You start off on a stranded planet after your ship has crashed and you must gather resources in order to repair it. Now, this part is quite slow, figuring out how the various mechanics in the game work; from gathering resources to inventory management and crafting new items. You’ll spend a good while on the first planet but once you get in the groove and get your ship up and running, it gets a whole lot more enjoyable because walking across a planet can get tiring. Once your ship is fixed and you can fly off-world, you need to collect a different type of resource to power your pulse drive. On top of that, there are half a dozen more resources that make up the key components of a warp cell that lets you travel to different star system. So, be prepared for A LOT of gathering.
One great feature is that you can name everything you discover in the game as long as you’re the first to go there or see it. Once you do that, it gets uploaded to the games server and anyone who visits that planet will see creatures and locations you’ve named and that’s quite awesome. No Man’s Sky has a lot to offer to players who are interested in trading and such; I remember back in my MMO binge days, we’d collect resources, wait for prices to spike or go to the right region and make a nice profit and No Man's Sky is basically that, in the whole universe. Each species has different needs and each star system only has certain resources and that determines the prices they’re willing to offer and you can compare it to the galactic average.
Now, trading and exploring isn’t the only thing in the game as some local species can get violent and the planets ‘sentinels’ also attack if you start to take too much from the planet’s reserves. In space, it’s a whole different story with random space pirate raids where a squadron of ships comes after you for your precious cargo. So, it’s in your best interest to stay prepared or just high tail it out of there.
Overall, No man’s Sky does deliver on its claims of an unimaginably vast game world with random events and whatnot. However, it does get monotonous after a while. The game is fun, but its visuals tend to get dull after the first dozen or so planets and that sense of discovery starts to wane. The concept of the game is great, but the fate of the game will be decided by the post launch content support it gets in terms of new features, activities and possible multiplayer/coop gameplay which people were initially looking forward to.
