Introduction

I have spent a lot of time playing World of Warcraft as evidenced by my 259 mounts, 684 pets, and over 22,000 achievement points (before Legion). I am no stranger to this game and thus my review will primarily focus on what is new to Legion rather than be a review of the game in its entirety.

Within the game I play as a Death Knight. I have been a Death Knight since I started playing World of Warcraft at the start of Wrath of the Lich King. I raided some in Wrath, and then all through Cataclysm, Mists of Pandaria, and Warlords of Draenor. I will be raiding again in Legion, which will be the subject of another blog post.

The content of this review will focus exclusively on the leveling experience in Legion. My next review will dive into the endgame content once you reach max level.

Something to keep in mind while reading is that things may have changed since this review was written. Some issues raised may no longer exist. Online games such a World of Warcraft are constantly being patched and updated to fix existing bugs and also to streamline the rough patches.

First 15

I load into the game, so far no lag, which has been a problem in the past with a new expansion. Time to teleport the city of Dalaran. Here we go!

Right away I’m being led to my class hall, which is the floating ziggurat Acherus. I’m not really sure how I feel about it to be honest. On the one hand it’s hard to say there’s anything that feels more like a home for the Death Knights than Acherus, but on the other hand the whole place feels kind of stale since we’ve been in and out of this place so much in the past. There are a few structural improvements, but for the most part it’s kind of the same. It would have been nice to branch out into someplace new, but on the flip side it’s hard to argue with having a floating base (it works for Dalaran after all). I guess I’ll just say I have mixed feelings about it all.

Now I have the choice of which artifact weapon to pursue next. I know from my research that no matter what artifact I choose I can get the other two at level 102, so since I’m leveling I choose the Blades of the Fallen Prince, which is my Frost damage specialization. I’m told where to go and eventually find myself back in Icecrown Citadel.

Not only does the place bring back some memories (I did raid Icecrown Citadel), but this definitely feels like a very Death Knighty (totally a word/phrase/whatever) place to go. I pull the first set of mobs and holy hell they hit hard. I feel like I should be doing this as Blood spec.

I get to a pair of gargoyles who turn to stone once I defeat them. Now I’m faced with two switches. It actually takes me a moment to realize that I’m supposed to Death Grip the stone gargoyles onto each of the switches. I think this is the first time ever that I’ve been required to use Death Grip. So many quests in the past have to be tuned around all of the different classes, so the designers can’t require Death Grip since other classes don’t have it. But this is a questline for only Death Knights, so I can (and will have to) do only Death Knight things. I think this is the first time in a long time that I’ve actually felt like a Death Knight.

Speaking of only Death Knight things, what else do I have access to that might help me? Maybe something that can deal with the ridiculous amounts of damage I’m taking? Oh wait, that’s right, Control Undead exists. Just to preface this, Control Undead is an ability that Death Knights were given during the pre-patch for Mists of Pandaria. We’ve gone through two whole expansions since then, and not once in all that time has Control Undead ever been useful. Most of the places where you can use it, it’s easier and faster just to kill everything. And the places where you would want to use it, everything, including undead mobs, are immune. I, and probably every other Death Knight, don’t even have the ability on my bars since I can never use it. So I try it out. Well, it certainly helps some. Again, for the first time since Wrath of the Lich King I really am starting to feel like a Death Knight.

Now that said, I’m still taking a lot of damage. I decide to switch to Blood (tank) spec and see how it goes. Things go much smoother after that. I get to the throne at the top and Bolvar, the new Lich King after Arthas’ defeat, is giving me instructions. I’m actually very much against what’s happening now. Why am I taking instructions from the Lich King? Wasn’t the whole entire point of the Wrath of the Lich King expansion for the Death Knights to break free of the Lich King’s control? Shouldn’t Mograine or Thassarian or someone like that be giving me instructions?

The boss (no spoilers, I promise) showed up for me to fight. I did the fight as Blood, and really there wasn’t anything that made me feel like I should have been Frost. The boss summons a bunch of small adds, presumably for Howling Blast to eliminate, but Blood Boil works just as well (or maybe even better). I defeated the boss and earned myself my first artifact weapon. The moment is appropriately epic and I really do like the look of the Blades of the Fallen Prince. I’m a little sad that all throughout this questline there was no mention made of the fact that I own (and was carrying) the legendary weapon Shadowmorne. At the very least an extra piece of dialog would have been nice.

At this point I’m past 15 minutes since I began the expansion, but I do want to go a bit into the start of the leveling when it comes to more normal questing.

