Elite Dangerous

I don't have much in game time but I can make this assessment, it seems somewhat technical and has a high learning curve. I bought a Logitech HOTAS specifically for this years ago and am just now trying it out. My brain is throbbing from just the first tutorial. This will take a little patience to get going, seems like a worthy cause though!
8.5/10

it's like trying to hug and cuddle a cat that does NOT want to be touched and claws you up horribly but you just wanna keep hugging the cat so badly.

It's not great, I decided to get it over the idea of space, being able to explore, and more. It reaches the bare minimum to be playable, it's a laggy mess a lot of the time even on my high end hardware, the game is a repetitive grind with a lack of exploration, you can barely do anything.

Would've preferred if the game was less about repetitive combat but rather exploration. Much preferred No Mans Sky.

Reviewing every game I've played in my Steam Library. Game 17

Fun but its really for space ship enthusiasts.

I only dipped my toes in but i do recall it taking a long time to get anywhere.

Unfortunately when i last played getting together with a friend to play coop missions was a hassle and i dont think its changed since.

Probably don't get it for the coop tag as i found it frustrating to try and do bounty missions together. Its probably not changed.

The dumbest game in existence I'm stuck at the tutorial because the training drone is OUTSIDE THE TRAINING AREA WHERE I CANNOT REACH IT. These are 4h of my life I'll never be able to get back and also unfortunately my money. DO NOT BUY THIS GAME even if it's on sale! It's a buggy poorly optimized dogwater.

If you want a game that counts how long you've played by the amount of time you've had the launcher open, this game is for you.

If you want a game that has a manual which is 140 pages long and (as of this writing) eight years out of date, this game is for you.

If you want a game that has tutorials which are so unhelpful that even the forums say you shouldn't do them, this game is for you.

If you want a game that purportedly has a solo mode, but is so tied to its multiplayer form that trying to play it standalone is crippled by time out of game counting against you, a delay on exit, and lack of ability to pause, this game is for you.

If you want a game that has in-game super-futuristic computers which are less capable than current real-world computers, this game is for you.

If you want a game that provides no explanation or warning of constraints on missions, this game is for you.

The reviews I read made this sound quite good. The mechanics of the game do not support the reviews. I might've played for two hours. Steam claims I've played for 23, because I never closed the launcher until I asked for a refund.

No stars. This is a stinker.

I have been playing this game for many years and even tho theres alot of bickering people giving this game negative reviews i still think its a fun game for whenever your in the mood for some scifi gaming. I mostly enjoy minning asteroids to make money. I also enjoy exploring new systems and going as far as i can to unexplored territory.

The user experience of this game is utterly abysmal. Here's a list of some evidence of just how bad the user experience is:

* There are 100s of keybinds, and you have to scroll through ALL OF THEM, because the devs categorized them in ways that only make sense to them. Just add a search, people, come on. This is amateur crap.
* If you don't have a photographic memory, you'll literally spend 90% of your time looking up how to do things. Even when you ask the community, you'll get half-answers and sentences that start with the word 'Just' -- ('Just land at a station and pay the fine!' -- Nah, there's more to it than that).
* You can land at a station with a fine and be locked out of important services, with literally no way to pay the fine _at that station_ (probably because you didn't land at the _right kind_ of station).
* Trying to plan a route for your evacuation mission before you take off from a settlement? Hope you aren't using default keybinds, because your hyper jump destination is behind the planet you're currently on, and you literally won't be able to super cruise OR jump at all until you can find a clear line of sight to your jump destination! Meanwhile, Thargoids are killing you, and you can't stop the game to look up how to fix the problem. You're probably going to die, and then you're also going to incur fines for not being able to deliver your passengers. By the way, hope you know what type of station to land at so you can pay the fines!
-- * While you're at it, don't bother trying to clear your jump destination so you can supercruise off of the planet -- you literally can't. No keybind exists, despite the community asking this question repeatedly. (Note: The answer is 'set a separate keybind for supercruise and hyperjump - don't use the defaults. Good luck finding those, tho! (They're under Options -> Controls -> Ship Controls -> Miscellaneous - but that will probably change, and you'll never be able to find it.)
* Hope you've got more than one monitor -- if you want to make any meaningful progress in this game, you're going to need to rely upon 3rd party websites that are only updated by the good will of its members, because the devs sure as hell don't want to help you figure out how to play the game.)
* You want to fight Thargoids and participate in some large-scale PvE? Plan on spending 2 hours kitting a ship out to be able to do the bare minimum, and end up dying repeatedly anyways because you don't have Caustic heat sinks, or because there's literally nothing telling you how to use the Thargoid Pulse Neutralizer.
--* Oh, and also, you're probably going to spend a significant amount of time just floating around in space, because the Thargoid interceptors will EMP your ship and you'll literally be dead in the water for 30 seconds while your systems reboot (it might actually be less than this, but it is an _egregious_ amount of time you spend disabled)
* By the way, you're going to need ECMs, but nothing in the game is going to tell you where you can find them. By the way, the official Fan wiki is useless, as well - it'll list _maybe_ 8 locations, likely 100s of lightyears away. If you were smart and used inara.cz, though, you can probably find one in the next system over.

