No Man's Sky

Since all work and no play is not very... uh-hum.. exciting, I put away a few hours so that I could play the highly anticipated and controversial procedurally generated sci-fi exploration game No Man's Sky.

The game, in development for over 5 years, launched to a lukewarm and divisive reception. A lot of players have been unhappy with the released features of the game, as a lot more was promised than was delivered. Even though there were performance issues on my relatively capable PC with an Intel i7 4790K CPU and nVidia GTX 970 GPU, I had an enjoyable but underwhelming experience.

You can explore planets (over 18 quantillion of them, although the colors are used well to make you feel as if you are visiting new planetary systems again and again), dogfight in space, harvest resources, scan fauna and alien lifeforms, upgrade your ship, tool and exosuit, learn alien languages and manage resources and inventory. The latter can be a little bothersome, as you have limited space and a lot of the items do not stack as one might imagine (a single pearl can take the same slot as 250 units of ore in your exosuit or 500 in your ship).

After visiting about 40 systems on my way to the center of the universe, I do not feel that the asking price of $60 was worth the admission to this virtual world. There is no building, multiplayer, colonizing or anything more persistent which would encourage players to stick around. With that being said, the game has a lot of potential to be something greater than its current incarnation, provided that the developers iron out the performance issues AND introduce the much needed content mentioned above.