In 2016 I purchased a PlayStation 4 to play No Man’s Sky. I bought the special edition of the game at launch. While the rest of the gaming public argued whether Sony had pushed out the game before it was ready and debated whether an indie developer speaking passionately about his hopes for his game should be taken as promises, I was simply devouring No Man’s Sky. Was I hopeful that all of Hello Game’s ambitions for it would eventually come to pass? Of course, but I loved that launch day version. As update after update hit, it became clear that No Man’s Sky would not only meet the goals set out in those infamous pre-launch interviews, it would exceed them. I bought a second copy on Xbox when it left PlayStation exclusivity two years after launch, and wound up picking it up on PC as well. Since launch, No Man’s Sky has been one of my most consistently played games and one of my favorite games of all time. Now six years later, I bought it again, on Nintendo Switch. As I loaded up a new game and found myself once again on one of many trillions of planets in this universe, I couldn’t help but fall in love yet again.

After awakening near a crashed ship on the surface of a random planet, you’ll need to repair your ship by gathering resources from your surroundings. Plants can be broken down into carbon, rocks into ferrite dust. Your goals are laid out simply one at a time, slowly teaching you exactly how to synthesize parts for your ship, and to charge your own life support systems. No Man’s Sky opens up more slowly than many other games of this kind. As a result it is less intimidating than this kind of game often can be. Yes, there are a myriad of resources to gather that can be refined into more complex resources, crafted into tools and parts, or even used to construct buildings, but you’ll start with carbon and ferrite dust, slowly building your understanding. By the time you do leave this starting planet and venture out into the stars, you’ll have a good handle on how to survive, which shifts the focus from keeping your bars full, and more towards wondering what’s on the next planet. No Man’s Sky is often called a survival game, and put into the same category as ARK Survival Evolved, Subnautica, or even Minecraft. But I’ve long felt No Man’s Sky is an exploration game.

Reviewing No Man’s Sky as a game becomes much more difficult beyond this point. You can continue following the story but you by no means have to. You can take on ever changing community missions to earn cool rewards. You could find a nice planet and settle down. You could set out to learn the languages of various alien species one word at a time. You could meticulously catalog the flora and fauna of planets, and name them all after yourself. You could start an off the grid, solar-powered farm. You could become a space pirate looting to earn money. You could buy yourself a giant capital ship and slowly build out a fleet of ships to send on missions across the universe. As I said there is a story there if you need that focus for your experience, but No Man’s Sky is at its best when you’re setting your own goals and just exploring. In fact, if the survival aspects truly hold no value to you, creative mode allows you to explore and build with absolutely no limits. Inversely, a variety of tougher modes are also available for those who want to heighten the survival elements.

From a pure performance standpoint, the Switch version is better than I’d have ever expected, while lacking in a couple specific areas. When playing docked No Man’s Sky runs at 1280x720. Given that the base Xbox One runs the game at 900p, the Switch hitting 720p is on the high end of my expectations. Meanwhile, handheld mode drops the resolution to 853x480. Image quality holds up well in both configurations thanks to an effective but somewhat restrained temporal anti-aliasing solution to clean up edges. You’ll still notice some pixel crawl along harsher edges but temporal artifacts are essentially non-existent. The one element that does break up image quality are some low resolution alpha effects. When they overlap with the edge of an object, they can give the impression that the resolution is significantly lower than it actually is. It’s something anyone familiar with the Xenoblade or Breath of the Wild engines may have noticed before, but it's particularly aggressive here in select situations.

A variety of other adjustments have been made including pulling back draw distance on foliage and the removal of screen space reflections. Impressively, volumetric clouds are still in place around planets, and terrain is drawn pretty far into the distance. All of this is in service of a 30fps frame rate target that is met the vast majority of the time. In a highly variable game like this, some frame rate issues are a given, but in my testing they rarely became invasive. Most commonly I’d notice a short hitch as a new ship warped into the system, or a particularly complex piece of geometry came into view.

All that being said, the Switch version nearly delivers on the complete experience. Unfortunately direct multiplayer is not currently available, which is disappointing. Community missions are still available but you’ll have to take them on solo. No Man’s Sky is a fantastic single player experience but multiplayer has added much since it was introduced, and it is disappointing to see it missing on Switch. The only other apparent cut is the removal of large settlements from planets. They’re not crucial to the experience but they were a fun addition. Likely for similar reasons, base building limits complexity by default on Switch, though this can be turned off from the options menu after a warning that it may affect your experience.

No Man’s Sky makes the jump to Switch mostly unscathed. In terms of performance it greatly exceeds my expectations, but at the cost of a couple features. Settlements are ultimately a minor loss but multiplayer will be significant to many players. Hello Games hasn’t ruled out adding it in the future, but it is worth being aware of if you’re planning to pick up No Man’s Sky on Switch. Beneath these few complaints is an incredible game that outdoes anything else in its genre. It is one of those games you can play indefinitely. This is largely thanks to the fact that you’re free to play it however you want. One player may find themselves having a vastly different experience from another, or even being entirely unaware of mechanics they’ve never chosen to engage with. While the Switch version isn’t without its flaws, the core experience is excellently translated. And if I’ve learned anything from Hello Games over the last six years, I’m hopeful this version will only get better with time.