This is before you even get to the number of game breaking bugs in this game that require you to log out and back in, or absolutely stupid, imbalanced mechanics that require nothing more than trial and error to solve for. Unless you spend 1000 hours on this game, you _will_ spend 75%+ of your overall game time _just figuring out how to play the game_. And god help you if you quit playing the game and come back more than a few months later -- you're in for another 100 hours of learning how to play the game.

This is just awful. What an absolutely miserable experience. The game CAN and WILL be fun, and you WILL eventually figure your way around all of these god-awful eccentricities, but I would never ever ever recommend this game to anyone. I genuinely don't think that it's worth the effort, by-and-large. The devs clearly have never heard of the words 'User Experience,' and it shows. They don't care.

Don't bother with Star Citizen. this has everything it should have had. And it works fine. Glitches and crashes are extremely rare.

After playing for 259 hours, I can say that the game is too frustrating for several reasons. While the gameplay and usability have improved, after purchasing the Odyssey expansion, I noticed a significant issue with learnability. The game does not provide enough structured learning paths to progressively understand and master its features. This makes it difficult to fully grasp and utilize the mechanics, especially for someone who plays to relax after work. Overall, this lack of guidance detracts from the experience and makes the game less enjoyable.

Played for a while on xbox, and finally transferred my account to PC. Still a fantastic game, I can get absorbed for hours and hours just jumping around into different systems, or bounty hunting.

Elite Dangerous is a rare gem that deserves to be cherished. The intricate Background Simulation and global player interaction create a truly unmatched experience. Its sandbox nature offers limitless freedom, allowing players to carve their own path in a vast and stunning galaxy.

Unlike many modern games, Elite doesn’t hand content to you on a silver platter. It challenges you to explore, discover, and define your place in the universe through your own courage and effort. A masterpiece for those who dare to dream big.

Thank you, Elite.

The quintessential space sim, with a pedigree to back it up. The learning curve is huge, but once you get over it you're in for a stellar experience. The 10 year anniversary is just around the corner and big things are happening across the universe.

There's something mesmerizing about traveling multiple hundreds times the speed of light with full flight controls. Lack of time-dilation notwithstanding, this game manages to reel me back in over the years despite its many flaws. You have to be very self-motivated and love technical details. Combat will stress your multitasking abilities as you manage multiple sub-systems to maintain a razor's edge over your foes.

had this game for like a month, found out in the first week i could buy string lights for my cockpit.........haven't looked back since....

on a deeper level i bought this game in 2024 and i had no idea its 10 years old. the amount of content in this game is remarkable and the community in my experience has been superb. ASIDE from the occasional DC while jumping between systems once in a while, the overall experience mechanically speaking has been a buttery smooth experience and lets you slip into some fairly deep immersion even without a flight stick.

i have yet to throw on my VR headset and experience that particular feature but from what i've seen online, i don't expect to be disappointed. i certainly view it as a bonus feature and not a core selling point to the game.

As many nice things i have to say about Elite Dangerous, the only caution id give to the prospective buyer is that i believe the scope of all the different paths to take forward in the game can seem a bit daunting to the uninitiated. i luckily had help starting out and was able to get my feet under me relatively quickly, but even after 200+ hours of game play, i'm still learning a ton. also i think its worthy of mention that progression can and will be a grind. a lot of methods exist to help farm whatever it is you may need, but that doesn't mean those methods are all quick.

in conclusion, buy the game scrub.

