I play a lot of games and I've played them since the eighties. I don't write too much reviews and some games really deserved a review. I should have written one for those games but I didn't because I'm simply too lazy.
But this, this game is just too special and because gamespot hasn't written one yet here's my short but essential review of Elite: dangerous.
The elite series started somewhere in the eighties, but this game has hardly anything to do with it anymore. The games are technologically too far apart. It's like comparing batman from 1986 with arkham city, or at best wolfenstein from the nineties with the latest installment but that last comparison would be bit of an insult to elite dangerous. Maybe for docking the wolfenstein comparison would be good...
Anyway, describing elite. I would say elite dangeous is a futuristic space flight/combat simulator where the flying is simplified and the space is 100 percent simulation. I'm not even talking about battle/dogfight scenarios.. yet or any other stuff that's in the game.The flying is simplified because it took me only about an hour to get the flying down in elite. While it has a lot of depth, you get familiar with the controls pretty fast.
I would really opt for a joystick though, I got a cheap one from thrustmaster, costed me 20 bucks and works perfectly for me. It doesn't have a yaw function but the game has such slick options that I just set the controls to 'yaw on low roll' which probably works better for me than a joystick with yaw function. This might sound chinese to you (or any other language you don't understand at all), but when doing the first training missions you'll know exactly what I'm talking about.
That brings me too the simulation part. They have managed to simulate space and the flying around in it like no one has ever done before. The distances you have to travel are just crazy, like they are in reality. Your ship has extreme capabilites when it comes to speed, but it still has to accelerate and decelerate. You have like three modes, normal thrust, supercruise and hyperspace.
Normal thrust is like zero till the speed of a rocket. Supercruise is something above that till several times lightspeed, and hyperspace , well hyperspace crossed 6 lightyears in half a minute on my first jump. Still I need to use supercruise to navigate into systems. I was nearing a saturnus like planet and was going into the rings to find some resources and when I saw the rings it thought I was close. Those rings look nice, but that's not how they look when you're close. So I wasn't close, when dropping out of supercruise, it would take me 6 days to get into the rings and find resources lol. When getting closer , the rocks started to show, and the ring like structure, well , that's just something you see through a telescope, or in a space ship thousands of miles away lol.
I do have to mention that I got killed in that asteroid belt by the way, because i forgot to turn my ships light on, and ran into an asteroid , with all power diverted to engines and none to shields, i exploded...
As for the fighting , well think standard dogfight xwing, wing commander or whatever you played, with some power management, rockets, laser, machine like guns. I only did combat training, but the dogfighting rocks. The whole game simply rocks, It's the most innovative game i played in years. I get a kick out of this game just by accelerating, the sound and graphics are just sweet. It's a shame this had to happen through a kickstarter campaign. I will think twice before I buy any game now, because when playing elite dangerous I realize what crap some devs are trying to feed me.
I still have to add that elite is way more than I just mentioned, you can do trading to get money and buy better equipment, the game has other players in it as well as computer players, you can do exploration to get more money, be a pirate, be a a bounty hunter, be a miner. Elite also holds the entire milky way as 'the open world'
And they promised to add a lot more.. and that would be great. I would be willing to pay extra for that without even thinking because this game is my best spend 50$ in ages. I would give it a 10, but i'm too old to give tens.