Ladies And Gents its here the Elite Dangerous a sequel to my past. Memories of my gaming youth come flooding back playing original Elite and mostly Elite Frontier in my bedroom many long nights trading, mining and killing in the big black void of space, well that's what I hoped for when I bought this game, its not what I got.
So i'll start with the good. This game has amazing graphics, ship, station they are detailed and look awesome, so does the space environment, especially the stars. The sound effects are ear blastingly good. The flight model is epic you have total control of your ship and dogfighting looks and feels excellent.
Now the bad and two main problems I have with this game the first is this game is an empty shell. There exists barely any content it might as well be a tech demo there is hardly anything to do and what you can do is so mind numbingly tedious and designed in a way to be anti-fun in every possible way. So what can you do in this vast universe? Basicaly you can run the same 4 missions over and over again, trade, mine or explore. Why these suck I'll explain in a second.
The second major problem with this game is it is heavily instanced, this is to create the illusion of you playing in a vast universe except any encounter involving ship combat or docking with a station is handled in an instance created in the another instance of the system you are already in, so basicly you cant interact with another ship in a system unless you force that ship to stop through a thing called interdiction or follow that ship into a instance. So its all smoke and mirrors and makes the universe feel fake and small.
Missions are designed to be tedious and long, you will get missions like retrieve the rebel signal or recover the black box this involves flying to the designated system, and randomly looking for Unidentified Signal Markers which just appear randomly around the system in with no rhyme or reason and entering these markers to create a instance with the same 3 random encounters in the vain hope your goal is there. This can take 2 hours a mission sometimes because flight times in this game are so painfully slow plus the randomness equals tedium.
Combat missions are similar kill 4 pirates, were are the pirates? The game won't tell you have to fly about at random and hope they appear somewhere, also they never explain who these pirates are, or what constitutes a pirate because the only info you get on a ship is if its wanted and that doesn't mean they are one ugghh.
Mining is basically blasting rocks and picking them up one by one. All done in a collection instance, not fun. And exploring? What is there to explore? The same looking systems, artificial planets you cant land on its really pointless you might as well play Sandbox universe or whatever its called they know how to generate a interesting galaxy.
Bounty hunting and pirating is just hovering around a nav point and waiting for stuff to appear to blow up, really shallow.
The last thing you can do is trading and the only real way to get money in this game, and its dull dull dull, it just shunting a few crates of cargo from station to station in the hope you make a profit.
The forced multi player in this game is unnecessary, because the game world is huge you most likely will hardly ever encounter another player let alone fight one so what's the point? Its like they tried to make a pseudo mmo but it rly doesn't work.
So Elite Dangerous is a huge let down as a release, it needs another good year to fill it with meaningful things to do because as it stands its a barren wasteland of content. There are people that could find enjoyment out of the current content but God knows how.Beside the crappy instancing there's a decent flight model and engine there but my advice wait until they fill it out with meaningful things to do or prepared to be disappointed.