Now I have a choice of where to go first on the Broken Isles. I choose Stormheim. I honestly chose it because I wanted the shoulder enchant they have once you reach revered with the Valarjar (which admittedly turned out to not matter since you can’t get revered until well after you hit max level). Of course, right away I’m told that I’ll be given control of Sylvanas’ fleet, which I am all about. Let’s do this!

I get into the first zone and immediately get attacked by the Alliance. So much for unity between the Horde and the Alliance. Also, given how insanely hard the enemies in the artifact weapon quest hit, these enemies barely even touch me. Why the huge discrepancy?

There are other players in the area. For a moment I’m worried about having to fight for quest mobs, until I remember that everything is now shared tag. It’s amazing how much more enjoyable the game is when players are considered “grouped” without having to go through the hassle of making a group. Second best decision Blizzard ever made. (Scaling Normal and Heroic Raids being the first.)

And that is the end of my second fifteen minutes. So far I’m having a lot of fun. Time to keep going and see where Blizzard takes me.

Story

As with all questing in World of Warcraft, the leveling experience is extremely dense with the lore of the game. As per usual, players are introduced to a number of new characters while also meeting a number of familiar faces. What’s new this expansion though is the introduction of artifact weapons and, more importantly, class quests. Blizzard is trying to restore the core of each class by not only creating questlines that are unique to each class, but even creating unique gathering areas for each of the different classes.

While the class quests for the Death Knight certainly make me feel like a Death Knight, I felt that there wasn’t anything that made each of the different specs feel unique. As I mentioned above, I ended up finishing the Frost scenario as Blood spec, and I did the same with Unholy. Nothing about the gameplay for either of the damage spec scenarios made them feel particularly unique to that spec. Unholy at least should have made a big deal about having a pet, but it didn’t. Of course storywise they felt very different, but the gameplay just wasn’t there to back them up. Still, I enjoyed them, but I would like to see some more effort being made to make me feel like I need to be Frost spec when doing the questline for the Blades of the Fallen Prince.

Also, I found out when I started leveling an alt that Unholy Death Knights and Balance Druids run the exact same quest for their artifact weapon. This completely undermines the feeling of uniqueness the second time around.

The storyline does a very good job of making the invasion of the Burning Legion feel like a global event. In the pre-patch, players had to defend different areas of Azeroth from demonic invasions. Then, everyone began to focus primarily on the Broken Isles as they hunted for the Pillars of Creation. But even with the search going on, the story still took players away from the isles to different areas of the world. This was especially true of the artifact weapons as players interacted with a wide host of characters from Warcraft’s past. All of this helped make the threat of the Burning Legion feel more like a global event rather than something solely isolated to the Broken Isles.

Something that helps sell the idea of the artifact weapons is the way in which the other NPCs in the game acknowledge their existence. Some promise to help empower your weapons with their blessing, which usually takes the form of relic upgrades, while others express their awe at the power of your weapon(s). There’s even a boss in one of the dungeons that has a special voice line if there’s a Druid in your party. The boss accuses the Druid of bringing corruption and how the boss will take the weapon for his own. All of this helps to reinforce the feeling of importance players feel as they wind their way through the story of the Broken Isles.

Interface

First off, I want to commend Blizzard’s back end team for the smoothest launch in the history of World of Warcraft. There was little to no lag ever during the first day of launch, and thanks to the new shard system areas felt populated but not crowded. There were only a handful of missions out of the hundreds I did while leveling where I felt I was competing with other players for quest objectives. All of the other missions it either wasn’t an issue, or I was actually happy to see other players thanks to the new shared tag system. The designers may be the superstars, but the programmers definitely deserve some accolades for their work too.

The interface for World of Warcraft is a very difficult thing to talk about because Blizzard has the single most easily customizable interface out of, I think, any game ever made. The plethora of addons mean players can make their interface look any way they want. The one big issue I did run into was in the class hall. While in your class hall, a bar appears at the top of the screen which shows your resources and the number of minions you have. I’m sure it works great on the default UI, but I and most streamers that I’ve seen put things at the top of the screen, things that are now being covered up. I looked through the options for a way to turn it off, which unfortunately there isn’t one. Of course, a day later someone made a simple addon to turn it off.

