Recent reviews by hotfix

Disclaimer: I played Elite in beta, and took a break. My Steam hours don't accurately reflect the time I spent playing Elite.

There are countless reviews here about what the game does, so I'm not going to talk about that. I'll just talk about how great the game feels.

I love space. I love the emptiness of it as much as I love the balls of dirt we call planets, and the stars. Elite does an amazing job at putting you out there, exploring, trading, bounty hunting or mining. The Galaxy is imense, as it should be. It's a pretty accurate replica of the actual Milky Way, with distances and known stars all in the right places. People have calculated where Voyager would be, went there, and found it. This amount of detail and polish is a dying art form in today's AAA games.

I don't think Elite is for everyone, but I think with the recent public interest towards space, Elite is for many. The game has a lot to offer, but it will not hold your hand, and it will not make it easy. For me, discovering a new asteroid belt that gives back great resources that I can mine, or discovering places that nobody has discovered before, that makes me happy. The faction system, missions, power play and the community itself are just the cherry on the top (see fuelrats.com as an example for how great the community for Elite can be).

The game can be action packed, if you decide to go that route, or it can be a very enjoyable, mostly solitary, experience. It is up to you. Some people call it a sandbox, but I think they're looking at it the wrong way. The Milky Way is vast, and mostly empty, as it should be. If you want a hand crafted experience, with a smaller yet more "lively" Universe, and with a narrative you have to follow, this is not the game you want to play, and one has to wonder, with the promise of a 1:1 scale replica of our Galaxy, what did you expect? There are a few very populated areas, and there are areas where you will be alone, in a many light years radius. The narrative is there, but tries it's best to not get in the way of whatever you're up to.

This is not your run of the mill, 10 min multiplayer battle game (cough, Star Wars Battlefront). This is a journey that was planned to be in development for years to come, with a roadmap that so far has been respected. The developers have kept to their promise and every piece of experience they deliver has been polished to a standard that I wish more games had. It's the best space sim on the market right now, and for the forseeable future. I've also backed Star Citizen and I have great hopes for it, but make no mistake, they are not the same game, and they don't aim to deliver the same experience. Whereas Elite Dangerous is more like Isaac Asimov's Foundation, Star Citizen is more like Orson Scott Card's Ender's Game. Both are great, and right now only Foundation is available.

I should add that I'm playing Elite on an Oculus DK2, which makes the experience incredibly immersive. It is the best game I've played in VR, followed closely by Alien Isolation.

Frustratingly fun and thx Volvo for not ruining a great game