BenoSaur

Why This Game?

I had been pret­ty pumped for No Man’s Sky ever since its debut trail­er first aired at the 2013 VGX awards. When the game final­ly land­ed in my hands, it had been paired down to a bit more real­is­tic prod­uct for a small indie team to be mak­ing, but I remained excit­ed to play. Frankly, I think the game has received a bit more flak than it deserves, but that’s a top­ic for anoth­er day. The tro­phy break­down for No Man’s Sky involved earn­ing what are called mile­stones for per­form­ing var­i­ous actions you would nor­mal­ly do in the game. Thus, I fig­ured, earn­ing the plat­inum is akin to com­plet­ing the game, since it does­n’t real­ly have a con­crete end­ing. Paired with both this idea and my enthu­si­asm for the game, I set out to get this plat­inum trophy.

Was it Quick?

Hah! No, it was not a ter­ri­bly quick plat­inum. In fact, time to plat­inum could vary great­ly depend­ing on your tech­nique. One tro­phy in par­tic­u­lar, a gold tro­phy titled “The Sen­tinel,” tasks you with sur­viv­ing on an extreme­ly haz­ardous plan­et for 32 sols. In the orig­i­nal ver­sion of the game, you sim­ply need­ed to sur­vive any­where at all for this amount of time, but this was per­haps a lit­tle on the easy side of things. Hel­lo Games may have over­cor­rect­ed in the cur­rent state of it. Now, you need to sur­vive on one extreme haz­ard plan­et for 32 sols with­out ever return­ing to your ship at all. No prob­lem, as you can sim­ply get in a shel­ter and be fine, but 32 sols could be as long as 8 hours. I end­ed up tim­ing out how long my life sup­port would last, left it sit­ting and refilled as nec­es­sary to get this one. Fun times! All told, I spent more time than was nec­es­sary get most of the oth­ers, but I def­i­nite­ly enjoyed explor­ing the var­i­ous solar sys­tems. (3 out of 10)

Was it Easy?

Again, this depends on the tech­nique you decide to use. If you own a dig­i­tal copy of the game, it’s not going to be easy for you. Anoth­er change Hel­lo Games made to the mile­stones involved dis­cov­er­ing dif­fer­ent ani­mals. In the orig­i­nal ver­sion, you sim­ply need­ed to scan any 60 ani­mals. I esti­mate that they though this may prove to be too easy, so they changed it. You now need to dis­cov­er every dif­fer­ent ani­mal on 10 full plan­ets. Let it be known that I gave this an hon­est shot, spend­ing near­ly four hours on at least one plan­et. That being said, almost every sin­gle time there would end up being one ani­mal type left and I end­ed up blast­ing off frus­trat­ed. What I end­ed up doing was dis­con­nect­ing my PS4 from the inter­net, back­ing up my save, delet­ing the game and rein­stalling it from the disc. This gave me the much eas­i­er orig­i­nal goal, but play­ing that orig­i­nal ver­sion did come with its own set of chal­lenges. Noth­ing required a ton of skill, so hard might not be the right word, but it cer­tain­ly was­n’t easy either. (5 out of 10)

Was It Fun?

No Man’s Sky haters are gonna hate, but I did have a good time with the game. The scope of the plan­et and joy of dis­cov­er­ing dif­fer­ent things kept me play­ing and smil­ing for a decent amount of time. This is not the last game you’ll ever need to buy, like many peo­ple thought, but if you enjoy explo­ration games then there’s a decent amount of fun to be had here. The two main tro­phies I’ve been grip­ing about, “The Senti­nal” and “Gala­pa­gos” respec­tive­ly, are decid­ed­ly not fun and drag down the process of get­ting the plat­inum. (7 out of 10)

Any Oth­er Thoughts?

Often, I have a ten­den­cy to give the ben­e­fit of the doubt to games that are tak­ing a beat­ing crit­i­cal­ly. Once expec­ta­tions are set prop­er­ly, many games can be quite enjoy­able for what they are and No Man’s Sky is no dif­fer­ent. I would still say that this game is an amaz­ing achieve­ment for the absolute­ly tiny group of peo­ple that made it. I’m proud to have the plat­inum for this game in my col­lec­tion and look for­ward to more updates that Hel­lo Games will add to this explo­ration odyssey in the future.

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