Gameplay

I cannot begin to describe how much more enjoyable questing is now that everything is shared tag. If I see someone fighting a group of mobs I need for a quest, rather than having to walk around that person to find my own mobs I can simply jump in and help them. After that, we almost subconsciously end up “grouped” as we move around together from one quest objective to the next until one of us is finished. At that point we go our separate ways and the process repeats with the next player(s) I encounter. This does so much for making the other players in the game feel like your allies rather than your opponents. This right here is easily my favorite change of the entire expansion. (Yes, even over the return of class quests.)

My least favorite zone was Highmountain, but my reasoning has nothing to do with the storyline. The reason for my dislike was the stupid elevator that goes between the upper and lower levels of Thunder Totem. The two levels are quite far apart and so the elevator takes a year and a day to go between them. This means that every time you go back there you end up having to stand around waiting for the elevator to reach you, then waiting some more while it carries you up or down. I felt like each time I had to return to Thunder Totem I found myself hating the zone a little more all because of the elevator. As a suggestion, they should split the elevator into two separate shafts. One, the “down” shaft, should be a straight drop down into a pool of water. The other, the “up” shaft, should have a totem at the bottom that creates a constant updraft of wind that launches players up the shaft and spits them out at the top. This way the elevator is always ready for players to use instead of having to wait for the platform to reach them. Also, falling/rising will be much faster than having to use the slow-moving platform.

In regards to the use of flying mounts, this time around Blizzard has decided to repeat what they ended up doing in Warlords of Draenor by not allowing flying at the start of the expansion, and then providing a series of achievements that players can earn in order to unlock flying for all characters on their account. I really like this approach personally. That said, the lack of flying in Draenor was less problematic than it is in Legion due to the existence of the daze mechanic. Any monster close to your level that hits you can daze you and force you off your mount. In Warlords of Draenor players could build a stable in their garrison that made them immune to daze. Unfortunately, such an option doesn’t exist in Legion. In the past the designers have said that the goal with daze was to make the enemies you run past feel threatening, but I don’t feel like this mechanic does what they intended for it to do. When I’m running past monsters on a mount, it’s not because I’m afraid of them, it’s because I have better things to do than waste time dealing with them. So when I get knocked off I don’t feel threatened by them, I just feel annoyed with them. Every time you get dazed it is an entirely negative experience with absolutely no upside. Blizzard gave players a way to ignore it in Warlords of Draenor, and I feel it is time they retired this outdated mechanic once and for all.

There are a lot of things that you stumble across as you’re questing. This can be anything from rare spawn monsters to hidden treasure chests to a group of murlocs racing snails. You certainly can go straight from quest to quest, but if you do you’ll miss a lot of what makes the world so compelling to experience. Blizzard is also starting to experiment with jumping puzzles, though nothing to the extent of what you can find in other games such as Guild Wars 2.

Conclusion

You will enjoy the leveling portion of this game if you like having lots of very strong stories with a whole host of characters. The lore of World of Warcraft is incredibly deep and Legion treads the craziness of it quite well. There are also a number of small moments and hidden gems that from time to time offer a nice respite from the more serious nature of major events.

You will not like the leveling portion of this game if you absolutely hate repetitive questing. The storyline of the expansion is quite good, but the majority of the quests still fall into the style of “collect X of this,” “kill X of that,” and “go talk to this person here.”

World of Warcraft: Legion is off to an amazing start. The main story is engaging, and the class stories are very cool. I really like the artifact weapons, and I can’t wait to see what they do with class quests moving forward. Of course, no matter how good the level up quests are, the success or failure of an expansion is mostly determined by its endgame content. Still, this expansion is showing promise, and if Blizzard can maintain the sense of impending doom and personal influence on events to come, than this could be the expansion Blizzard needs after a somewhat disappointing end to the last expansion.

The First 15

I choose the “Give Me a Challenge” difficulty, which is the equivalent of Normal. There’s a hardcore mode as well where once you die your game ends, but you have to beat the game once before you’re allowed to choose that. What is it with games these says renaming their difficulties from the standard Easy/Normal/Hard?

At the start you have the option to watch a recap video of the first game. I wish more games would do this. Even having beaten the first game, the video was extremely helpful in identifying the major events and players from the first game.

On the ride to the first mission you’re given the option of lethal/non-lethal and close combat/sniper. I choose non-lethal sniper which earns me a tranquilizer rifle.

The game provides me with a few tutorials on the different game systems.

I’m noticing that even though things seem linear, if I start poking around in corners I can usually find an alternate path to the next room. And usually that alternative path puts me in a great place to snipe people from.

I ran out of sniper tranquilizer ammo. It took me a few missteps, but I finally figured out that I could sneak up behind someone and do a takedown. Why wasn’t there a tutorial on this?

