This review includes the Day One patch which includes the following core gameplay revisions:

• Much more diverse creatures in terms of ecology and planet densities.
• Addition of ruined satellites (moons), low atmosphere, and hazardous planets on extreme levels. Extreme hazards may include blizzards and dust storms.
• Improved terrain generation that allows formation of caves up to 128m tall. Geometric anomalies are also added as well as underwater erosion that develops sea beds.
• Slew of spaceship variety per star system and are available to purchase. There are also several changes and additions, as well configurations, of ship attributes.
• “Three Paths”—a path that a player can follow through the game on fresh save. The choices taken by the player in early game will have a significant impact later and the overall experience of the game.
• Algorithm changes in universe generation: planets moved locations, environments changed biomes, galaxies altered shapes, greater variety than the vanilla game.
• Trading system is now more complex as star systems and planets now has priorities of wants and needs. These wants and needs are based off galactic economy.
• Ship inventory is expanded with five times more size per slot. Suit inventories more than doubled in storage. Trading is re-balanced across the galaxy. Trade exploits now removed.
• Creatures now has its own diet basing on the planet they reside and the climate they are subjected on. Feeding the creatures correctly will now have different results per species like creatures mining resources for you, protecting the player, domestication into pets, or alerting the player to rare loots or defecating valued resources.
• Hazard protection recharging needs rare resources now. Shielding shards are tweaked to be useful again. Storm surges are fatal. Entire hazard protection and suit upgrades are shoehorned.
• Stat changes all around in upgrades especially the exo-suit and the ship. New upgrades are also added.
• Auto-aim and weapon aim are changed to feel more “gentle”. Sentinels will now alert other sentinels if they survive a battle long enough.,
• Advanced techniques are added and has been introduced—brake drifting and critical hits. Bounty missions appear. Large scale battles also occur.
• Infinite warp cell exploits and rare goods trading exploit are nuked out of the game.
• Resolution on several low repro crashes especially when a player is warped further than 256 light years in one session by nuking the exploit as detailed above.
• Star system scans available. These scans show the player what other players has discovered during Galactic Map flight. Ship scans are now available.
• Labs added in Space Stations as well bars, trade rooms, and hydroponic labs.
• Pop-in reduced when flying over terrain. Shadow artifacts are also minimized.
• James Swallow, writer on Deus Ex, has rewritten The Atlas path.

No Man’s Sky is one of the most anticipated game this year with its unique gameplay and interesting premise. Players take a role of an explorer wandering a galaxy of 18 quintillion planets. The entire game is all about exploring, and journey into the center of the galaxy. You can ignore this end game and just things that you want and get lost into a galaxy far, far away.

Freeform exploration rewards the player, even though it is does not have an explicit objective. It gives players more resources, access to more outposts, ancient ruins, creatures, in every planet that they come in contact with. The opportunities that will appear for the player is always unpredictable. Mining space resources and selling them later in trade posts will net anyone the good life—new spaceships, new tools, new things.

It does, however, become repetitive. The peanut butter phase, where a game gets into a slow grind because players need to hit certain requirement in order to progress but can only get it so slowly, is heavily present here in No Man’s Sky. The universe is huge; there are too many planets to explore and too large distance to cover. This game can wear somebody down.

The sense of scale and new worlds to discover is understandably hostile and shattering for people who wants to go to the end line quickly. No Man’s Sky does not give this immediately. It is surgical, methodical, almost as robotic as the Sentinels. Gameplay is fine, totally, controls are fine. The game is just too big for its own sake and the amount of post-release support might even add up more scenarios and gameplay elements that will definitely drag down anyone who just wants to casually play this game.

This is not for the people who wants a shoot-bang action-packed game. This is for the people who had been long thirsting for a space simulator left by Freelancer and Wing Commander. And at the same time, for the people who does not one to be buried into the ridiculously deep Eve Online game. There is a middle ground, and No Man’s Sky fills it the most.

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