Recent reviews by <>...mAma:))

Just started to play this game and enjoy what its trying to do. Traversal is a fundamental part of the game and skill based. Its a learning curve but when you hit the sweet spot and everything clicks, its an enjoyable game for a few hours at a time.

Great addition

Very immersive old school space sim with all the modern bells and whistles. This isn't necessarily an action game, nor a pick up and play game, but rather one that rewards the player, the more they put into the game.

You will find yourself developing skills in trading, fighting or general flying and navigator a real size universe with and expansion that initially includes airless full size planets, enriching further the scope of this amazing game.

Probably better suite for maturer players, both for reasons of content and perhaps expense. Elite is moderately priced for the biggest playable game area in any game to date. But of course, such games can't always be had in the bargain bin.

If you like space sims, like to choose your narrative and live out your Buck Rogers space fantasy in a true to scale believable and ever updating universe, then this game come highly recommended.

10/10

"When negative reviews are about the price of the game, rather than the content, you know you've done something right"

*Disclosure - I am able to afford this game without issue.

This is a game that I was surprised to get into.

When the base game: Elite Dangerous was released exclusively to their store, I thought it to be some specialist game that required expensive peripherals to enjoy, full of nothing in particular and not really for me. I did enjoy the odd space sim back in the day and like many others, considered it to be a dead genre, or one that needed to come with modern 'twitch play' and little hardcore interaction. I was wrong.

When the base game came to Steam, I bought it. I played it for a while and put it down; it seemed too difficult, specialised, too much to learn to play and too challenging. I stepped away from the game, putting it down to a bad purchase like many other steam games in my library.

However, I had a period where I became bored to the same old FPS, pretty graphics and no originality games, also I wanted something with better fidelity and production values than the array of space sims and space game generally available in the modern era. With the exception of Star Citizen (Which isn't out and it is unclear when it will be in a suitably playable form), I felt a craving for something different.

I realised that Elite Dangerous offered something aking to the old school space sim, with modern graphical fidelity and vision; it had the initial steep learning curve of old; minus the think booklet of playing instructions, and the menu of keyboard buttons; instead is an option of playing interfaces all customisable and comfortably playable with keyboard, controllor or HOTAS controls.

Elite Dangerous offers the base game; a truly emmense 1:1 scale galaxy where the player can fight NPCS or in open play, fight against other players, or form 'wings' and fight as a unit. One may trade, fight for various factions or a multitude of other options adding to the immersion of this game. With Elite Dangerous: Horizons, with the first distributed contents comes the ability to land on airless worlds and moons, adding further to the immersion of the game. With this release, comes tweaks and additions to missions, new ships to fly and a new vehicle; an Surface Recconasance Vehicle (SRV) that allows you to explore and fight from the surface of rocky, icy of metallic planetary bodies.

For those who love the base game (and can afford) additional content, this is a no brainer. Witin this season of content, comes additional feature to be released trhoughout the year. Some of these features will include muticrew; ability to share the functions of the ship with friends, crafting, which will improve add to the ability to become self sufficient and add further to immersion, avatars, no longer will we have a helmeted character, but one which will have a customisable face which others will see, in preperation for other seasons and content. In addition, this season will include additional pathhes and content, yet to be known and tweaks to existing relased content througout the year.

Elite Dangerous: Horizons is a further step toward the dream of many; the ability to live a truy immersive futurisitc world and universe with realistic scale and physics. This is part two of a grander plan which I forsee to be at the forefront of not just space sims, but VR in 2016, most likley selling many units because of this game alone.


Be a part of the journey. 10/10

I note that there isn't really any reviews for people who didn't play any of the souls/demon souls games and now have decided to get on board with this definitive version of the game.

So, I am one of those people who have never played the game before, any of them within the series. How to describe the game from a newbie point of view, is that it is very old school; you progress becasue you get better, not because the game holds your hands. You will need to get better and you will do that through dying and learnng the controls, how to best conrtol your character, understanding the patterns of enemies and utlising cooperative play.

Because of the game's depth, you have ample space and time to make mistakes and improve all within the same game - you will have fun after a while once you understand the game's punishment factor which is the main point of the game: every death can potentially ruin hours of gaming as you lose your 'souls' which can be picked up once, if you can get to the point you last died without dying again.

The graphics utlise DX11 in parts, mostly backgrounds and lighting and on some character models, notbaly armour sets. Less so on actual faces or improvement environmental textures. It could still do with a huge 4K texture update - most likley this will be achieved with mods.

The AI is really quite something and can keep you on your toes. This is something that isn't really mentioned but would be game breaking if the AI was poor or even average. The difficultly and challenge of the AI is integral to the believability and immersion of the game. There are some poor placements rarely and exploitations, but these are few and far between.

Music is immersive and well chosen - moody and sometimes spooky - it really contributes heavily to the game and I couldn't think of the game being the same without it.

Bosses - these and mini bosses including NPC invaders make this game a challenging one that continually raises the stakes and demands that you improve - or die.

I reccomend this game for a new player - stand strong, be patient and you will learn to love it.