The month in games: No Man’s Sky goes where no gamer has gone before
In a month traditionally reserved for cider and overpriced family holidays, there were two games so massive they were effectively inescapable: one encouraged you to explore your neighbourhood with a smartphone; the other gave you a space ship and let you loose in an entire simulated universe. The first was, of course, Pokémon Go (iOS and Android), a title that’s achieved worldwide ubiquity. Based on the framework of older game Ingress, which also encourages players to visit real world locations, the addition of Pokémon turned a modest sideshow into a global phenomenon. Its fame has grown exponentially, with nostalgic monsters recognisable from youthful summers spent collecting them on Game Boy popping up in Instagram pictures of children, pets and picnics.
Naturally, the emergence of so many people wandering about hunched over their phones in search of small, colourful monsters has led to problems. These range from muggings at gunpoint in a London park to a request from Washington DC’s Holocaust Museum to have the three PokéStops – which produce especially dense populations of augmented reality critters – inside its building removed after its normally sombre galleries were overrun by monster hunters.
This month’s other behemoth was No Man’s Sky (PS4 and PC), a game unconcerned with the petty minutiae of Earth, which sets you free in a whole universe, letting you explore, trade or plunder your way through its functionally limitless expanse. It contains some 18 quintillion planets, a figure so stupefyingly vast that even with millions of players exploring it, well over 99.9% of planets won’t be visited by anyone, ever, and actually finding a previously explored world will be a rare moment. There’s an overarching mission to reach the universe’s eerily glowing centre (a feat one fan with a leaked copy of the game managed to complete before it was even released), but you’re never under pressure to do anything other than your own thing. The universe’s enormousness lets you undertake a personal Star Trek voyage, seeking out new worlds and boldly going where it’s highly improbable anyone will have gone before.
Ghostbusters (PS4, Xbox One & PC) needed more than a movie to make people like it. Set after the events of this summer’s reboot, it also completely ignores it, featuring a new cast of two female and two male ghostbusters, a volte face that’s neither explained nor even referred to. The script’s fumbling, intermittent attempts at humour barely qualify as half-hearted, which leaves only the gameplay as a source of redemption. Unfortunately, Ghostbusters is a blandly generic twin-stick shooter, where one joystick moves your character and the other directs their gunfire. You and three player- or AI-controlled compatriots walk around agonisingly slowly, shooting ghosts with a range of tiresomely conventional weapons, before occasionally whipping out proton packs and catching one. The action isn’t unpleasant, but the fact that you see everything the game has to offer in its opening 15 minutes makes the rest of its 12-plus hours an exercise in repetitious futility that you should avoid at all costs.
Available as a preview only and missing about half its plot and landmass, We Happy Few (Xbox One & PC) entered early access. It finally gave players a glimpse beyond the tantalising trailer shown at this year’s Electronics Entertainment Expo, which depicted a lavish, conversation-driven adventure. The biggest shock was that the peppy opening scene of the trailer, a daytime TV-style news bulletin, rapidly gave way to a stark game of survival set in a dingy alternate-1960s Britain. The country has suffered a terrifying national trauma that everyone is legally obliged to forget by taking Joy, an anti-depressant/memory suppressant that renders the populace happily vacant. Your main job is, of course, staying alive. It’s still early days, but the woeful combat and lacklustre environments will need a lot more work before the game lives up to its interesting premise.
Finally, Song Of The Deep (PS4, Xbox One and PC) is a delightful 2D puzzle adventure about a girl whose father fails to come home after a day’s fishing. She builds a submarine and goes searching for him in a gorgeous-looking underwater realm. Slightly too many puzzles were unnecessarily fiddly, but it proved a lot more satisfying than the vacuous ghostbusting on offer elsewhere. Worth a try if you need to recuperate between Pokémon Go walks.
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