Note: The arrival of the substantial Waypoint 4.0 update isn’t yet available on Switch. We’ll update this review with our verdict on that and an overall score as soon as possible. In the meantime, you can find our pre-Waypoint impressions of the Switch release below.
It’s been a long old road for Hello Games’ No Man’s Sky. First revealed at the VGX Awards all the way back in 2013, the procedurally generated infinite space simulator finally released — riding an enormous wave of hype — in August of 2016. However, the PS4 and PC game we got our sweaty hands on was a far cry from what had been advertised and promised during a build-up to launch that could have made Peter Molyneux blush.
Yes, No Man’s Sky was not the all-encompassing wonder we’d been led to believe it would be. It had the procedurally generated planets, the ‘infinite’ universe in which to play, but there just wasn’t a whole lot to actually do in the months following its initial launch. It had some serious technical issues, too. It didn’t run well on consoles at the time, its procedurally generated aliens and environments were a bit duff and, as a result, the fury of what seemed like the entire internet was laser-focused on Sean Murray and the small team at Hello Games. It got nasty.
Fast forward to 2022 though, and there’s possibly never been a bigger or better comeback story in the history of gaming. The No Man’s Sky of today is a testament to an indie studio that point-blank refused to give up, that took the blows, admitted its mistakes, put its head down, cut comms, and concentrated on delivering — and it really did deliver. It ultimately delivered on every promise that had been made pre-release and it continued, and still continues, to deliver much more on top of that. What we’ve got now is a wondrous space exploration experience that lives up to the crazy pre-release hype. And now it’s on Switch.
Over the course of six years, numerous big updates have improved every aspect of what’s on offer here. That dodgy procedural generation has been transformed, tweaked and enhanced to ensure that the level of variety in planets, weather, local lifeforms and fauna makes for a genuinely compelling exploration experience. It now feels as though you’re travelling in a universe that’s actually full of endless possibilities with regards to what you’ll confront when you set your ship down on a planet. From weather, atmospheric hazards and volatile plant/animal life, to jaw-dropping vistas and twisted alien environments, you just never know what you’re in for when you open your ship’s cockpit, and planets are now stuffed full of gear and long-lost artefacts to discover and sell as you upgrade every aspect of yourself and your trusty spaceship. The boring old gameplay loops of old are now a very distant memory indeed.
The opening tutorial section has been bolstered and improved and now provides a genuinely useful introduction to the game’s core systems whilst also keeping you invested through some neat storytelling. There’s base building, improved economy systems, character creation, space combat, farming, alien settlements, procedurally generated missions, underwater exploration, ground vehicles, portals…the list is long and all-encompassing. In short, No Man’s Sky has become the game we all wanted it to be for the most part, but one question remains: Can Hello Games take all of this and jam it onto the Nintendo Switch in a playable state? We didn’t dare believe but, as it turns out, they’ve only gone and done just that.
There may be visual sacrifices — par for the course on Switch by now — and it takes a little longer to load into initially. Multiplayer has yet to make the jump, and you’ll need to hold on a little longer for the upcoming Waypoint update (which was meant to be live at launch but is still going through Nintendo certification at the time of writing), but overall this is a No Man’s Sky port that serves up an absolutely rock-solid experience.
Even in the areas we might have expected and even accepted some frame rate drops here — launching off from planets or cranking our ship to warp speed to blast our way to a far-flung location — the game holds an almost perfect 30FPS. It’s remarkable really, and it makes for a Switch conversion that, for us, sits right up top with the likes of The Witcher 3, Alien Isolation, and DOOM as one of the very best ports we’ve seen on the console thus far, something that just shouldn’t work but absolutely does.
Of course, there have been sacrifices — it’s not perfect. There’s a blurriness to the visuals in handheld mode — you can see it clearly in our screenshots — and pop-in is much more noticeable as you bound around planet surfaces. However, the graphical style of No Man’s Sky, that bold, colourful and chunky aesthetic, means that none of this really matters as much as it could with another game. That slight blurriness never holds you back, everything is perfectly readable in the environments, and you can settle in and explore and scavenge and build to your heart’s content without needing to stress over technical issues. What an accomplishment.
This is also a game that absolutely sings as a portable title; we already feel like this is gonna be our default way to play it going forward, a perfect experience for long sessions on the couch or short blasts on a journey. None of the sacrifices that have been made by Hello Games to get this one running well encroach upon your enjoyment of the experience, and it all still looks pretty fantastic, even with the visuals dialled down to their most basic settings.
Of course, we’re still waiting for that big Waypoint update to arrive. It’s just launched on other consoles but will be another few days making its way to Switch, and so we won’t be putting a score on this review just yet. Waypoint is the largest update yet for the game and introduces a raft of fundamental changes, additions and improvements to how the game plays. There’s a ton of stuff on the way here, with reworked inventory management, new visual elements in space and on planet surfaces, a “relaxed” gameplay mode, survival challenges, inventory filters, crafting trees, dynamic difficulty settings, custom game options and more besides, so we want to thoroughly explore all of that before delivering our final verdict.
Conclusion
We’ll be diving into Waypoint as soon as it hits Switch to test out all its new features and see how they further improve the core gameplay experience. But for now, the keen intergalactic travellers among you can rest assured that if you’re thinking about hopping aboard this particular space adventure at launch, a super solid Switch port awaits. Watch this space.
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