Now that the dust has settled, the expectations meted, can we all accept that No Man’s Sky was an interesting and unique video game experience?
I doubt it. That’s fine I guess. Personally, I loved the time I spent in No Man’s Sky and it remains one of my favourite games of 2016.
I think this JB Hi-Fi review nails it.
Via Reddit
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35 responses to “A Very Good JB Hi-Fi Review Of No Man’s Sky”
i liked it for what it was, never got into the hate that surrounded it and will go back next update
Still going to leverage my hate for it – nothing more than a vertical slice of gameplay which as a whole has been better serviced by other games.
Exactly, it’s really not as unique as some people try and portray it as.
There is literally nothing I haven’t seen or played before.
I even accept that technically it’s a substantial achievement, but I also understand a mountain of turds is also impressive in its own way, but still just turds.
I’m still angry…….angry at myself for buying in to it. What we got as a full price release is criminal. If they’d only been more upfront with what was on offer, I may have supported them.
Yes, this too.
Before the appropriate anger and refund route, I turned to Hello Games for answers, the majority did.
We got nothing, not a single god damned thing aside from silence.
Worse still the apologists took the few toxic individuals and elevated them, placing all those with genuine concerns in to the same basket.
Even now they still bring up isolated and empty individuals as the “gamer” standard to diminish what really happened.
yeah but the best part was the support team with help geting the game started! they asked for my dx info, and msinfo so i sent them…. it has been 5 months game still doesnt work and i paid 60$ the only help i have gotten is sending them my info for no reason
That is a bloody disgrace, not even getting to experience the game at all.
Loved my time with the game and am really looking forward to the next update.
Really like it. Had a lot of fun wandering and exploring.
No, it’s not Elite, nor is it Minecraft. But it satisfies a different itch.
Same here. In a lot of ways, its still a beta, but theres enough there to satisfy an itch. Will be interesting to see how (and even if) it changes over the next year or so.
I didnt buy into the hype as much as many did, and it was only after the vitriol started spewing after launch that I went and looked back and saw where it all started. When I did, I thought a lot of the drama was created by various fans picking and choosing what information they wanted to rely on.
Not all, there is blame to be lumped on both HelloGames and Sony, but it was made far worse by the zero tolerance mentality of the community itself. A community that had made death threats to some reporters for the heinous crime of suggesting it might ship late.
It might not be everything that was promised, but this is still a unique Kotaku AU article.
Feeling misled by the use of the bullshot header image though; No Man’s Sky STILL never looks anything like that.
They accidentally coloured in 3 extra stars.
haha that review is from my store
I kind of understand the hate (that’s such bad state to be in over a game). But I enjoyed my experience with it — apart from the really bad self-promotion they did — very much appreciated the work that was put into the game by a small team. The soundtrack is still on my playlist, as I adore it.
Nice game. Still one of my favourites for chill-out playing. And let’s face it, with the weather we’ve been having lately, we could all do with some more chill.
Oh I fully expect Mass Effect Andromeda to probably attract some of the same awfulness that No Man’s Sky had to deal with, no question.
Yeah, expecting it myself. You know there will be a core of people screaming for the “disastrous” ending of ME3 to be addressed in the first 2.3 seconds.
Or they’ll just downvote it regardless because of the bumhurt they felt over that ending.
That awfulness was nothing more than fabricated narrative based on reactions from the vocal and toxic few and used as a weapon.
It’s disgusting that so many elevated the false narrative to encapsulate almost anyone who had a genuine complaint.
Oh I heard about the rage, I saw the tweets and saw the articles.
But when I entered discussions I found rightfully angry and frustrated people being called entitled brats and copping unneeded hate.
Im glad people enjoy it, I’m just sickened that two groups of people can use hate in such a way and that the majority of people are prone to these loud mouthed individuals who reduce everything to black and white.
That will always be my memory of No Mans Sky.
Didn’t follow the marketing hype, tried it out at release and found it to be pretty boring and lackluster.
I don’t tend to like adventure games where you just look at scenery though.
Yeah, I avoided the hype, picked it up because of the Kotaku article like two days before release where they wrote a little personal note in the review copy and I was persuaded by the author that it meant ‘good developers’. It’s shallow and empty and a waste of money, and the developers’ lies and subsequent silence are the mark of ‘fucking awful developers’, and whoever wrote that article will forever be on my shit list.
(edited for actual English)
Yep. It’s one thing for a game to be hyped and not live up to it…quite another for a game to just be bad.
