is +50 degrees, which is -50 - the same thing. There is also a claim to the same force of attraction: it is constant everywhere.

This raises an important question: what to do in the game? Developers have often said that the essence is free exploration, the search for the unknown. Allegedly, No Man's Sky allows you to feel like a real discoverer, a kind of Neil Armstrong, only even cooler. Romantic ideas about space exploration are shattered almost immediately: all you can do is collect resources. Although during expeditions to the moon, astronauts also fought not with lightsabers, but collected dust in test tubes.

The planets turn out to be surprisingly empty, and this is very disappointing at first and finally finishes when it becomes clear: such a situation will be on every "ball". You are waiting for at least some settlements, conversations with local inhabitants, interesting quests. And they just give you a randomly created surface with resources scattered on it. We split the cobblestone with a blaster, collected the iron, went to the red crystal, shot at it - now we have plutonium. And so all the time. You can get rich already on the starting planet, and there is no need to research the rest.

Do you think the space station in No Man's Sky is like the Citadel from Mass Effect? No matter how it is!

The elements themselves are needed to craft items, create upgrades, refuel engines and the like. Lucky to find a rare substance - fill it with inventory, bullet to the space station, sell and bathe in money. There, at the same time, you can purchase other resources, saving time on their extraction.

Do you think the space station in No Man's Sky is like the Citadel from Mass Effect - with hundreds of inhabitants, many compartments and interesting little things? No matter how it is: in each system there will be one large complex with parking for a couple of starships, a trading terminal and as much as one whole newcomer. Out of boredom, you can try to talk to him, only a sincere conversation does not add up: the dialogue is shown in the past tense in the form "I approach the creature, it looks at me suspiciously and starts waving its arms."

The same despondency awaits everywhere. There will definitely be some kind of research base where there is an improvement for a suit or ship. If you are really lucky, you will see a representative of the next life form. He will either give you some kind of upgrade again, or he will teach you a word from the vocabulary of his race. Learning the alien language, by the way, was also presented by the developers as a peculiar feature. But instead of a set of tasks or mini-games that help to learn new dialects, the aliens just give one word from time to time, and gradually a kind of phrasebook is formed.

The game has a formal goal - to get to the center of the universe. But this is not the main task, as such missions are not here. Travel between systems follows the same principle: gain resources, refuel the engine, make a hyperjump and find yourself in a new area of ​​the universe in order to gain resources and fly further.

This turns planetary exploration into a mechanical action. After visiting two, maximum three dozen objects, any desire to study them disappears. We landed, gathered resources around the spacecraft, checked in at the save point - that's it, you can go to a new planet. Hello Games has talked so much about research, but it's just pointless. You will not find secret messages, traces of civilizations, cities, memorable mountains, seas or rivers. Any planet from Interstellar, even a submerged one, will give odds to the local landscapes in beauty.

The situation could be radically corrected by multiplayer, but it is not in any form

From time to time, the hero is attacked by drones, which, apparently, are ordered to guard the wealth of the planet. Then the game turns into a primitive shooter. During space flights, you can also run into pirates, but it's better not to do this: shootouts are even more boring than wandering around the planets. Who would have thought that the life of a space explorer would be so bleak.

The situation could be radically corrected by multiplayer. Just imagine: researchers are roaming the planets, someone needs help (say, a person is dragged into a swamp), someone is fighting robots, another does not have enough resources to create a powerful upgrade, and you just need to empty your inventory. Representatives of Hello Games have repeatedly stated in plain text that the game will be able to see another user. They immediately said that the probability is very small: after all, there is an unthinkable number of planets, but if the stars are right, then you will meet the same wanderer as yourself.

The last nail in the coffin lid is a technical implementation. The graphics, as you can see in the screenshots, are not exactly brilliant. Destructible objects are also discouraging: they are made of voxels, not ordinary pixels. This method makes the modeling of objects faster and less demanding on iron resources, but these objects are completely devoid of physics. I caught sight of a huge cobblestone, you start to perforate it with a blaster. They pierced through, cut off the edges, but the upper half did not fall - it continues to hang in the air without support. Moreover, No Man's Sky often gives errors. Especially the PC version suffers from this, the forums are already full of complaints. But on the PlayStation 4, the game crashed several times.