Making slight improvements and reducing the grind has actually helped this game a tiny bit.

This game has the highest barrier of entry that I've ever seen. You need to play for tens of hours just to learn how to play. It's the most complex game I've encountered, and it has absolutely zero hand-holding.

It just feels so right. There is such an attention to detail with how your spaceship moves, looks, and sounds, it just makes it so believable. I'm not a huge sim fan, but I've tried a few, and none of them felt this immersive. I thought this is as good as it gets, until I started playing this game on VR (Meta Quest 3) and this is now my 2nd favourite VR game too. I'm not saying this to gatekeep the experience, but I genuinely believe that you haven't really played E:D if you haven't played it in VR. It unlocks such a being-in-the-moment feeling, and it's not just the free headlook, it's the feeling of depth (3D) that only VR headsets do. A planet isn't just a picture of a planet, they feel HUGE and you feel so tiny when close to one. So immersive.

After all these high praises now let me also tell you one thing: Frontier is absolutely squandering the potential of this game. These guys have never heard of the concept of "scope creep", and they will invest in ANYTHING but the actual meat and potatoes of this game, you know, it's a SPACE game. It's a space game that barely gets content to do in space. Frontier would rather come up with a new party trick every other year: Planet landings! FPS combat! Base building! At this point this is a MMORTSFPSRPGSim game and it doesn't do anything better than others except for the Sim part and arguably MMO part. In other words: stuff they have built and abandoned a decade ago.

Imagine how much better this game could get if they diverted resources wasted on building a mediocre FPS game to their core offering: the space game. There are already great FPS games and base building games out there. Frontier, please, just please don't start building Football Manager 3034 or whatever BS you have on your roadmap next, and get back to the space game.

This is the Achilles' heel of Elite Dangerous. It has so many things done right, but also the actual space content is still quite thin and relies on grinding to keep players on the long run. I still love it for the feeling of it, because it feels GREAT, and I play on and off until I get bored of mining the same rocks or whatever game loop I've managed to piece together thanks to random YouTubers.

Oh right. In the year of our Lord 2024, this game's lack of tutorials and built-in tooling is insane. I had to watch 50 YouTube videos, read 100 Reddit threads, take 2 Udemy courses, and night lessons, only to use 5 different websites and have 3 different programs running in the background just so that I can participate. Frontier. Just. WHY?

Over the past year Elites dev's have defiantly proven themselves to be capable of delivering a good open universe experience. They have made the game much more enjoyable with the changes they rolled out this summer to the grindy engineering system making it take much less time. Despite some bugs and balance issues I think the big system change, Powerplay 2, has launched successfully. They will also deliver on their promise of 4 new ships this year when the Cobra mk5 releases in just a few days. And with the reveal of colonization coming in just a few months i think it is really good time to pick up elite or return for those who already have it.

This game hits all the right spots if you love space exploration, I see some negative reviews, But honestly I don't get it. This is everything sci fi fans could ask for, It is definitely grindy, but that's ok. I'm not coming to game, to get in get out, I'm coming to escape.

It's a good time. I've been playing off and on for almost a decade now and enjoy every spurt. Take it in moderation!

I love this game! I took a trip to the edge of the galaxy, and on the way back I made billions in exploration! We discovered so many Earthlike worlds, I wish we could set up new colonies!

Can't believe how strong this game is still going and the community behind it. It's come a long way since release, there's just so much to explore and random discoveries to chance upon.

The visuals and sounds of this game are out of this world (pun intended). I mean there is not much to say really. What game can be cooler that a space simulator with very realistic graphics, the whole milky way galaxy as the map, planets you can land on and take you rover in and even walk on. Ill wait ...

One of the best space sims I've ever played. Sure, the game isn't perfect, as many activities require a lot of grinding, and mastering all the mechanics can be challenging. But the feeling of freedom when the entire Milky Way is open to you is simply incredible! Elite Dangerous impresses with its scale and possibilities, delivering a truly immersive space experience!