Story

The story in Deus Ex: Mankind Divided is about society following the Aug Incident from the first game. What follows is how humanity has become divided (hence the name of the game) between Augs and Naturals. There seem to be more Naturals than Augs, and more importantly the whole of the military seems to be made up of all Naturals. As a result, prejudice against Augs is rampant leading to violence and exploitation. The game is plenty obvious about this, but it also expresses this divide in more subtle ways. For instance, every time you take the subway, you get stopped by the police who want to look over your papers since you’re a “clank”. They always let you through, but just the fact that they singled you out for being an aug forces you to acknowledge society’s prejudice since part of that prejudice is being directed at you specifically. Then of course there are other more subtle reminders such as graffiti on the walls stating that “A wrench is a tool, not a person,” or separate bathrooms for Augs or shopkeepers who won’t sell to you because you’re an Aug. The train is also divided into Naturals and Augs, and the police will yell at you if you take the Naturals train. There’s no one thing that makes the story feel real, rather it’s a series of little things that all work together to form a whole narrative.

The main story is an exploration of what it means to be human, especially as someone like you who is more metal than flesh. You can keep strictly to the main storyline or branch out and follow a series of side quests that have you doing everything from investigating a murder to working with the criminal underworld. Or you can forgo both and just break into a bank (not that I got distracted doing exactly that for a few hours). I want to commend the storywriters for creating a series of narratives that feel completely at home within the world they built. I won’t go too much more into the story to avoid spoilers, but I found the events and conversations both interesting and compelling.

Interface and Controls

The basic controls for the game work well enough. The game uses a fairly standard cover system. Combat felt fluid enough (though admittedly I did almost everything stealth). It’s all of the non-combat interacts that cause problems. For instance, pressing TAB (on the PC) will open the player’s inventory, but pressing it again does nothing (like closing the inventory).

The controls during the hacking mini-game are fine except for one glaring exception. When you click on a node, it pops out a radial menu that provides you with options on how to interact with that node (hack, fortify, nuke). The problem is, the boxes have a tendency to cover up other nodes around the currently highlighted node. Often times I had to click in empty space to make the radial menu go away so I could see what I was doing. Sometimes when going fast I’d accidentally fortify the node I was currently on when I meant to hack the next node, and the act of fortifying the node would alert the system to my presence and then I’d fail the hack. I don’t understand why this is such an issue when the fix is so simple. Just bring the radial menu in so that it’s only half as far away from the highlighted node as it is currently. I’m surprised that this made it past all of their QA testing given how glaringly problematic it makes the system to use.

While in the sell items menu you can’t examine an item. There are some items that only exist to be sold, but to check which ones those are I have to close out of the shop menu completely so I can examine the item. My advice would be that when players mouse over an item it displays the information that would normally display when examining an item in the player’s inventory.

Something that really bothered me is that the main character clips through his own outfit. Most of these problems involve the tall collar of his jacket. The back of his head clips through the back of the collar and his chin/beard clips through the sides of the collar when he turns his head. This is happening constantly during conversations (which are in 3rd person). Even late into the game it’s still awkward to see and distracts from what else is happening on screen. Either pull back his collar so that it doesn’t clip, or just get rid of it entirely. The constant clipping is sloppy and awkward.

One extremely annoying bug is if you load a save file in which your character was pressed up against cover, the game will immediately have your character move as if you’d told Jensen to vault over or around the cover. This could potentially put you in a permanently bad spot if you saved too close to enemy soldiers since you can’t cancel the movement before they’ll spot you.

Small pet peeve, but if you’re going to put mirrors in the game than they should reflect the main character. If you’re not going to do that, then don’t put mirrors in your game. It’s jarring as a player to stand in front of a mirror and only see the room behind you.

Gameplay

The thing I want to highlight most about Deus Ex is the sheer brilliance of the level design. If you’re studying to be a level designer, then this is the game you want to learn from. Every objective has at least three different ways to reach it. Whether you choose to fight your way through the front door, hack your way through a side door, punch yourself a new door through a weakened wall, search around for the pass code, go around through the air vents, or maybe climb up the side of the building and go in through the window, you really do have the freedom to feel clever in how they approach a mission. When you first enter a new area things seem almost impossible with too many enemies, cameras, turrets, and drones. But if you spend some time poking around you’ll find that you have a lot more freedom of movement than you initially thought and lots of options provided you have the right augments to take advantage of them. All in all the level design is beautifully done and easily the game’s biggest selling point.