It’s like how Fallout 4 wasn’t a great Fallout game, but it was still a pretty good RPG. All the criticisms against it were due to not giving as much choice as previous titles etc, but as a stand alone game it would have been great.
No Man’s Sky as a stand alone without the hype is pretty boring and average. I’m surprised how they managed to hype it up so much to begin with. The marketing team must have been better than the dev team.
I’m an odd one out when it comes to Fallout 4. I’ve played every Fallout game except Brotherhood of Steel and I think Fallout 4 is a great Fallout game, better than 3 was. Choices were less than they should have been though, I agree with that.
But yes, beneath the surface I just don’t find NMS a good game, or even a mediocre game. It’s a shell, a tech demo with no substance. Sure as fuck not an $80 title.
Lead photo for the article contains the crashed freighters which are not in the game. Let’s just think about that for a bit… To find a good photo for the article they used the promo material, not actual content. Still played the hell out of it, the first 20 hours is great but the contents is not what was on the box. If you’re looking for gameplay with meaningful progression you get more out of minecraft modpacks, made by amateurs, for free.
Luckily my backlog is so big that I still probably won’t get around to this for another 6 months. By then it’ll probably have been updated into something more resembling its final form, and be dirt cheap to boot.
Was a great game…..for about 10 hours until it dawns on you that it’s utterly pointless repetitive pap
I loved the planetary exploration side of things, although it could have done with a bit more variety in the aliens and the outpost designs you could find. Also the base design limitation was a bit of a kick to the nuts. The thing that let it down for me was the space side of things. There was no pacifist space exploration option, if you got targeted, you had to fight. The space stations always had the exact same interior regardless of where you were or who you were dealing with. The system exploration always consisted of rocks, rocks, more rocks and the 2-7 planets you could detect the moment you came out of hyperspace. There were only 2 weapon options for the spaceship, and frankly neither were particularly interesting, being variations of 2 of the 3 planetary weapons. The ships are all cookie-cutter variants based on 4 hulls per class, 4 wings per class, and 5 module addons per class. It felt like literally the only reason they gave you a spaceship was to get between the planets and to have somewhere to store everything, not with the intent of using it for actual space exploration or feeling any investment in the ship.
The game is dead and buried. It will never shake its disater of a launch. And given that there has been only 1 major update (player housing, Something no-one asked for) this game will die soon.
I have to admit I jumped on the hate bandwagon. By in the end when you are sold on the premise of endless possibilities of procedural generation and yet everything starts to look the same not but 5 planets in.
I would have been happy just getting lost in different environments but they all kinda seemed the same. I have it he benefit of the doubt and invest 50+ hours into it. But that just made me more mad.
Oh well I am glad some people like it but I will never buy any other title Sean Murray is involved in.
The day I put NMS in the recycle bin was the day I learned a lesson to not ever believe anything pre-release. Sell me on the features the game has shipped with. Not what it could ship with.
I reckon it will be a rather good game if they ever patch a meatier singleplayer campaign into it.
You mean if they made any form of campaign.
Its not actually unique, since several other games do the space exploration thing, and much better. It certainly wasnt interesting, since the worlds were bland and lifeless, other than the monsters (that weren’t actually that varied or interesting to begin with) that wandered around in their predetermined loop of actions. Oh and the fact that half the cool stuff they showed off in the trailers either didnt make it to the game or couldnt be found in game. Not to mention the garbage “ending” once you hit the centre of the galaxy.
It’s not the worst game in the world by any means and it probably didnt deserve the vitriol it got. But at the same time, lets not pretend its a good game either, and it will be tarnished by its marketing pre release, because lets face it, they hyped it. It seemed too much like a company trying to do too much with way too little.
Oh is appreciating NMS the new 2017 bandwagon? I distinctly recall an article on here praising a JB HiFi review saying it was the best refund simulator.
Having my ingrown toenails removed was an interesting and unique experience.
Clearly the dust hasn’t settled….
Thats because the actual problems that plagued NMS were never actually dealt with.
I purchased at release. I had bought in to the hype and tried so hard to delude myself that it was a great game. That lasted about 2 weeks and about 50 hours of game play. It was around then I took off the rose coloured glasses and saw it for what it was. I left it and went on to bigger and better things.
After the update that brought in base building I loaded up a new game and thought I’d give it another shot. It lasted an hour before it was uninstalled for good. Too little too late.