Elite dangerous is one of the best games out there for people who love sci-fi and spaceship games. It's open-world in a way gamers today can't understand. Want to be a space-trucker? Go ahead. Want to explore the milky-way and document planets no human has ever set eyes on? Done. Want to fight criminals and collect bounties in intense dogfights in space like you're some kind of Boba Fett mercenary? Got it. Want to be a space taxi and take high class executives to visit a beautiful neutron star in the far reaches of the galaxy? Absolutely.

The depth and the detail is unrivaled, and spectacular, if you haven't played this game, you are losing out, and Kudos to Frontier for making this incredible game such a wonderful experience.

Elite Dangerous is a difficult game to recommend, primarily because it only achieves the bare minimum for what you can call a "game"...

Lemme put the cards on the table here: Elite dangerous is very much a game I WANT to like, but even after 10 years it feels more like a glorified tech demo. Everything in this game looks, sounds and handles beautifully and realistically. there is no game out there that so realistically simulates just how vast and empty space is, and how spaceships could look and handle 1300 years in the future.

The customization of ships in this game is incredibly deep, and it rarely feels like any weapon or module for your ship is a direct upgrade, since even different tiered modules of the same type have different use cases. A tiered modules are usually the most powerful, but also expensive. B tier is the most sturdy, but also have the highest weight. C tier is the most bang for your buck. And D tier is the inverse of B: lighter weight, but more fragile. same thing with weapons: fixed weapons need to be aimed by the pilot, but have the highest base damage. Gimballed and turret weapons have lower damage but can shoot in a wider cone. the game is full of these trade-offs.

There are various activities in the game that you can outfit your ship for, like hauling cargo, mining, bounty hunting, piracy, exploration, xeno-hunting etc. and you're never locked into or required to do any of them (unless you wish to hunt for certain ranks or side-grades for your modules and weapons).

But here comes the stinger: what are all these systems and activities used for? Well they are used to earn credits that can be used on buying new ships, modules and weapons. Sounds fair enough, right? Yes, but that is pretty much the only thing you can use credits on. the "Game" is just one long ass grind, to get enough credits to upgrade your ship so it can become slightly better at the thing you were already doing! That's it, that's the entire game-play loop. Once you have the biggest ship and the best modules and weapons, there is basically nothing to work towards any more.

There is only really two things to do in this end-game: the first thing is to grind for an additional 100 hours to get your hands on a carrier, that also needs its modules bought separately and has maintenance/upkeep that needs to be paid for. Requiring you to log in once a day and grind credits for a few hours. And if you want to move it, it requires 500 tons of a specific commodity that can either be bought or mined, in both cases requiring you to find where it can be bought/mined first.

The second thing is Xeno-hunting. Unlike human NPC's (and other players in some cases), the aliens in this game are a real threat, that will tear even your biggest ship apart in less time than it takes for you to say "Oh fuck!". So these bastards require that you have a specially designed ship with specialized weapons, and for you to have fully mastered maneuvering your ship, if you want to even stand a chance at defeating them. (They are hands down the best part about the game tbh, mainly cause unlike every other activity being rather mind-numbing, fighting the aliens is a genuine challenge).

Do I recommend Elite Dangerous? Depends on if you find the act of combat or exploration exiting/rewarding (even after have done it 1000 times before) rather than it just being the means to get to "the end".

This game is massive and pleasantly complex. It takes a bit to learn the ropes, but once you do, it provides an outstanding experience. You have space combat, ground combat, ship building, and trade. It has missions, but you can also just freewheel it. You can play almost any role you want. There are real time results to decisions you make. It really is like 4 different games in one. You pick your path and you explore. You can't put it on autopilot. You have to be involved in every aspect. If you are looking for something to truly immerse yourself in, this is it. There is also a well built, player-driven website. I don't usually take the time to write game reviews, but this one warrants it.

Bought it to play with boyfriend, almost stress cried cause I have really bad motion sickness and couldn't figure out how to manually land on planets but bf is patient and I'm getting used to it now. Really nice space road trip date simulator that's occasionally interrupted to shoot people or get shot YIPPIEEEEE!!!

My favorite space sim, I've put hundreds of hours into this game between xbox one and steam, it's had its fair share of problems but the game is currently in the best state I have ever seen it, well worth picking up on sale or just on a whim if you are a fellow space nerd

powerplay 2 really really sucks and they just nerf all the good ways to get merits instead of fixing a broken system.

