Elite Dangerous Review

The first word that comes to mind when describing Elite Dangerous is “big.” Video games tend to struggle when it comes to conveying how vast space truly is. This is something the developers at Frontier set out to fix with their massively multiplayer follow-up to the classic Elite series, and “massive” is the operative word. The game takes place in a one-to-one recreation of the Milky Way galaxy featuring tens of thousands of unique star systems to explore. The universe is so massive that you can go days without seeing another player unless you deliberately seek them out.

Gameplay

While space is by definition mostly empty, that doesn’t mean there isn’t plenty to do in Elite Dangerous. Players can hunt bounties, trade between planets and space stations or dive headlong into the chaos of galactic power struggles. It’s easy to feel overwhelmed at first due to the sheer number of functions the game throws at new players. But it doesn’t take too long to get a handle on the controls. The complexity goes a long way toward making you feel like someone piloting an actual spacecraft instead of just controlling one in a video game.

On the subject of gameplay, ship-to-ship combat is somewhat reminiscent of games like Ace Combat. It’s very fun and exciting to play. The flight controls work well, for the most part. However, they lack the subtlety for precision tasks such as landing, making it too easy to overcorrect and fly off in the wrong direction.

Mining and trading can be surprisingly enjoyable as well. It might seem dull from an outside perspective, and I’d be lying if I said it doesn’t get old eventually. But there is something satisfying about finding a profitable route or good market for your salvage. If none of that sounds interesting, players can simply pick a direction on the galaxy map and see what’s out there. And there’s definitely a lot to see.

Elite Dangerous really is a breathtakingly beautiful game. Ships traveling at FTL speeds leave behind shimmering wakes as enormous space stations rotate silently in the void, their cavernous cylindrical interiors filled with skyscrapers, highways, and holographic billboards.

On the downside, transit seems to take a disproportionate amount of gameplay time. As fun it is to fly between the rings of gas giants and watch the boiling plasma of supergiant stars, that will seem far away while flying in circles around the same star system waiting for your sensors to identify which of the dozen signal sources is your mission target. While that may be in service to creating the vast sense of scale, it does make searching a large area tedious.