No Man's Sky is its own kind of success story. Panned in 2016 as an almost Daikatana-level disappointment, developer Hello Games has spent six years building it up into something pretty closely resembling all its pre-release promise. Its procedural generation now creates landscapes that beckon you to explore rather than neon-coloured deserts, it lets you build vast settlements, play alongside your friends, and engage with all kinds of NPCs and quest-givers who were glaringly absent back in 2016. The game's community is veritably thriving, as players continue to post videos of the strange planets they visit in its galaxies, and the spacefaring adventures they embark upon.

After all these years, a short clip or snapshot of No Man's Sky really does look like everything we dreamed of for the game, and the work the team have put into it is commendable. Unfortunately, the magic can't be sustained forever. It never wears off altogether, but the more I played, the more the cracks began to show. No Man's Sky in 2023 is leaps and bounds ahead of where it was in 2016. The initial release was devoid of content, had no multiplayer element, and the procedural generation was panned across the board for lacking any real variety. There have been big improvements but a fundamental identity crisis and a lack of depth still hold it back.

So, in a world-first (well, at DualShockers anyway) re-review, here are my thoughts on No Man's Sky in 2023.

At its best, No Man's Sky can be breathtaking. The experience of touching down on a new planet, and stepping out of your ship to survey a vast alien landscape is almost worth the price of admission alone. Things start very strong. The universe beckons, and it's up to you to chart a path. I can still remember the sheer awe I felt on my first trip out of the atmosphere; the yawning void of space as intimidating as it was beautiful.

The defining moment came surprisingly early on. I had just touched down on the frozen wastes of a newly discovered ice planet when I felt an enormous tremor. Everything started to shake, and then a worm big enough to block out the sun burst from beneath the earth, and arced gracefully across the sky. All I could do was watch, slack-jawed, as it disappeared over a nearby hill. This was exactly the kind of moment I had been hoping for.

About 20 minutes later, I was searching for carbon on a different, more tropical planet, when I heard the same rumbling. This time, my heart sank as the exact same giant worm broke the surface and made the exact same song and dance as the one I had seen barely half an hour prior. Suddenly, that first encounter felt a lot less special, and the universe a hell of a lot smaller.

That's the No Man's Sky experience in a nutshell really: a game billions of light-years wide, but only a few inches deep. Beautiful, expansive, but ultimately without substance. Let's back up a little bit though because I don't think No Man's Sky is a terrible game, just one kind of at odds with itself.

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The basic premise is still pretty much the same. You play as an amnesiac space-farer, who wakes up on an unknown planet, with a damaged ship. Once you get that sorted out, you're free to engage with the universe as you see fit. Maybe you'll follow a cryptic sequence of clues that eventually become a surprisingly in-depth narrative, or maybe you'll spend the next 200 hours shipping circuit boards and quantum accelerators back and forth.

The enormous amount of new content since release is impressive. There are ground vehicles, huge freighter spaceships, hundreds of ships and weapons to acquire, and even entirely new modes. A lot of this new content was added in 2018 in the NEXT update, but new ways to play such as the expedition mode have been added as recently as 2021 with an update of the same name. No matter what you think of the game, there's certainly a lot to do.

The new MMO-style quest system from 2019's Beyond update is a particularly welcome addition. The objectives, which can entail hunting pirates and building outposts, among other things, provide good reasons to explore and engage in combat, which unfortunately is still a fairly vestigial feature and never feels as satisfying as it should. Still, it's nice to have a little context, and get rewarded properly for doing things that would otherwise be done almost entirely for their own sake.

The reworked story deserves a closer look, having been fleshed out significantly over time. After you get your bearings, you are contacted by an enigmatic entity known as "Artemis" who (in a roundabout fashion) directs the player to "The Atlas", a mysterious being of great power. The whole story takes a rather surprising direction reminiscent of The Matrix, culminating in a choice that has universe-wide consequences. It's by no means a bad story, and actually raises some interesting philosophical questions, but it feels weirdly grandiose given how characteristically lightweight No Man's Sky is in its genre. None of the characters do anything other than dump exposition on you, so it's hard to care about whether their lives have any meaning.

