No Man's Sky: Multiple reviews + Our first look at the game!

IGN
This is an enormously complex game, but it gets there by means of networking together many different mundane tasks. So far that’s been as amusing as it generally is in the genre of survival crafting games, but at this point No Man’s Sky has done little to set itself apart other than the impressive spectacle of flying from one impractically huge world to another without obvious loading screens between them.

Polygon
In actuality, No Man’s Sky is first and foremost a survival game. From the confusing outset, where you’re thrown onto a planet with a crashed ship and told only to gather the resources needed to repair the ship, it’s all about hunting down various minerals and isotopes needed to live.

Gamespot
Despite the fact that there is a tangible formula beneath it all, No Man's Sky can instill a grand sense of wonder. On any given moon or planet, the call of a distress beacon will lure you over the next mountain, where you might then discover a cache of rare minerals in a cave that allows you to refuel your hyperdrive for another interstellar leap. You may wander so far in search of random events that you begin to fear becoming stranded on an alien planet, and you long for the familiar comfort of your cockpit.

Trusted reviews
No Man’s Sky is about discovery, experiential learning. Instead of a drip-feed of skills and rewards, it's a gradual unlocking of information. From the various species to the strange alien language, everything has to be discovered. It may feel very slow-paced, but a lot can happen on a simple walk in a new world.

Time
I can see No Man’s Sky potentially losing me for the inverse of all the reasons a game like Minecraft has yet to bore me. Yes, the universe isn’t random, and yes, it’s all extrapolated from a nucleus of elegant mathematics in a way that boggles the mind. But randomness was never the issue with these games. The problem with exploration-driven gameplay at this scale of algorithmic generation is over-generalization, and you’ll start to see it early in No Man’s Sky: Alien outposts laid out the same on every planet; diplomatic chitchats that draw from a shallow pool of conversational possibilities; geometrically unique but interactively homogenous creatures that wander about in all the same aimless ways.

Destructoid
As an "experience," No Man's Sky excels, and should delight people who are already predisposed to sci-fi sims. As Hello Games has noted time and time again No Man's Sky is not a multiplayer game. There are little "discussion" points to be sure, as well as some leaderboard-style conventions with the ability to name galaxies and points of interest, but nothing massive. This, for the most part, is an isolated adventure. And "isolated" essentially describes my state of being while I work on a full verdict for a review later this week.



You can check out the gameplay action at Twitch.tv