Is No Man’s Sky fun? Yes. No Man’s Sky scores 8/10 for fun. Lifting off a planet, flying straight into space and landing somewhere nobody has named yet still feels great, even if the activities run shallow.
Where this score comes from: Steam player reviews, last checked against the 200 most recent English reviews in October 2026. No Man’s Sky on Steam
No Man’s Sky had one of gaming’s most infamous launches in 2016. Ten years of free updates later, it is a huge space sandbox that new players are still discovering.
No Man’s Sky scores 8/10 on immediate fun. Most players under 20 hours were positive. It misses a 9 because the systems go wide rather than deep, and the menus and controls turn simple jobs into chores.
The big moment comes early. You wake up stranded on a hostile planet, patch your ship together, and within the first couple of hours you take off and fly into space with no loading screen. One new player hopped from a fire-swept planet to a jungle of man-eating plants to a paradise moon and logged 15 hours in three days.
Exploration carries it. Every planet is its own small trip, and something odd is always waiting, like a giant fish lunging at you while you mine. It is also calm, with no timer on your back. Players call it comfort gaming for a late night.
When you want goals, there are bases, ship design, freighter fleets, settlements and even fishing, all added through free updates.
It is wide but shallow. Four-hour and 300-hour players say the same thing: once you have seen each planet type they blur together, stations share one layout, and the systems rarely connect. One newcomer said the tight resource juggling of the first five hours was the best part, before money stopped mattering.
Getting comfortable takes patience. One player called the first hour a walking simulator. Menus want held buttons instead of clicks, and several players spent their early hours searching online for how things work. One said it clicked after about 10 hours.
Bugs are the long-term risk. Veterans describe missions that stop advancing, items vanishing from freighters and crashes after the recent Cosmos update. Mac players report frequent crashes. That mostly hits after hour 20, so it costs little here.
Solo: This is where it shines. The game is made for wandering on your own at your own pace, and you can switch multiplayer off completely.
With friends: Good, with caveats. You can bring your own save into a friend’s game, travel together and visit each other’s bases, and fans say a crew makes it better. Others report disconnects and broken missions. If you start an expedition as a newcomer, check that PvP is off in the network settings.
Yes, if you like exploring for its own sake. Give it a few hours to get past the tutorial and the menus, and chase what you enjoy instead of everything. If you need depth more than scenery, it may wear thin. Players keep comparing it to Starfield, which we rated 4/10, and most say No Man’s Sky does the space part better.
For comparison, we rated Subnautica 10/10 and Palworld 9/10 on the same fun-only scale.
See where it lands in the most fun co-op games.
No Man's Sky scores 8/10 on immediate fun. Wake up stranded, fix the ship, fly into space. Weekends vanish. It runs wide but shallow, and the menus fight you.
Wide but shallow. Clunky menus.
One question: did it deliver immediate fun? Graphics, story depth, difficulty and critical acclaim are ignored. Pick-up-and-play accessibility is rewarded; anything that makes you wait for the fun to start is penalized.
How we score: We don't care about graphics, story depth, or critical acclaim. One question — did it deliver immediate fun? We reward pick-up-and-play accessibility and penalize anything that makes you wait for the fun to start.