By 'genre,' I mean survival-crafting game with MMO elements - No Man's Sky having decisively nailed its colours to the mast in recent years. The emphasis is now firmly on base building, resource gathering, and crafting new vehicles, tools, and weapons. The free-wheeling freedom the game gives you clashes with the epic, urgent tone of the story, making me question why Hello Games felt the need to put in the effort.

The only other survival game I can think of that's managed to pull off a great story is Subnautica, which achieved this thanks to a much tighter scope and handcrafted world. Lacking both those things, the story in No Man's Sky feels out of place. Its themes of identity, meaning, and being don't belong in a game where most players just want to explore, build robot suits, and party it up in their space palaces.

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To the game's credit, there is a lot of stuff to make, and a lot of it is fun to mess around with. Zipping about on the motorbike-esque Pilgrim (vehicles first appearing in 2017 with the Pathfinder update) is a nice reward for putting in the time and effort to build it. There's also a huge variety of elements with which to build your base, and all sorts of technologies that make exploration easier (here are a few ideas to get you started on your next project).

But No Man's Sky is lumbered with the baggage that is so often part and parcel of such systems. The grind for resources is downright oppressive, and the game throws up roadblocks at every turn which wore me down over time and sometimes made it difficult to want to keep playing.

Everything, from your mining beam, to your ship's launch thrusters, to your hyperdrive, needs refueling. Constantly. You can never just build something and then have it work. Almost every system in the game seems designed to stymie progress in some way. None of the creatures you encounter speak your language, so you have to laboriously learn theirs, word by word, by finding and touching dozens of "knowledge stones" scattered across planets", which gets dull pretty quickly and doesn't make me feel clever. As a final annoyance, your inventory still feels way too small for the amount of stuff you need to hold on to.

For a game ostensibly about charting the unknown and exploring the universe, these constant interruptions are a serious problem. Finding yourself low on supplies deep in unknown territory might have added a certain spice, but that's never what this is. There are very few uninhabited systems, so there's almost always a space station nearby (which kind of sucks the fun out of exploring), and even if there isn't, every planet in the game will provide all the basic materials you need. It lacks any sense of adventure.

Here we start to see the core problem. The actual exploration in No Man's Sky is very, very weak. All the planets (for the most part) still feel exactly the same and there doesn't seem to be anything much worth finding. Every planet has the same vicious little tentacle plants, the same knowledge stones, and, lest we forget, the same giant worms.

Even the new faction system (which was beefed up significantly in the 2017 Atlas Rises and 2018 NEXT updates) feels a little dead behind the eyes. There are five factions, each of which you can increase your reputation with in order to gain access to unique blueprints, and a chance of friendly support when taking on pirates. They're useful no doubt, but none of them have any clear ideology or impact on the galaxy they happen to be in. The factions are just another thing that's there.

There are plenty of stunning vistas and alien creatures to discover, far more than in the original game, which look great in screenshots, but fall completely flat on a gameplay level. The animals all still just wander aimlessly about. Some of them will run up and give you a nasty nip, but they continue to feel as derpy and unintelligent as they were when the game launched. As for the landscapes, they are beautiful, but they quickly began to blur together in my mind. After about 20 hours or so I rarely encountered a planet that stood out to me as unique. In a galaxy of apparent billions of procedurally generated planets, it's inevitable that the algorithm will knock up a stunning and unique one every now and then, but this feels like the exception and not the rule.

Here's the bottom line. No Man's Sky is neither one thing nor the other. It's either a mediocre survival crafting game, with a pretty but unnecessarily large and complex framework, or it's a game about exploring space, hamstrung by resource management and lacking any real depth. There's a lot of number crunching going on under the hood, and a lot of systems in play, but it doesn't produce unique and compelling scenarios frequently enough..

What we have here is living proof that technology is never a substitute for good design, and at this point it feels like no number of updates can address the fact that core reality that at its core, No Man's Sky isn't particularly great at any of the many things it does. It's no longer the disaster it was, and its turnaround is impressive, but No Man's Sky is a game that, like an asteroid, drifts through time and space without much sense of purpose or identity.

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