Note: I live in the UAE, and the currency we use is AED which is tied with the USD. That means all North American copies of the game will be redeemable to me.
Hello. My name is Ritik and I am 14 years old. Today I am making a request for No Man’s Sky. I previously wrote several thousand words on this but it was deleted when the notes on my iPad disappeared. My laptop’s LCD screen is damaged so therefore I will be using the iPad to type up this review - please take this into consideration as it is much harder to type with an iPad. I'm also messing around with speech dictation software will see how that turns out! Hint: it's very, very messy! I will likely be typing most of this stuff up. Whoever said that iPads were productivity suites were probably idiots or never used one.
Let me first start off by talking to you about how I discovered this game. I've been reading up about this game for several months now. I have also been discussing it lots with my friends. I am, no joke – obsessed with this game. Well. Maybe not OBSESSED, as such, but nonetheless, extremely interested in it. I spend on average twenty minutes a day researching things about this game. Most of you wouldn't consider that normal, and rightfully so, probably. This is, without a doubt, one of the most anticipated games from me. I was heavily invested previously in Star Citizen, but that, obviously, is not a very hot topic anymore and the game is neither being updated nor looked at anymore really. So, with that in mind, I ventured out and found another space game to satisfy my lust and desire of exploring vast fictional worlds. That game? No Man’s Sky. Like the title said, if you read that. Yeah. Cool. Right?
Now this is typically a topic discussed at the very end of a request, but I'm gonna break the rules and norm and mention it at the beginning. It's why I can't get the game. I obviously don't want to write a sob story, as I want my desire for the game to be the main reason I receive it, not my lack of ability to purchase it. That being said, I suppose I should elaborate. My family is extremely conservative fiscally, and I have a breadwinner dad who earns a decent salary with my mom who quit her $1 an hour teaching job. We live in the UAE, by the way, although I mentioned that in region lock above IIRC. That means that there's not a whole lot left for pleasure - the gaming PC I own back home (I'm returning from vacation back home day after tomorrow) can easily run No Man’s Sky, it is custom made and everything. It was my joint birthday present for the last three years. But what this paragraph meant was essentially - my only chance of being able to enjoy this game depends entirely and solely on the kindness of the internet’s wonderful souls. That sounded creepy.
But next, let me get onto before I so desire this game my history of gaming. I have only really been gaming for several years, because of course - I'm young - but I still have favorites. My childhood game is… Wait, lets backtrack. You ever remember RL Stine? The guy who everyone speculated was a pen name, but nah, it's a real bloke? Well you probably then remember the children's book series “Goosebumps”. It was extremely memorable of course, but what I remember more than anything is the TV show that there was, based off of the books. I fell in love with every episode of that TV show, it was so goddamn good. Probably my favorite childhood TV show, not counting the numerous Indian anime I used to watch, and still do occasionally. Well, I digress - once I bought the DVD disc versions of the TV show. In one particular episode, I think it was “Calling All Creeps” - the scariest thing I've seen to date - I saw an advertisement for the Goosebumps Horrorland video game. Here's a lets play on it I made a while ago, in case you're wondering about it. It wasn't a popular game in any sense - hell I seriously doubt anyone spent hours upon hours on it like I did.
But what I vividly remember was when I got my first console - a Wii. My dad had a PS3 he was gifted by a certain famous member of royalty I shouldn't mention, but this was a Wii. I went to the store, on the prowl for this game - and really fucking surprisingly, I found it. No, it was amazing. I think my dad asked the store guys to place an order of it or something. Unfortunately it was on the Wii. My dad just said “let's take it anyways,” and me being 8 years old, didn't realize until we were halfway home that my dad had just bought a Wii - I think a large amount of his salary - for me. My dad is in a much better position financially now, I wanna just say for people that are suspicious of me being able to afford being gifted a gaming PC. Well I played the shit outta that one. It was fun by golly it was, I still enjoy it when emulating it on my PC to this day, it's amazing. Soon, Minecraft followed, and playing Minecraft on my very very old MacBook was something I spent a lot of my time on. Then followed Skyrim and Shadow of Mordor. Those games are all ones I love to this day, and have played the hell out of. That's been my gaming journey so far.
But now I should talk about space and planets. I am a huge fan of cosmic things and vivid things. Beautiful neon visuals like the ones in NMS - I'm abbreviating things now, iPads suck to type on - really are aesthetically appealing to me. I know more to judge a game by solely it's graphics, but graphics are obviously a really massive part of any game, and this is great to me. I just feel like discussing the games features as opposed to how it relates to me is useless. I like the game for the same reason everyone else does - asinine amounts of planets, visuals, and playing it with bros if that ever works. But enough said - lets get on to how this game and it's features relate to me.
The first thing about this game that's often mentioned is the insane amount of planets there are. I am, like everyone else, amazed by it. But what I love so much about this feature is the fact that it ties in a lot with my personal thoughts on the world. I wonder how many worlds and dimensions there are, and if we humans are really such insignificant ones. What if our entire universe is just a little quark in an atom of a foreign creature’s excrement? Cliche stuff, you’re probably right. But how does that fare in any other understanding of the universe? We all think alike, and my dream of exploring procedurally generated worlds - digitalness in flora and fauna - is fulfilled with this game.
The game also has spaceships. Spaceships. What more can be said about them? They're completely awesome. And there's no don't about it. My favorite spaceships are the ones in Star Wars. But let me just go off on a bit of a tangent here - you see, my favorite thing to do is watch and evaluate movies. And the first thing I do when watching any movie with spaceships is to try and put their understanding into my world. I've always found it funny - you know how there's a real “car culture” in the world? Well. That's how I imagine alien people like Luke Skywalker or Han Solo being with their stuff. Unrelated, but I totally see people having religious or sexual obsessions with their cars like some blokes playing GTA did. You know the kind I'm talking about.