My friend go on and on about how fun it is to shoot space pirates. Good for them. Me? I'm on that space trucking grind. Captain of industry, deliverer of agricultural equipment to distant stars. They may be shooting laser guns but they don't get to play clash of clans on their phone and drive at the same time. They mine asteroids, I mine that goldmine that is trade route finders. In the end, I make more money and get to gold 3 in MTG Arena at the same time.

Who is the real winner?

This is an absolutely great game. The biggest problem, however, is how hard it can be for new players (myself included) to understand aspects like factions, Powerplay, ship modules etc. The game definitely needs a better tutorial, not just flying basics. Regardles of these downsides, the feel of the game is unmatched. This is the only game where I actually feel the dread of the universe, flying past the stars feel overwheliming just as it should. Looking at the map of the galaxy for the first time is also a great experience, really waking up the fear of the unknown.

I knew ED existed for years, and yet it never interested me. I looked at it and thought "yeah, ok, cool looking ships and space, with arcade-looking fighting, lots of menu screens and economy stuff I probably wouldn't care about... meh... not for me...". But then I found out this game actually simulates 1:1 the Milky Way galaxy, with dozens of types of stars and planets in literally (!) billions of star systems that you can go about and explore. That piece of information changed my entire view of the game and I finally decided to pick it up on sale, together with the Odyssey DLC, which really is a no-brainer unless you don't care about space exploration... (you can also read my review for Odyssey here: https://steamcommunity.com/id/hk_hunterkiller/recommended/1336350?snr=1_5_9__402)

As soon as I stepped into the game (and after a few training scenarios), I took off with my new little ship from a planetary port that sits on top of a frozen landscape, and just landed it right back down on the icy ground next to it, and disembarked my ship. Listening to the crunchy sounds of my footsteps over the snow and ice, I walked around to take a closer look at my new ship, while both player and NPC ships were constantly whizzing across the sky, landing on and taking off into space from the planetary port nextdoor.

As an aspiring exobiologist, I immediately decided to give exploration a go, but I was also afraid to leave the starter system, and with plenty of planets to explore in there already, I saw no need to rush with it either. So I went ahead and started zipping around the planets, figured out how to scan them, landed on a few, deployed my rover each time to do some driving, as that's the best way to explore the surface. I discovered volcanic activity, geysers and gas vents, acquired some precious materials from those, then drove onto a geyser with my rover to get launched almost back into space, but not quite, so I came back down hard and exploded and died just like a true noob, went at it again and discovered a bunch of alien life forms I ended up scanning and got filthy rich, and yet, this was just the beginning, inside only the starter system...

A few hundred hours in, having done a lot more than that by now but with so much to do still, this game still blows my mind, more than anything due to the "simpler" things. Just looking at the galaxy map in detail can give you an existential crisis as you realise how insignificant you are. This game has got so many things right with environment and sound design... Together with the brilliant ambient soundtrack, on more than one occasion I've gazed with my mouth open at a star that I parked beside, or a beautiful vista on a planet I walked on while staring at the gas giant in the sky. With the ambience you get in this game, even the nerdiest of audiences can choose to ignore the fact that there akkkshhually would be no sound in vacuum.

All that text and I haven't even talked about combat, trading, doing missions together with your friends, passenger hauling, fighting aliens, building ships, unleashing your inner thief and stealing items from planetary settlements, and who knows what more... There is just so damn much to do in this game and I've had different kinds of fun doing it all. There is also a very rich lore to everything, since the original game dates all the way back to the '80s, and you can find plenty to read online if you're into that stuff.

While the background of the game is indeed built on a simulation of our entire galaxy, the mechanics of the game are tuned in a way that prevents the game from becoming a study-sim, and give you an arcade-style core gameplay loop, but with more than enough depth to it to keep the experience always exciting and rewarding. The ship to ship combat that I thought wouldn't interest me when I had my prejudgements about the game turned out to be both entertaining and exciting, as I came to enjoy especially flying small and agile ships around the big boys to make them go crazy trying to line up a shot on me.

For the more technically-minded people that might wonder how they managed to do a "1:1 simulation of the Milky Way", I highly recommend watching this video where the ex-particle physicist turned lead programmer explains how they created a plausible simulation of systems based on actual data and equations from research papers about our galaxy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e2AJS_-bTg0 I think this is truly insane in the context of what in the end is a video-game, and with everything that this game has to offer, truly that's the main thing that attracts me to it more than anything to this day.

