As a sandbox adventure, you can build your own space stations on any world you like, as well as construct your own ships. With a whole host of other planets across the galaxy to discover, every planet is uniquely different. As the commander and sole survivor of the ‘Titan’ frigate that crashes on an unknown planet in the Andromeda galaxy, you set out to find out just what happened. Just like in No Man’s Sky, you’re free to walk across planets and discover aliens species with native flora and fauna. StarboundĮmpyrion is another sprawling, expansive exploration game that lets you navigate through space and land on planets to uncover strange new worlds. It’s worth noting that as a massively multiplayer space sim, you do have to be online in order to play it, but there is a solo mode if you don’t want to encounter other players. By gaining skills and know-how, you’ll have to set out to survive in a galaxy filled with challenges - it also involves collecting bounties and trading. Affording you a similar amount of freedom to go about your space travels as you please, you start out with a small ship and a little money to your name. It is just as grand in scale, with 400 billion star systems to jump to, so you’ll certainly still get your fill of space exploration in its recreation of the Milky Way.

Instead, you’ll spend your time on board your customisable ship exploring its expansive openworld. Planetary exploration is its biggest difference, since Elite Dangerous does let you land on some planets, but you can’t walk across or explore them in the same way. The low-poly art also gives it a very appealing aesthetic that brings the colourful worlds to life in a distinctive style.Įlite Dangerous is another open-ended space exploration game that shares some similarities to No Man’s Sky. The planets all have hidden secrets to uncover by scouting across the world’s surface, or even digging right down to its core to discover rarities and unravel the mysteries of the universe. Once you’re ready to discover more, you can journey to new worlds - every planet is entirely different, and the recent 1.0 update has added another solar system. By using your creativity, you can use anything you mine or discover to craft any number of different items, and build bases and vehicles to travel across the terrain. Setting off into the far reaches of outer space, you crash land on a strange new planet and have to adapt to the new environment and use the world’s resources to repair your space pod. In this sandbox-y space adventure, you play as an Astroneer who lives in the 25th century during the ‘age of intergalactic discovery’. If you love landing on planets and exploring everything the wonderfully strange alien worlds have to offer, Astroneer is all about just that.

No man's sky on opengl 4.4