Now, having sung the praises of the level design team, there are some parts of the game where you spend too much time just getting through the level. There’s a portion of the game where you have to talk to an important leader (no spoilers, I promise) and you spend forever navigating your way first to his compound and then through his compound and then out again after your conversation. The level layout maintained a high standard throughout, but the developers needed to do something to help change up the gameplay a bit.

The augment system is very well done. Upon gaining access to it, I immediately wanted almost all of them. Fortunately the game starts you off with 7 Praxis (ability points) to invest however you want. There are some advanced augment trees that require you to permanently disable another augment tree in order to use, which creates an interesting give and take. In a lot of games you tend to get the few skills you want early on and then the rest you just sort of take because you might as well spend the points, but Deus Ex does a great job of providing lots of attractive options so you’re constantly looking forward to when you’ll finally have that ability or get that upgrade. As mentioned above, the more augments you unlock, the more options are available to you in moving through the levels.

One of the augments you can unlock allows you to see important items through walls and containers (such as lockers). This really helps to take the tedium out of searching every room you come across for all of the things you want to collect.

There is one augment that I absolutely don’t like. There is an augment that allows your character to become invisible. This completely trivializes the stealth aspect of the game and causes players to simply ignore the stellar level design since they can walk right past everything without being seen. Stealth is simply a matter of watching your energy level and ignoring everything else. I honestly think the developers should have just removed this augment from the game entirely. I personally didn’t use it and my advice is if you want to actually experience the game then pretend this augment doesn’t exist.

The hacking minigame is a lot of fun (minus the interface issue explained above). At first you try sneaking through the network until you’re discovered at which point it becomes a frantic race to finish the hack before the system manages to trace you back to your starting node. You have some on use items that can make it easier to remain undetected or buy you a few precious seconds at the end to finish the hack. All nodes rank 1 or higher have a base chance of 15% for the network to detect your presence no matter what level your hacking skill is. I feel like 15% is a little too high. If I’ve maxed out my hacking skills (which was one of the first things I did) then I want to feel like I can dance around in low level networks. With a 15% base chance, I’m mostly just hoping I don’t get caught due to extremely bad luck. Personally I would like to see the base chance lowered to 5%.

If you’re going the stealth route, then you will be doing a lot of takedowns. Unfortunately, takedowns are one of the most jarring experiences in the game. When you press the button, the screen goes black for a few seconds, and then you watch a scripted scene (in 3rd person) of your character delivering a quick beatdown. I suspect the blackscreen is trying to cover up the fact that the system does not handle going from a physics based system to a script based system very well. Mechanically the takedown system works just fine, but from the player’s perspective switching from 1st to 3rd person removes them from what’s happening. I would much prefer if the game remained in 1st person during the takedown so players actually got a sense that they were the ones doing the takedown. Also, physics in this game is very wonky (more on that later) and half the time when I knocked an enemy to the ground to deliver the knockout blow, they would end up in the completely wrong place and my character would showcase his amazing talents at punching the ground.

The physics engine in this game is awful. Objects and people are constantly clipping into one another. During a couple cutscenes someone would walk right through the camera and so I would get a nice view of the inside of their head. Bodies especially tend to clip into, and get stuck in, everything. Once I had a mission become impossible when the person I was supposed to drag around got stuck inside of a door and nothing I did could get him out of it. Fortunately for me I could just reload from a minute or so back and try again, but the game does have a hardcore mode where you can’t reload a previous save. If I’d been playing hardcore than the physics engine would have completely screwed me over. Pedestrians will shove objects out of their way just by walking into them, including super heavy dumpsters.

There are a lot of televisions and radios in the game, and for some reason they all seem to be turned on. After a while you get really sick of hearing the same 4 or 5 news stories repeated over and over again. I wish the vast majority of them would start in the off position.

The game comes with another gameplay mode outside of the main story called Breach. In Breach you play a master hacker who, using your avatar, must sneak/fight your way through various “networks” (basically custom levels) to steal data. It’s a clever repurposing of the game’s systems and I actually enjoyed it quite a bit. It reminded me a lot of Mirror’s Edge given that each level has an optional score and time to beat for true mastery. Another point in its favor is the inclusion of mini-storylines in each level where you are hacking different networks in the pursuit of certain information to help someone innocent or to take down someone evil.

Conclusion

You will enjoy this game if you like finding alternate passages to reach your objective and a story that makes you stop and consider what it truly means to be human.