After Mirror’s Edge: Catalyst, it seemed that there would be no more failed game this year. No Man's Sky managed to set a new benchmark. It's amazing how, in an endless stream of content, the project ended up so empty and monotonous. Billions of different planets - yes, of course, one is larger, the other is smaller, the third grass is higher, the fourth is lower. It is so easy to collect two or three billion, especially since they were not created manually.

“You are just a machine, just an imitation of life. Will the robot compose a symphony? Will the robot turn a piece of canvas into a masterpiece of art? "- the hero of Will Smith scolded the mechanism in the movie "I, Robot". I would like to present the same to the No Man's Sky generator: is there any point in such content, if there is nothing to do on the planets? Let there be 7-10 planets, but which you want to explore. Game for an hour or two, no more - then everything is repeated. No matter how much time you spend on it, you will not see anything new.

Onliner.by rating: 5 out of 10

We would like to thank the Gamepark store for providing us with a copy of the game for review.

Introduction

Since time immemorial, developers have been trying to recreate an infinite space, and the first attempt was realized back in 1984, when Elite was released. Despite this, there are not many truly large-scale video games. You might think of Eve Online, Spore, Elite Dangerous, and more recently Stellaris, but compared to Ubisoft's annual pipeline shooters, this is nothing at all.

Sean Murray, head of the Hello Games studio, who presented his game No Man's Sky to the whole world and has been sharing since 2013, fearlessly rushed to save the space sandbox genre. Endless world! 18 quintillion planets! Procedurally generated events!

Perhaps, at numerous conferences, Sean surpassed even Peter Molyneux himself in terms of the number of promises made per second. But did he manage to contain them all? Let's find out now!

A Space Odyssey by Sean Murray

First of all, one should not expect any unexpected plot twists from the NMS, since the script for the game was written, most likely, for show. The plot itself is simple - the main character (presumably a human) finds himself on a random planet next to his spaceship, the state of which leaves much to be desired.

The task for the next hour is to fix the vehicle and fly to the stars! Or more precisely, to the center of the galaxy (yeah, just like in Spore), but that's another story.

As promised by the developers, the entire universe from start to finish is procedurally generated. Absolutely similar planets cannot be found, but sometimes the flora and fauna of some of them will be repeated.

When completing the initial assignment, the only difficulty can be terrible brakes and periodic drawdowns up to 10 frames per second. In general, the optimization of No Man's Sky is probably the most disastrous aspect of the novelty, which can seriously ruin the game for a gamer.

Okay, in order to reduce the number of lags, you just need to tweak the settings a little, after which you can freely (with drawdowns up to 35 FPS, for example) start exploring the vast Universe.

To repair a starship, it is enough to find, collect and apply the necessary resources to the damaged components of the ship. The interface is not as obvious as we would like, but you can understand all the intricacies in the first ten to twenty minutes after the start of the game.

And if we close our eyes to all the technical flaws, it is interesting to do it. As you know, everything is learned by comparison, and No Man's Sky, oddly enough, is very similar to the recent The Solus Project, only more global and without any complex puzzles. Judge for yourself - there are suit indicators (temperature, health), there is a protagonist - apparently, an ordinary representative of the species Homo Sapiens, which ends up on another planet, and there is a huge game world that amazes with its size, which can and should be explored.

Of course, for a tech-savvy gamer to understand that all this is procedurally generated on the fly, it will not be difficult, but the creation of Hello Games still leaves a very strong impression. Especially when you open the map for the first time and for ten minutes just look at thousands of stars passing by and realize your insignificance in this huge world. Such sensations were once provided by the magnificent Spore, and No Man's Sky is clearly following the path of its mastermind.

Thanks to the network part, it is possible to see if this system was opened by some other player. Another thing is that from the very beginning you can be thrown to the galactic line on Easter cakes and then the star systems discovered by other people can not be seen for a long time (or even never).

