What’s unique about firing up No Man’s Sky initially, is your procedurally-generated planet is yours. At least from the outset. It’s an interesting game so far, with a lot going for it. And I mean a lot.

Recently I’ve been playing Subnautica from Natural Selection developer Unknown Worlds, which drops you -- as a lone survivor -- on an alien world entirely covered in water when your spaceship crashes. The ship itself is unsalvageable, and all you have to work from is a tiny escape pod where you need to scour the ocean depths around you for natural resources so your youbeaut Fabricator can make you advanced equipment. Eventually, through enough resource gathering you can build motorised underwater vehicles such as the SeaGlide, Cyclops and more, as well as an expanded base to survive. It’s still only in Early Access on Steam and in Preview on Xbox One, but there’s a huge amount of promise, and I’ve been digging the shit out if it.



No Man’s Sky reminds me a lot of Subnautica. You gather resources, which you can use to craft specific items, or repair damaged parts of your ship. These resources are scattered about an immensely-sized planet, and aren’t always that easy to find. Certain planets present danger, while others are either neutral, passive or friendly. On my planet, which I renamed “Chuzzwazza”, I could readily go about my business with little-to-no violent hindrance. There’s a fine thread to follow as you enter the game-universe, but it’s also very easy to ignore and just do your own thing. The problem with both of these options though, is neither offers enough driving meat out of the gate. There’s no real call-to-action for the player, and survival -- which is the CTA for Subnautica, is really easy in No Man’s Sky, so that’s not it.

You do have tasks though. Firstly, you’ll need to fix your smashed ship up, which means you’ll need to gather the correct resource ingredients to craft the parts your ship is missing. Going out into the game-world on foot early on, can lead you to numerous places of interest, and set you very far from your ship. You don’t run very fast and have a stamina meter that has a cooldown. You will need to apply gathered resources to things like your life support and space suit as well, so the opening part of the game can take you a while, especially if you’re easily distracted. Once you have your ship, however, life is much easier from a traversal perspective, but because the game’s planets are procedurally generated, there’s no map, per se. Instead, you find beacons which require a crafted “Bypass Key” and from these you can search for Monoliths, Colonial Outposts, Transmissions and Shelters. You can only choose the one, but you can use as many Bypass Keys as you like to use each beacon as often as you like.



I’ve currently only visited two worlds, both a star system apart (well, actually multiple worlds in each system, but you know what I mean). And what you do find is similarity in the Points of Interest the game serves up. The environments always differ, and despite the minimalist nature of art-direction throughout, it’s quite gorgeous to look at. And a technical marvel really, when you consider the size of the playspace and what’s going on under the hood. But the same beacons and the same POIs exist across worlds, which may or may not tie to that thread mentioned earlier (there is a sort of story in place, but it’s wafer thin). It would be nice to know that diversity in alien contact and on other alien worlds grows the deeper you get into the game, but so far it has a pattern that it follows, despite where I am in my known universe.

Travel, be it on foot, or at FTL, is measured in time. So your POIs float on-screen and aiming your reticule at them reveals how much time before you reach the destination. Fortunately you can use various speeds from on-foot to inside your ship to close the timeframes for location arrival. Interestingly, you could probably set your ship on course to a planet that will take seven real-world hours to reach on basic thrusters, and just leave your game running while you go off and do… well, whatever. However, you can close gaps like that with greater speed so something that might have taken an hour, will now just take 20 seconds. It’s an excellent traversal system, which leaves how you go about it, up to you.



In my time with the game, what I’ve enjoyed doing most is learning alien languages. The aforementioned Monoliths are a good place to start for this, though scattered around alien planets are Knowledge stones where you’ll learn a word in a specific alien tongue (at most Monoliths there are multiple Knowledge stones. You can also earn words off aliens you’ve made friends with by trading in things like Carbon, or by pleasing them. It’s varied in how you do this, and because so much of the game’s exposition is presented to you in another language (largely written), it’s exciting every time a sentence reveals one or two words in English, helping you to understand and make better decisions when liaising with your new alien pals.

At its core though, No Man’s Sky is a fantastical mining sim. You have a mining weapon which extracts resources from plants, animals, rocks and more. When travelling in space, you can shoot asteroids and gather the resources they spill forth too. All of this is done to both fuel yourself, your ship and to be able to trade, craft and barter. There’s a marketplace at select locations, where you can sell and buy items, and your ship and suit both have finite inventory spots. You can upgrade these, or even buy new ships, but these are costly. On planets, if you’re lucky enough to come across a crashed ship, be sure to compare it to yours and grab any with bigger inventory spots than yours, because you will run out of space very, very early.



So far, I’m enjoying the game. I would love more interaction with more intelligent life, but the sparsity of coming into contact with aliens does make it exciting when it happens. You can also interact with local wildlife by feeding them, or killing them -- entirely up to you. On all planets you will see little drones flying around, and if you destroy too much of the environment while they’re around, they will attack. I’ve only died once, and that’s because I shot up a Freighter in space and its owners came in and attacked me. I managed to take one of them out, but the space combat takes a little while to get used to, leaving me now working towards getting more blueprints, a bigger ship and just generally becoming more powerful.

My biggest concern at this stage is getting tired of the grinding required and losing interest because of the size of the game, and that it’s procedural, so there’s a lack of persistency. And there’s only so much joy I can take out of naming planets and systems after Futurama planets and systems (Omicron Persei 8, for example). But, I will keep at it because it has me caught in its gameplay loop, I just worry the completionist in me is going to be ground to a halt because of the scale.