Elite: Dangerous

Disclaimer: this review is based on an early 2017 version, not later potentially patched or otherwise updated versions.

I want to like this game but there are just too many things that hamper you as a beginner, simply trying to learn the game. It's an unnecessarily cumbersome learning curve. There are also a number of things that prevent you from immersing yourself into the gameworld, things that keep you at a distance from it.

For one thing, the menu system itselfs needs a tutorial; it's just menues after menues after menues, with tonnes of information. The game explains just a tiny fraction of it. You are abruptly thrown into the game with no introduction at all to the gameworld; what it is all about, the settings and overall story. It's simply: 'here is your ship, now away with you!'.

There's is next to no initial guidance as to how you are supposed to play the game, you are just [very] slowly stumbling around trying to understand how you should even get going. To give you an example. In my first attempt at a mission I neglected to take fuel into account, the game does not mention practical things like that, and I had to self-destruct in order to re-start because the game does not allow for manual loads and saves. This lack of guidance makes the game feel overly punishing as a beginner.

The lack of narrative and structure made it hard for me to get motivated enough to stick to the game, especially since this is a game that can be very repetitive. There's little excitement built into the exploration of the game compared to other space sims I've played, like the X-series. In the latter you have aliens to interact with, can walk around on space stations, there's an underlying storyline, and there's much more variety in the different planetary systems. 'Sure' Elite is more realistic (I guess), but everything also looks and plays more or less the same no matter where you decide to go in its massive game-world.

Progression feels so slow that if you want to get anywhere in it, you can't really afford to play any other games; it's Elite or nothing else. I've played plenty of slow-paced games, like Euro Truck Simulator 2 and American Truck Simulator, and progressing in Elite feels slower than in those games. One significant advantage those games have is that you experience different geography and weather as you drive through the maps. In Elite every place looks more or less like every other place you visit. This visual sparseness contributes to making the progression feel even slower.

The game is highly immersive in terms of graphical quality and sound. I was impressed. Yet even with this, I'm not that eager to play this game again, or 'more of it' to be accurate, and would recommend any game in the X-series over this. Having said this, if simulation and "space games" are the only kind of games you play, Elite is probably worth a look.

Side-note: I don't recommend using HOTAS with the game, at least not as you are starting up, as it makes the game ten times more difficult to learn. The game works well with a controller and is quicker to learn this way.