Moreover, NMS is a real sandbox that is not going to lock you in close plot frames like Starbound for a long time - you just move forward, exploring new worlds along the way.

The spirit of a space pioneer is fully present, especially when you scan the local flora and fauna with the help of the built-in visor (literally every pebble has its own name!), And then give the planet some unique name.

Despite all the scandals associated with the missing multiplayer, No Man's Sky periodically connects to the network and downloads your new discoveries, which can be given any name.

Nobody will let you just move between star systems, and the game here throws a minimal challenge. For example, to make a hyperjump, you will need to launch a hyperdrive, which in turn is powered by special warp cells.

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As someone may have already guessed, these same warp cells will have to be crafted from items found on nearby planets using a special tool under the general name "multitool". In this case, it is worth considering the subtleties of certain planets: on some it is difficult to find the vital isotope Tamium-9, so sometimes it is better to fly to the space base without wasting time, where you can often buy everything you need and get rid of unnecessary things.

Okay, the warp cell is assembled, let's fly further towards the adventures of the center of the galaxy! Such monotonous gameplay may seem boring to someone in words, but believe me, it is difficult to break away from the game after at least two hours of continuous gathering of resources and creating the necessary items. Someone may consider such space empty, but who said that this is not good for the game? After all, the novelty gives unique sensations, similar to those that you experience when you first find yourself in another country: everything is very incomprehensible and everyone speaks unfamiliar your language, but this only makes it more interesting.

Each star system has a space station where you can stock up on things you need and talk to an alien. Well, and, if possible, break open the closed doors with a special master key called "Atlas Pass".

Initially, the hero does not know alien languages ​​in general, and in order to at least understand what foreigners are saying to him, he will have to look for special "knowledge stones" on the planets, with the help of which the character learns new words. Well, tell me, where else was such a chip?

Gradually, this world begins to become more understandable, when half of the words are learned, and the hold of the ship is filled to capacity with the resources necessary to continue the journey. And then the question arises: what next?

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However, the answer is found quickly - to follow an unobtrusive storyline, which seems to be the case, but it seems to be not. On the other hand, no one will forcibly drag you somewhere - do not forget that this is a free and stress-free game where you can easily land on any planet and discover something new for yourself.

The scope for research on planets is huge - some of them can be explored for hours.

Just do not forget that some planets are protected by the so-called "guards", which will not allow anyone to just collect valuable resources. True, it will not be difficult to cope with them, and if a character suddenly dies by accident, then his clone will simply appear at the nearest station, albeit without some of the equipment.

And all this contributes primarily to the fact that No Man's Sky does not claim to be a serious space simulator of the Elite level, so it is very simple to control the ship here - the standard W, A, S, D layout, plus the left mouse button for shooting (without battles in space not done) and "space" for fast movements.

That is why the game should be viewed as a meditative, beautiful entertainment that will keep you for a very long time. But only on one condition.

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The planets are not as empty as it might seem at first glance - there is a chance to stumble upon such alien monoliths.

You must be very lucky. Seriously, otherwise one day there will be a bug that ruins your entire game. And the problem here is not even in the lags mentioned above - crashes here also happen and sometimes turn out to be critical. For example, there is a high probability of getting stuck in one of the systems just because the game crashes when you hyperjump.

The specified system requirements also do not correspond to reality: Intel Core i3, 8 GB of RAM and a video card of the level of GeForce GTX 480 will only be enough to run the game at the lowest settings, and even then with brakes and periodic crashes to the desktop. Yes, the game sometimes (the key word here) gives out fantastic beauty of the footage, but this cannot serve as at least some kind of excuse for such an outrage.

The generator does not often throw up interesting planets, but when this happens, then on one of these you just want to stay and live, having scored all space adventures at once.

Conclusion

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No matter what anyone says, but No Man's Sky is a victim of marketing, and not the failure of the year, which many are trying to imagine it to be. Yes, with multiplayer and curve optimization it turned out badly, but in all other respects the novelty is an excellent game in which you can "hang" for a long time, just traveling between numerous planets. But just before meeting you need to clearly understand what you want from the game. Cool plot? Spectacular space battles? The most realistic mechanics of interstellar flight? In this case, pass by, all this is not here.

