Recent reviews by Juice

One of the best indie games ever! Just cannot put it down!

1ST PUBLIC REVIEW!

EDIT: Quick tips, left click to enter menu's, right click to exit them. Press E to craft an item while in the inventory menu (that took me like 10 minutes to figure out).

Ok, for those having issues running the game and getting 30 FPS, go into your options, and turn off the cap to FPS! It defaults to 30! Also, turn off VSYNC if you want higher than 60 FPS. After I did that, the game runs really smooth for me!

The game is a great buy! So many ppl are rating it negative just because they haven't discovered how to optimize their settings.

No Man’s Sky has the potential of a game that might consume your life. There have been jokes on the internet that a single player will need 584 billion years to go to every single planet and explore it fully. Jokes aside, planets are diverse and interesting – they range from pleasant and colorful ones, teeming with life and vegetation to depressing, barren, dark-colored dull ones who have pretty much no life, but usually sport lots of resources or even curiosities that can be sold for huge buck. Don’t get slobbering over the heaps of valuable stuff you are going to find though – the universe is just as dynamic and shall we say “well-populated”- you will see ships flying around, there are numerous space stations where you can discover new technologies and trade for goods or even ships that dock with it, but then you also have space pirates, who will readily pounce on any ship carrying valuable cargo. It is then up to you whether to fight or run. Thankfully, even if you die on the ground or in space, your items are recoverable… But your pride is not. No Man’s Sky will remind you quite often that you should not go biting more than you can chew – and for that matter, you should not be out biting stuff before you’ve grown proper teeth. And save at any point in the vicinity that you see. Just in case.

I was very pleased to see the diversity in everything in the game – from flora and fauna to space ships. The developers went for “lego-like” species that are “built” by pieces – and the variety of those pieces makes the alien lifeforms and ships more unique – and the combinations are plentiful. I know for a fact that it will be lots of fun exploring and naming every single thing you see – be it a biped, quadruped, 12 footed, writhing, jumping, big, small, mammal, fish, whatnot! And then, when you have made enough money, it will be even more fun going shopping for space ships. They have numerous varying models, colors, features, systems, cargo slots, including a different looking cockpit.

Thankfully, there are multiple ways to make money in the game in order to procure a said ship. There are many activities that will net you “Units” or Space Bucks, as players usually like to call them. You can sell found curiosities and resources on the galactic market; upload your discoveries (planets, flora, fauna) on the galactic network, or find a dangerous planet with lots of high-value stuff and fight your way to riches, as you will constantly be under the threat of being discovered by sentinel drones, space pirates, and other ill-minded entities.

Interestingly enough, it doesn’t end here. As you are exploring, you will find knowledge stones – or structures left by various civilizations on different planets. As you interact with them, you will slowly start to piece together their language and eventually be able to interact with them and understand them fully. It’s going to take plenty of time, but then again, it is also going to be fun. And did I mention that there are multiple languages for the different species as well? Yep, even more stuff to do in this game.

As far as the story goes, there was this guy who spent 13 000 dollars to somehow procure the game earlier than the others. According to his words, rushing through the game, he finished the main story line in about 35 hours. To my mind, this is a good value for a 60 dollar/euro game, because I know for a fact that I will take my sweet time exploring, discovering and building stuff.

Sadly, as with many other big games, it is not all rainbows and unicorns out there. So let’s take a look at the stuff people might seriously DISLIKE about the game.

First and foremost, is the tedium. No Man’s Sky is not for people who expect to be showered with action and pew-pew stuff early on in the game. You will need to do a lot of mining, building, exploring, and money-making before you get to that point. Then, when you get to that point, you will need to do even more of that – because most of the equipment on your ship or exo-suit runs on materials – and you need to regularly procure them in order for your gear to function. This turns the game into a perpetual mine-build-progress-mine-build-progress loop, as you don’t want to find yourself stranded somewhere without a crucial resource. This is what the game expects of you, and if you can’t handle the tedium, it is likely not for you.

Secondly, the game runs in real time, which makes battles a lot harder, especially if you get into one unprepared. There is nothing worse than any weapon running out of juice. If this case, you need to reload it with some the materials you mined – and since everything happens in real time, you will get shot multiple times while desperately clicking through your inventory menu, trying to rearm. This is valid for both ground and space combat – so in essence, the game tells you “be prepared, or suffer the consequences”. If you are not prepared, the game will look unreasonably difficult for you, and this will most likely take most of the fun out of it. So if you are not ready to deal with such stuff, do not buy the game.

Thirdly, as I was watching the various streams to further my knowledge of the game, I discovered a number of… pet peeves that many people had with the game. Let me list some of them: tedious gameplay, no customizable ships, no player housing, inevitably similar progression through the game regardless of the numerous planets, no physics, bad space battles, multiple bugs on the PS4, multiple crashes on the PS4, and the most glaring problem of them all, which I also find unforgiving – you CANNOT SEE EACH OTHER IN THE GAME. You can see the stuff that other players have named, but even if they are standing next to each other, they cannot interact with one another. I sure as hell hope this gets fixed in the future, or it would be a really damn shame.

Conclusion: I would thoroughly recommend this game to people who love space exploration and do not mind effectively “living” in this game, as you will need to procure everything and progress all by yourself. The message this game is trying to deliver is very much that “the universe is your playground” – and you get to do just that, the way you want. However, if you are unable to slog through games that thrive on repetitiveness, maybe even borderline grinding, then No Man’s Sky is most certainly not for you.

yes!

horrible. Read online help after purchase that if you have a USB headset, then the software will sound like a robot.