No Man’s Sky has had a very strong redemption story. Originally released six years ago to widespread criticism over missing features, overblown promises, and barren content, the game has since expanded massively – delivering a transformed experience. Nowadays, it’s an acclaimed sandbox title, with a wealth of customisation and base-building potential… which brings us to the new Switch release.
Unlike the original PS4 version, expectations must be properly calibrated here, as developer Hello Games has admitted to cutting two key features – multiplayer and settlements – at least for this initial release. Early footage hasn’t seemed particularly impressive either, but the prospect of a virtually infinite universe in the palm of your hand might be enough to offset that. So is this a worthy port? Or is No Man’s Sky just ‘too big’ for Nintendo’s hybrid console?
No Man’s Sky is a fascinating and unique title. Fundamentally, most of what you see is based on procedural generation – the world geometry, weather, flora and fauna, and texturing are largely generated in real-time according to a preset seed code. Some elements do repeat, like patches of textures, or certain objects or body parts, but there’s a surprising amount of variety here. That technology is used to create a highly open-ended sandbox. The curated content is fairly limited, but players can travel the stars, build massive bases, catalogue new species and planets, or tear apart the deformable voxel-based planetary terrain. No Man’s Sky isn’t a hardcore space sim, by any means, but it’s far more tactile, approachable, and immediately engaging than games like Elite and Eve Online.
But all that tech – originally built to suit the capabilities of the PS4 and gaming PCs – doesn’t seem like it would minituarise particularly well to a mobile chipset. And visually speaking, this release doesn’t impress very much. Switch makes use of aggressive draw-in for virtually all screen elements. Major chunks of level geometry snap into place at close distance, and huge areas of shadowmap coverage crudely draw in as the player nears. This is all made much more obvious when flying over a planet’s surface, where the geometry issues seem particularly egregious. Larger foliage elements do render out reasonably far, although bushes and small plants only show up very close to the player.