But if you just want to feel like a space discoverer, flying across the endless galaxy, then No Man's Sky will come in handy .;

No Man's Sky is coming to PlayStation 4 today - the game that the media has already dubbed the largest project of the year and will be released on PC on 12 August.

The game is a simulator of space exploration, with many randomly generated star systems.

The developers approached the project ambitiously and created an open world of a size that the gaming industry did not yet know.

In this regard, some expect that No Man's Sky will be a revolution in the gaming industry, and some - just another "zilch" with many crookedly realized promises.

“I have explored huge planetary systems and interacted with countless alien races - and for all this I did not have to leave the room. It is a shame that I do not fulfill my youthful dreams of space - to truly explore space or at least visit the moon.

For such people, No Man's Sky is intended.

In this game, you are a solo explorer with a spaceship, mining tools and huge ambition. Forget rattling rocket launches and long flights - your star cruiser takes off from planets in seconds.

You are not a fearless Space Marine who must "save the galaxy" and you are not a group of people who must stop an "ancient evil".

There is no complex backstory or classic plot here. You are not a fearless Space Marine who must "save the galaxy" and you are not a group of people who must stop an "ancient evil".

You are just a researcher and your only goal, if you want to follow it, is to get to the center of the universe.

What happens when you get there? Your any guess will be as good as mine. I spent 12 hours playing No Man’s Sky, and as far as I understand, I’m still very far from the center of the universe.

Instead, I spent a lot of time moving from one planet to another and stopping at trading posts to exchange rare resources and make money.

In general, the game works like this:

1. You appear on an alien planet, you have a spaceship and your first goal is to upgrade your shuttle.
2. What for? This will allow you to penetrate into more distant points of the universe.
3. But this planet is also beautiful. Maybe you should study it first?

Such moments in No Man's Sky are exciting.

Like any good explorer, the protagonist (you) has a scanner to identify and record alien life (flora and fauna). Interestingly, there are no "experience points" traditional for such gathering.

Every plant or animal I discovered was uploaded to the main server. Thus, I contributed my piece to the general library of the Universe, like other players.

This concept of community and collectivity of gamers (although we have not met) permeates the entire game.

There are 18 quintillion planets here - that's 18,000,000,000,000,000,000.

No Man's Sky is the largest open world game ever. There are 18 quintillion planets here - that's 18,000,000,000,000,000,000 planets. Each of them can be studied and a huge number of them have their own unique lives. And all this space is not mapped.

As much as you try to describe the size of No Man's Sky, it would be an understatement, it is so huge.

There was also a place here for star battles - space pirates do not sleep and want to rob you. There is also intelligent life on alien planets, which, in my experience, is rarely hostile.

There is even a robo-police here: the more animals you kill and collect more resources, the more "hot" target you are for them.

Do you want to share with the police? Your right, you can knock them down. But just like Grand Theft Auto, she will return with reinforcements.

Like this guy straight out of Star Wars:

But battles are not the main thing in the game. Yes, you can "pump" and stuff your ship with weapons, but to be honest, the battles here are not very interesting.

Research is much more interesting.

I have managed to study dozens of planets and have not met a single one similar.

I managed to study dozens of planets and have not met a single one similar. Some are inhabited by strange sea creatures, some by mushroom-like animals. There were also empty planets or completely composed of ice.

Moreover, each of them has underground systems that are waiting to be studied. Many also have structures with unknown treasures or mysteries. For example, why did an alien traveler die here many centuries ago?

A sense of mystery and expectation of a miracle permeates the entire game. It has chained me to the computer all weekend and I certainly can't wait to get back into that atmosphere again. "

This is one of the most significant events of this year. The game from indie studio Hello Games may well immortalize itself in a game design tutorial as the largest game created as of August 2016. But this tutorial should be called something like this: "How not to make video games."

Hello Games took us all one step further towards procedurally generated video games, as their creation takes less than 4 gigabytes. Who knew the result would be so bad? There is no smell of revolution here, because the game turned out to be corny boring for most gamers.