You will not like this game if you can’t stand a messy control scheme or if a bad physics engine will distract you from the game too much.

Deus Ex: Mankind Divided is a mastery of level design with a strong story to go with it. There are a lot of small things that enhance the game, but there are also a lot of small things that distract from it. But if you can overlook them, then you’ll find a world worth experiencing.

The First 15

I load into the game and there is an immediate sense of wonder.

I find myself crash landed on a planet that is -73 degrees celcius. That’s really really cold. Fortunately it seems my environmental suit can handle it.

I go off into the wilderness and start gathering resources.

I just got attacked by something that looks like a floating camera. Why is this thing attacking me?

I spend the rest of my time running around and gathering resources. I have a feeling I’m going to be doing this a lot.

Story

No Man’s Sky provides a storyline in the form of a quest line to reach the center of the universe. Players are free to race ahead with the quest line or to completely ignore it and go off on their own. The atmosphere of the Atlas storyline is haunting and mysterious. The game does a wonderful job of making you want to know more about what it is you’re pursuing. It leaves a trail of answers that you acquire bit by bit, but it also creates even more questions every time you find a new answer.

Along the way you encounter several alien races. You can explore the backgrounds of the different races, which are interesting and well crafted, but you can’t really do anything with those stories. They exist as a sort of interesting side note since whether you know them or not has no bearing on the rest of the game. Again, they are well written, but they don’t seem to help you in any way moving forward.

Interface and Controls

The controls are mostly fine, but there are a few odd mechanics that prevent the game from really feeling fluid. One issue is having to click and hold on menu options. The assumption for needing to hold down on a menu rather than just clicking on it is due to the console version having the same requirement. There is a mod that can correct this, but the base game requires it and it feels awkward to do every time you want to select an option.

Movement on foot can be a little bit slow. Fortunately, there’s a bug in the game you can take advantage of to make this a lot less painful. If you start sprinting, then perform a melee attack, then boost off the ground during the attack, you will maintain the momentum from the shoulder rush allowing you to eat up large amounts of space very quickly. The new speed feels just about perfect for exploring. I would like it if they removed the bug, but then set your speed while using your jetpack to match what you can get from using the bug.

Gameplay

The core gameplay of No Man’s Sky is well thought out and fun. You explore planets to gather resources and chronicle the various plants and animals you encounter. You will do a lot of resource gathering. Fortunately the game makes this task very easy and actually quite rewarding.

You also explore ruins in order to learn the language of the local alien race in order to better interact with them. The more of the language you understand, the more likely you are understand the computers and people you encounter. The more you understand them, the more likely you’ll be able to take the correct action to help them with whatever problem they have. The problem I have with learning languages is that when you move on to another star system, all of the work you did learning the language of the last race you encountered is rendered useless since you have to start over again from scratch. I would prefer that each language you learned/mastered boosted your efficiency at learning new languages. This way players are rewarded for their previous efforts since each new language they encounter gets easier and easier as they learn more and more.

The overall problem with the No Man’s Sky is that it doesn’t really go anywhere. Everything you do is mostly focused on earning money and getting more space whether it be more space on your ship, or your suit, or even your mining tool. But then, all that extra space really enables you to do is be better at gathering resources and making money. There isn’t anything to actually do with that money other than get better at making more of it. The developers have promised that more is coming in the future (building bases, etc.), but as of this writing there aren’t really any goals to pursue except to keep gathering and exploring. Again, gathering and exploring is fun, but it would be more fun if it built to something more.

Something I disliked is that you can’t build a new ship or even upgrade the size of your current one. Your only option for improving your ship’s cargo capacity is to buy a new one or to fix up a crashed ship and discard your old ship for the new one. Also, you can’t sell your ship. It just vanishes whenever you buy/find a new one. You can craft upgrades to the different components of your ship, but you can never increase the storage size of your current ship. I would have liked the option to craft a custom ship so that I could choose the look I want.

Conclusion

You will enjoy this game if you like wandering in search of hidden mysteries and doing lots, and lots, of gathering. The slow but steady progression of your equipment will appeal to completionist players who enjoy maxing out their character.

You will not like this game if you are looking for a game with lots of action or if you prefer a more linear sort of gameplay. Much of this game is about exploration and discovery, both of which then create space for you to set your own goals.

No Man’s Sky is seriously impressive as a world generating tool, but it needs something more to be a complete experience. It is a simulation in search of a game. The systems it has are fun and interact well together, but it’s missing that little something extra that could make it into a truly top tier game.