Occasionally a creature might make me chuckle, as in the case of a bear-sized armadillo with thick elephant legs drifting through the air by slowly flapping a pair of tiny butterfly wings.Ī couple have been cute, like a wolf with a tortoise's shell or a grinning badger covered in lime green spots. Like the planets, they’re cobbled together procedurally, made from parts and pieces that may as well have been shook up in a cup and dumped onto the landscape like a handful of dice.

The biggest disappointments are the collections of alien creatures clumsily flapping and stumping around the surface of most planets. I’ve seen a couple of nice creatures, but nothing jaw-dropping or particularly memorable. Repetitive tasks need to at least be efficient, and here they are anything but.

Nearly all games have repetitive tasks, and repetition isn’t necessarily bad, but these are the systems that need the most attention from developers to ensure they don’t get irritating. I’ve got an infinite universe to explore. The same way Skyrim thinks you want to have a little conversation every time you buy something, No Man’s Sky thinks you want a five-second delay before you can sell something. You’ll trade with alien NPCs in space stations hundreds of times, and each time the game makes you wait as the camera swivels into position, then slowly brings up the conversational options, one by one, even though the options for trading (buy or sell) are always identical. It’s all done manually, and it’s clunky as hell. If you’re in a firefight that depletes your shields, you may die in the time it takes to open the menu, navigate to the correct screen, find the shield icon, and hold down the mouse to recharge it. This is the survival portion of the game, and it’s clumsily handled. Even the beam you mine plutonium with needs plutonium to function. Your various systems need to be charged with the resources you gather, everything from your ship’s booster rockets to weapon systems to warp drives. It’s also frustrating to navigate and use: the system is unintuitive and clumsy, and feels as if it was designed for consoles and not PCs. Your starting inventory on both your person and ship are small, and while it can slowly be increased by finding or buying new ships and slots, it remains cramped through most of the game. Most of what you do on these planets is mine resources, and almost immediately inventory management becomes an issue.

No amsn sky