No Man's Sky NEXT – Review – No Man's Sky NEXT Review

With its latest update, called Next, No Man's Sky has rounded enough of its rough edges and piled enough content that exploring its strange galaxy is usually rewarding. However, it is definitely a treadmill, and while there are innumerable improvements and ships to acquire, bases to build, and resources to mine, the process of winning them involves hours and hours. hours of thoughtless and repetitive work.
Jumping into a spaceship, flying out of the atmosphere into space, then landing on another planet that looks completely different from the one you just left is as incredible as ever – a feat that does not happen. still has not been matched. Some worlds are quaint and gorgeous, begging you to use camera mode to capture the views of hills with colorful plants and animals that dot the landscape and a ring-shaped planet hanging on the horizon and throwing a look between the clouds; others are barren and ugly wastelands; and others are just weird. There is really an impressive range of sites.

The new option to play in third person perspective is more than welcome as the beautifully animated and customizable character models (which can be of any species available) really seem to have fun with their jetpacks. It's much more fun for No Man's Sky to see someone move around and interact with these sparsely populated landscapes (by intelligent life, whatever that may be)

Characters Appear have a good time bouncing with their jetpacks.

Although each world looks different, they are all functionally identical. The same environmental protection bar that declines when it's very hot also decreases when it's ridiculously cold or toxic – faster when a visually impressive storm hits – and you're in it. always fill it in with the same resource. While animal life is extremely varied – sometimes hilarious, with bouncy spots, giant crabs, flying sharks and beasts full of dinosaurs that roam everywhere – but they have few unique behaviors to distinguish them when you want to do more than to watch them.

Most resources are mined in the same way, everywhere in the universe. You can either vacuum them with one type of laser beam, drill them until they explode with another type, or walk up to them and pick them up. (Or you can shoot rocks in space.) After the first few hours, there are not many new tricks in handling No Man's Sky when it comes to moment-moment gameplay.

[19659005] And this remains the biggest problem with No Man's Sky: You spend the majority of your time monotonously collecting and refining the materials you need to make everything else, just survive repairing and improving your ship. This is quite typical of survival / craft games, but No Man's Sky prevents you from automating the generation of core resources for up to several hours.

Resource gathering becomes even more complicated when you encounter the annoying Sentinel robo-cops, who are offended by your doing anything more than watching their gems in their presence, or sometimes being attacked by hackers . The fight is simplistic and weak both on the ground and in the space, with a small selection of weapons to work with and uninteresting AI to shoot. Dull fights and incessant chases (it is impossible to jump or dodge ships in space without landing on a space station, and kill someone brings more after you) do all the missions fight that you can drag.

at a pace that is just rewarding enough to keep running after the next one.

What No Man's Sky has, it's a lot of things to do to leverage your hard-earned resources and your money for updates, which arrive at a pace that's just rewarding enough for that I keep running after the next one. Most improvements, such as a glove that allows you to harvest poisonous plants or a rifle-like attachment for your weapon, require you to do treasure hunts for specific materials, and that makes sense of endless search. .

The new basic system that allows you to build simple structures anywhere seems conceptually at odds with the nomadic nature of No Man's Sky, but if you decide to put pickets on a planet preferred, you can build teleporters at your fingertips.

You can even build a mobile base in the form of a mbadive cargo ship that follows you and carries huge amounts of resources, providing some relief from strict (but more generous) inventory limits. that & # 39; before). It is also hungry for updates, and you can even build a whole fleet of escort frigates with their own specific stats that can be sent on timed offscreen missions to collect resources for you – the only one you can do. One of the few elements of automation that we

Joining a multiplayer game makes this world much less lonely by allowing you to team up with up to three other players to explore and execute missions together. It's fun to do silly things by building together or digging holes and sealing each other. But eventually you will all have to take a break to collect more materials to fuel your antics, and it turns out that laser rocks are no more fun than doing it on your own. (And how is there no cool effect to cross the stream?) This slowed down the pace of my amusement and made me feel as if I had to save solo before joining a multiplayer game. buggier when there are other people involved.

But there are some reasons to pay attention to dive head first into the multiplayer mode: on the one hand, you lose the ability to pause your game, but that 's a bit given. More specific to No Man's Sky, she becomes more and more buggy when there are other people involved. While my solo bugs were limited to mission script issues that were not working properly, in multiplayer mode, I constantly had problems with flag markers for other players, hearing from them. audio from a distant player as they were right next to me, accidents, and, most disturbingly, falling through the floor of a freighter into the space where I I immediately died from exposure to solar radiation. The kicker, in this case, was that I was not able to recover my corpse, which contained all my inventory. I strongly recommend that you create a manual backup (which you can do by creating a savepoint) before jumping into multiplayer.

Also, know that the performances are excellent on any platform. There is some clipping and a major pop-in on the PS4 Pro and the Xbox One X, especially when landing on a new planet. And on PC, while planetary landings are smoother, I could not get a reasonably stable image of 60 frames per second on any resolution higher than 1080p even with a GTX 1080 and a Core i7-7700. The sky of No Man does not seem good enough to justify this kind of slowness.