The single most hotly anticipated game of the year – and perhaps the last few years – is No Man’s Sky. It released on PlayStation 4 last Tuesday, but yesterday it finally hit PC, where we will cover it. After playing our first few hours, does it look worth the wait, or should it have stayed in no man’s land? Let’s find out in our No Man’s Sky First Opinion.
The first thing to note is that the game is a port of the PS4 version, and some of the design decisions don’t transition well. For example, you never just click an icon, you click and hold until a little meter fills up. This makes navigating menus a lot more frustrating than it needs to be. The game also asks you to use right click as your back button in menus, which feels counter-intuitive.
The second, and more glaring thing you’ll notice is that this is not a very good port. Framerate drops, stuttering, poor texture streaming and input lag give the game an unfinished feel. You can improve a lot of the framerate issues by raising the frame rate cap on the graphics options menu above 60, but this is a clumsy workaround.
As for the actual game, I’m not yet sure what to make of it. I’m in my second star system, but it feels pretty much exactly like my first. In fact, if you took away that I named some of the planets in my first system, I don’t think I could possibly tell the two of them apart. The planets all have a similar look and feel so far with muddy, color-bleached textures and generally unexciting terrain. In truth, I have come across a handful of interesting sights, but if you asked me out of the blue about my favorite place or animal I’ve found, I couldn’t recall any that stand out enough to mention.
There is a huge galaxy still to explore before we render our Final Opinion, so I’ll get back to that. Look for that, or perhaps a Review in Progress in the near future on AAGH.