No Man’s Sky (Review)
No Man’s Sky is an oddity. In the years leading up to its release, very little about the actual game was allowed to sit still. Every trailer looked like a slightly different promise, and by the time the disc arrived in August the argument was already louder than the soundtrack.
Played on its own terms, the opening hours are properly magical. You scrape a ship together, you name things that do not need names, and the sky does that thing games almost never manage, which is feel big. Hello Games has built a toy universe that is lovely to drift through when you stop asking it for a checklist.
The trouble starts when the drift becomes the whole job. Mining, charging, warping, scanning. The resources have fiddly names and the creatures blur together. Combat is a shrug. The shared adventure a lot of us thought we had been shown is not waiting out there. You are alone, and after a while you notice.
That loneliness can be the point. There are evenings where No Man’s Sky is closer to a walk than a game, and those are the evenings worth having. There are also evenings where you realise you have spent forty minutes topping up a life-support bar so you can walk to another rock.
It is not the con some headlines want, and it is not the generation-defining epic the E3 sizzle reel sold. It is a strange, thin, beautiful hike across too many planets, made by a studio that swung harder than it could hit. We like it more than the first angry night suggested, and less than the pre-order deserved.