Indeed, despite the seeming atypicality, No Man's Sky is a rather boring game, and to understand this, you absolutely do not need to visit all 18 quintillion planets that the developers are so proud of. funny few hours.

Start of the game and generation of planets

No Man's Sky begins very vigorously and perfectly adjusts to the desired mood. Around the endless expanses of an unknown planet, there is nothing useful in a backpack, all equipment has become unusable after a ship crash. This world will become a sandbox for the player until he understands how to collect basic resources and create useful items from them.

During the passage of this preparatory stage, the game naturally amazes: here everything is really created in a random way, without any logic familiar to us, earthlings. No one knows where the new player in No Man's Sky will end up - on a lifeless radioactive cobblestone, on a blooming and smelling paradise abode or anywhere else. The first two hours are real magic.

Each new item that the player repairs during the training gives him new opportunities. For example, the scanner allows you to inspect the area for resources and points of interest, and with the help of a jump pack you can bend around uneven terrain. At these moments, you want to forget about everything and just run forward towards adventure.

There are a lot of things on the planets: vegetation, rocks, caves, optionally animals and plants. There are also objects of artificial origin: abandoned settlements, crash sites, factories run by aliens and robots, mysterious obelisks that store the knowledge of alien races, trading posts and much more.

It is especially surprising how cleverly the developers arranged their interaction with intelligent aliens and their electronic terminals. All messages are submitted in an unknown language, which at first cannot be translated.

You have to choose options at random. However, as you study special stones of knowledge that are ubiquitous on the planets, you can add new words to the dictionary, and then the speech of the next talking turtle gradually acquires meaning.

However, due to the fault of not the best localization, this element of the game evokes mixed emotions, because the translated words in the messages do not agree with each other. Instead of "hello, friend," you have to read something like "friend greeting" with a sour expression.

Gameplay of No Man's Sky

As cool as the first planet is, you still have to leave it in order to move forward. The first take-off is very promising: a real fire of enthusiasm is burning in the chest of the newly-made researcher.

However, the way out is not guaranteed to him, because outside the planet the player is waiting for a rather empty system, in which there is nothing but a star, other planets, many drifting asteroids and a space station.

After visiting the latter and talking to a single alien caretaker, the player receives a diagram of a hyper-engine. With it, you can move from one system to another.

As such, the game does not have a goal, although after the first hyper-jump, there is a meeting with a certain entity, which calls itself Atlas. This mysterious acquaintance only takes place to instruct the player to fly to the center of the galaxy. What is there is the main intrigue of the game, which by and large has no impact on the gameplay. It is quite possible that the developers will just make fun of the player in the style of Adams.

- Forty-two! shrieked Lunkkuool. - And that's all you can say after seven and a half million years of work?

I checked everything very carefully, - said the computer, - and I declare with all certainty that this is the answer. It seems to me that if we are to be absolutely honest with you, then the whole point is that you yourself did not know what the question was.

- The answer to the main question of life, the universe and all that in the book by Douglas Adams "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy"

Regardless of the goal, the gameplay will include the same set of actions: landing on the planet, collecting resources, searching for buildings with the completion of monosyllabic quests with three answer options, selling everything unnecessary at the station, creating improvements and flying to another system.

The moment you become aware of this constantly repeating algorithm, all magic dissolves. It doesn't matter which planet the landing is made on, everything happens the same: collecting resources for the next improvement of equipment, weapons or a ship, searching for special places with valuable technologies and artifacts for sale, and, ultimately, taking off and then jumping somewhere else. And so on ad infinitum!

Yes, of course, there are some differences, and sometimes they even affect the gameplay. For example, the planet may have aggressive fauna or even acid rain. Sometimes space pirates are found in space, and then you can immerse yourself in an absolutely unicellular "post-fire" without any variation. All this does not affect the gameplay, it only stretches it a little, forcing the player to distract from the endless "farming".

Collect resources to improve equipment that will speed up resource gathering! Upgrade weapons to quickly deal with robots that guard resources in order to collect them! This is a revolution!

