Remember a time when video games were just some moustached Italian plumbers playing in the sewer, or a blue hedgehog that sped around collecting coins?

Those days are long gone, because nowadays the gaming industry has become something else all together. Take for example ‘No Man’s Sky’, the sci-fi game that TIME claims is about to change everything.

Here’s some of their intro from their piece last week, written just before the release on August 9:

No Man’s Sky promises to be an interstellar sandbox you can explore without strings. Players are set loose in a kind of cosmic petri dish populated by randomly generated lifeforms they can study, exploit or destroy. Resources can be mined to upgrade gear or speed travel, while trade ships crawl through solar systems and tease precious cargo ripe for pirating. Even learning alien languages plays a role in trading effectively, or at least avoiding insults that could end in firefights…

More than that, No Man’s Sky is a challenge to a games industry that’s grown rich and complacent, aping the film industry’s preference for blockbusters and franchise-building sequels. For all the tech industry’s leaps in computing oomph, today’s triple-A games too often feel like overwrought musicals—dazzling pageants that mask shopworn ideas. While No Man’s Sky inspires rhetoric about its limitless scope, its real gambit may be its old school approach to ginning up all that grandeur. If No Man’s Sky delivers the sort of revelatory experience players have been after for as long as games have been a thing, the implications for the industry could be as ramifying as the game itself.

How about a look at the trailer?

You can read TIME’s full pre-release write-up HERE, but here’s one reviewer over at Stuff having played the game for a few days:

The paradox at the heart of No Man’s Sky is that it somehow manages to be the most interesting and the most boring game I’ve ever played. It serves up thrills and tedium in equal measure.

The limitless nature of the game and the sheer size and scale of it are awe inspiring, but when you realise that most of the experience revolves around the same repetitive tasks (trading, mining, exploring, nature watching) then the fact that it’s so big doesn’t really mean much…

The main problem No Man’s Sky suffers from is failing to live up to the hype around it. This isn’t the first game to face a backlash for “not delivering” on fans’ unrealistic expectations and it won’t be the last to have an over-enthusiastic publisher raising the bar so high that anything less than perfection will be seen as a failure.

You might love No Man’s Sky, you may well hate it, but it’s definitely something that’s worth giving a go to find out. It shoots for the moon, doesn’t quite reach it, but still lands among the stars.

Has it delivered on TIME’s claims that it will shake up the video game industry? I guess only time will tell.

[sources:time&stuff]