Review : "No Man´s Sky" - Game by Hello Games

In recent years, finding an interesting and somewhat different game experience has not been all that easy. I mainly play on my PlayStation 4 and my choices reflect that, even if some very nice games appear on other platforms. I just like the comfort of the sofa and my 55 inch LED :-) I have always had a thing for the games that venture off the main track. I get tired of the reworkings of the same game genres. I can hardly play an FPS or an MMORPG anymore... they are just so alike and formulaic.

(Scr.shot : Delilahtw @ reddit)

There is one kind of game that I remember having wanted since forever, a game where you can go anywhere at anytime, to any planet in a whole galaxy, completely open no strings attached, yet with some interwoven story to keep the interest up. This is one of those "it will probably never happen" kind of ideas, and yet, unbeknownst to me untill late last year, it had actually been made in 2016.

That game is “No Man´s Sky”

The game is huge ... and I mean HUGE like in galactically huge. You are dropped on what seems like a desert planet and you need to start finding resources to stay alive. The feeling of being completely lost in an alien world is very much present, and you only get a bare bone help to guide you in what to do and how to do it. You slowly set up a small camp and then start to venture further out in the strange landscape.

But it is both dangerous and confusing, yet mesmerizing and intriguing what you may find and the awesome views you may encounter. As your sense of the place expands you soon get to leave the planet, to find better and more prosperous places to grind for materials and artifacts, meeting strange beings on space stations and much more. The game "space" expands with your experience of it and the time over which you get acquainted with the game mechanics. They can be a little weird at first but as you get to know them It starts to make sense.

I get some of the same feelings of playing this game as I did with the old Battlezone, Freespace and particularly Mass Effect ... Still the game is very much its own style and even if the planets are not that different in fauna and flora etc. They have sort of got inspiration from the best of what could be obvious inspirations and gelled it into a massive galactic adventure, that you can probably spend years exploring.

The game apparently was mega hyped in the years leading up to, but went down like a Lead Zeppelin after a very controversial release The developers promised much more than they could keep and NMS came and went very much unnoticed. But the developers have been busy the last three years and have patched many many times and the game is completely reworked and improved beyond anyone's wildest dreams. And every patch has been free.

The next big patch BEYOND will be released in the summer 2019 and I am certainly looking forward to what that may bring to the "universe".

A highly recommended game, but an acquired taste :-)