Illusion game, screen game

It is the monotony that completely kills the urge to explore, turning the gameplay into a meaningless routine. In this, No Man's Sky went even further than t, because the game Mojang at least gives you the opportunity to create something, invent entertainment for yourself, while Hello Games does not provide any alternatives.

Even trading stations and outposts on planets are just an illusion. Traders do not trade with each other, and the stations themselves get their goods literally out of thin air. Therefore, there is simply no meaningful trade in this game, and there cannot be, because the goods are not interconnected by production chains. Of course, no one expected Hello Games to create a realistic economy, as, for example, in. But this "illusion" of what is happening extends to almost everything that is in this game.

The situation could have been saved by multiplayer, and then joint travel in the presence of a voice connection could significantly extend the pleasure of the game. Alas, the developers abandoned the idea of ​​a cooperative game, and they did it at the very last moment, because after the release in Europe, boxes with the game were discovered, on which an icon with a network component was bashfully glued. It is quite possible that many bugs at the start of sales are related precisely to rework at a later stage of development.

The game, which, according to the promises of the developers, was supposed to surprise the player all the time, stops doing it after a few hours. Dialogues with aliens are repeated, the buildings on the planets are the same from time to time, and interest in exploring the planets finally disappears, because they have to do the same thing on them.

Comparing with other "sandboxes", one can with horror come to the conclusion that "revolutionary" No Man "s Sky does nothing at all except monotonous exploration of planets and gathering resources.

Graphics and technical performance

If in terms of gameplay the game definitely did not take place, then with the graphics everything is a little more complicated. On the one hand, Hello Games was able to bring early concepts to life and created a very pleasing visual style. Often there are very beautiful views on planets that you just want to capture and show to someone.

On the other hand, the range of drawing in the PlayStation 4 version is simply no - objects appear at a distance of 15-20 meters, and everything that is further turns into a mess of acid colors.

At the same time, the developers have not been able to implement 60 frames per second, although they have repeatedly mentioned their intention to do so. It is very disappointing to see this on a platform where there is one, which, by the way, also works at 30 fps and often demonstrates very large spaces.

In addition to weak graphics, the release version of No Man's Sky could boast of an abundance of bugs. The developers have already released three patches that fixed the most annoying crashes and glitches, but they did not solve all the problems.

Crashes on PS4 have been repeatedly recorded, which is very rare. How it happened that Sony allowed such a raw product to appear in its store is completely incomprehensible.

The game's release on PC was not much better due to terrible optimization. Indeed, 30 fps on PS4 is a fairy tale compared to what PC owners have experienced. Do not believe the system requirements, which include Intel Core i3 and Nvidia GTX, because the game works disgustingly even on the i7 in conjunction with the GTX 970. It simply cannot be called counterfeit.

Control and sound

Perhaps these are the only entities to which it is difficult to make serious claims. First of all, I would like to thank the 65daysofstatic team for a decent work on the soundtrack, which gives the game a good atmosphere. The rest of the sounds that can be heard on planets and in space are perceived neutrally, be it the rustle of acid rain or the cry of some outlandish creature.

With the controls, everything is also quite acceptable: playing on the gamepad is quite comfortable, but this is mostly due to the fact that the game does not require anything at all, except for navigation and pressing a couple of buttons. Continuing to talk about control, one cannot fail to note the fact that the developers were clearly inspired when creating the interface of their game. It is not only similar, it is almost identical, which raises some questions.

Stop, I'll get off!

Hello Games deliberately tricked players into talking about things that weren't actually in the game.

For example, lead developer Sean Murray deliberately misinformed the gaming community by repeatedly confirming the existence of multiplayer. However, just before the release, something went wrong, and in the end there is not even a cooperative for two.

No Man's Sky is the biggest disappointment of recent years. After all these interviews with the developers, after all the enticing videos, we got a techno-demo with minimal functionality, which is definitely not worth the 4000 that ask for it on the PlayStation 4 or 2000 which the game is on Steam.

It is worth buying only if you are not afraid of the prospect of dying of boredom. But it's still better to visit some livelier galaxy.