Recent reviews by srgrvsalot

No Man's Sky is visually spectacular and endlessly, if subtly, inventive. However, there's no pretending it's not a niche game. It is, at its heart, a repetitive time-sink, in which you must carefully manage resources in order to wander around and look at things that are slightly different from each other.

And yet . . . if that's your sort of thing, if you're the sort of gamer who plays Assassins Creed mainly to look at the 3D-rendered historical buildings and thinks all that action-stealth nonsense is a distraction, then No Man's Sky is an unparalled virtual tourism experience. It's an endless, procedurally generated nature walk with science fiction trappings and the occasional laser battle.

I bought it for full price on day one and I don't regret it, but it's definitely the kind of game you want to go into with eyes open. Buy it only if the thought of collecting minerals in order to earn the privilege of hopping from one vintage sci-fi book cover to another is one that really gets your heart pumping.

This game is rough. It has some interesting ideas about how to do video game diplomacy and intrigue, but those ideas are undeveloped, and make the interaction between the houses of Westeros feel like the mere shuffling around of RTS game pieces. It does have an admirable commitment to the series lore, but to get to the lore, you have to play through a dreary campaign which includes frustrating escort missions. You can control a Targaryen dragon, and it feels pretty powerful, but the actual mechanics of doing so are excessively "gamey" (your dragon has a recharge time, making it less a creature of legend and more of an occasional special ability).

The presentation of the game is subpar, with a lot of tiny details that are just "off" enough to pull me out of the experience. And the RTS mechanics are a bit undercooked - there's not a lot of unit diversity (or distinctiveness to the units that exist) and the tech tree, such as it is, is mediocre. The most interesting part of the game is the specialized intrigue and diplomatic units, and even then, I find the challenge of not knowing which alliances are real or which units are loyal to be more of a test of mental endurance than a genuine political-style puzzle.

The game is not entirely without merit, but I would not recommend buying it without first seriously lowering your expectations.