I also see influence from Isaac Asimov in here. The Foundation novels are awesome, as is Nightfall and the other one about chronoscopy or some sort of time travel, the name doesn't come to mind. I enjoy reading a lot. I also like Dune. Like Frank Herbert. Yeah. Heinlein too. I didn't want to go off topic, but the game of course draws inspiration from these authors who I wanted to just mention were my favorite.
Now, of course, as we know, No Man’s Sky is based off of four pillars. These are; Exploration, Combat, Survival and Trading. Got it? Now let me evaluate why each of these facets appeal to me.
Exploration:
It's obvious why this would be so important to me. Like I said, I love open world games and universes. Star Wars universe, Harry Potter universe, all of these vivid escapist worlds are amazing to me, and No Man’s Sky does this. I love the encapsulating idea of exploring vivid worlds and different things, documenting them as I go along. I heard that realistically, and I, happy they did this - only a small percent of planets can sustain life, and an even smaller percent of that is intelligent life. Most of it will be little beetles and stuff, I guess, although those are awesome anyways. But I guess it's going to be the massive ones that I'll like. Memories of me snuggled in my armchair watching my dad play Shadow of the Colossus are slowly coming forward as I anticipate the possibility of being able to explore new worlds and lands - maybe some that could even be similar to the forbidden land in that game - with massive colossal black rock alien things. Maybe that won't happen. But just google up “No Mans Sky Aliens,” flip to images and see what they look like. Tell me there won't be something that looks like that.
I guess exploring flora and fauna would be exciting too. I'm not sure if this exists in the game, but I am anticipating to see if there are any large man eating plants or Venus fly traps. That would be seriously cool. Hostile fauna, huh? Brings a totally new meaning to “survival.” I'd like to get onto possible underground content for this too. We haven't seen much of any underground stuff in No Man’s Sky. Will we be seeing caves or something? That would be seriously awesome. Underground caves with cave beasts dwelling in. There's lots of evidence for it being in the game too, looks like.
Let's focus on the next pillar now. If you wanna know more about anything at all I'm saying, just post in the comments, and I'll immediately elaborate. Geddit?
Combat:
Combat is without a doubt my favorite part of most games. Especially with PVP, I just love that. I used to previously be a first person elitist gamer, meaning I would only play games if they had a first person mode to them. But that's obviously quite stupid, ain't it? Since then I've fallen in love with all perspectives and combat styles. Flow combat, first person shooter combat, everything. I love and adore it, and it's awesome.
So I have no doubt that combat in this game is also going to be fully awesome. In No Man’s Sky, there is multiplayer. It's just that the odds of you running into someone else are very low due to the entire size and scale of it, and it's certainly not like Planetside where you have mass groups of people together simultaneously They're more like encounters, and whether they're hostile or friendly ones probably comes up to you. That's the kind of game I like, one where multi players there, but not a massive aspect of the entire thing.
Anyways, back to combat. Perhaps another anticipated thing from me on combat would be the weapons we have - I have no doubts that creativity will be whipped in the direction of the weapons we have, as well as the means to get them. The current multitool system really looks amazing. Perhaps biological warfare would be possible, huh? Traveling to one planet and gathering diseases, to spread the out at others during another encounter with a person or near another planet’s wildlife? How cool would that be! Actually not that cool if it was ethics and real life and stuff, but I guess you probably catch my drift the, huh. In short, I am seriously anticipating fighting in this game.
Survival
The very first game I played focused on survival that wasn't Minecraft would have probably been… Something among the lines of Fallout. Perhaps? Anyways. I also greatly look forward to the survival portion of the game, although I'll confess, it's not going to be by far my favorite part of it. I feel that survival games are best set in the Earths wilderness or such, not really in the wild habitats of foreign planets. But then - who am I kidding? It'll of course bring a massive new aspect to the traditional survival genre.
Really looking forward to that one. Also, I wanna see how survival fares from island to island. There'll of course be massive differences when we look from one island to the next, so the challenges present on one island will of course be extremely different to those present on another island. I highly anticipate survival in that regard, though!
Trading
And finally, trading. Well I used to be big into Steam trading - hell, I used to get enough profit from it I could trade it in for Doom and stuff. Seriously though, it was fun, and when I say fun, I mean FUN, getting trade requests and stuff on Steam servers. But enough of that, let's look at what I anticipate about trading in No Mans Sky!
The trading and marketplace system will be managed by the NOC characters, obviously. They will be able to trade items with you, which reminds me of one of the updates that was once given to Minecraft, one which allowed Minecraft villagers to trade with one another for items and equipment, like emeralds. Perhaps an economy will build off of No Man’s Sky items. That would be cool.
That's all I really have to say about No Man’s Sky. I hope you consider buying me the game as it would really mean the world to me! My Birthday is also coming up soon, and I'd love to receive this for turning 15!
In either case, thank you very much for reading this! It was extremely hard typing it on an iPad, but I still hope you enjoyed this write.
Recently I've been binging on reviews for the PS4 version, and it looks like it's even better than I expected. I'm always cautious about pre ordering, but I think the PC version will without a doubt be better than the PS4 one, so I don't really have many worries. There's no doubt my GTX 970 can run it either.
Here's my Steam account: http://steamcommunity.com/id/zombaterlad
Thank you!