And finally, if you do decide to get into it, I personally recommend not using any online tools to pinpoint things you're looking for, unless you have a habit of just rushing through your games. With so much to see in this game, discovering things on your own is really the way to play it. So my advice, is to find out where to look for things and go looking for them instead of just searching in an online database to get a direct address. Who knows what you might stumble across during your searches?

One of the top if not the top space sim games out there. This isn't some cheap shitty sim this in your next 1000 hour time sink.

Avoid if you are looking to play online - extreme trolling and general toxicity abounds - considering the ramp up and amount of work it takes to actually play this game effectively i would skip this one if you are mostly focused on partaking in the "living universe" elements.

I had played this game for a while, and really enjoyed it too, I was pirate hunting with a friend and built up enough money to buy a fer de lance, and outfit it well, I decided to purchase an expensive weapon, excited to try it out, I was at maximum shields, and maximum hull, and was hit by an npc eagle, just a physical collision, I instantly exploded for some reason, and because I had just bought the 13,000,000 credit weapon, I couldnt afford the rebuy for my ship, If i had known that this would cause me to permanently lose everything I had worked for, I wouldve done things differently, I thought that if a ship couldnt be rebought immediately, it could be rebought later. I was wrong. This realization killed my motivation to play this game, as all of my effort was blown up by a collision with a ship 4x smaller than mine
- also side note, I bought the ship One day ago, and didnt even get to use it for 24 hours

My girlfriend got me to watch Interstellar, like her top fave movie, and it kinda got me thinking about this game again.
I had originally tried playing years ago, but never had the hook needed to get into it.
After the movie, I bought us both the game and we both jumped in. Getting to travel space alongside my gf has been an absolute treasure.

I will say the game is a bit rough starting out, it doesn't teach you much in terms of tutorials. (only 2 barebones tutorials: an on-foot one, and a ship flight one)
The learning curve is a little rough, and sometimes the punishment for a little mess-up while learning is pretty harsh, but if you're willing to stick through the initial difficulty, the game is actually pretty fun!

bugs bugs bugs, their support site does not show how to even fix some of the issues that keep happening. i go to get into the game and the servers are apparently down but when i check in the launcher it says they are "ok" i have reinstalled and validated my files, support website says to validate my key on their site, i go to do that but the page does not exist. skip this game and fuck the devs for making this shit.

In VR, this game is better than going to DisneyWorld. It feels so cool, and working to get that ship you want and outfit it just the way you like is very satisfying.

I love Elite, i originally played on Console before the shutdown, and had around 100 hours. The infamous grind really depends on which play style you choose. for my first 30 or so hours, I only really knew how to do transport missions, which was really slow . Then i learned trading exists and went from making a mil or so per hour to more than 100 million, per hour. There isn't any goal besides the one the player sets for themselves, unless you want to try the new Powerplay 2.0.

Though that's not to say the game isn't fun:
- The combat is enjoyable
- There's a lot to do
- The community is great
- The game is beautiful (just look at those neutron stars!)
- The ships are cool

Overall, Elite is a beautiful game with a very player-dependent grind, a strong community, cool things, a learning curve and an experience to match. I highly recommend getting it, whether you want to fight space pirates, haul stuff around, or just witness the 1:1 scale Milky Way and it's sights.

8.5/10

This game is one of the greatest space sims out there. The realness of the universe immerses you so well, all the star names and planets and everything. its so worth it if you are willing to put the time in to learn and grind and MAKE SURE YOU FIX YOUR KEYBINDS

Still the best open universe space sim out there, regardless of the first person being not great.

Elite Dangerous isn't just a game, its a community.
The game at the start doesn't give you handouts it put's right in the thick of thing's.
but from starting with a sidewinder and then doing missions, trade route or exploring or more you can progress
up to that bigger ship you have been looking for ages and wanted.
its based on a 1to1 scale of our solar system and you will never run out of things to do.
the community is epic and will help you along the way if you join a squadron and together you will progress and make your mark in the galaxy.
do i recommend elite of course i do, but to make your own way in this game will take a while but you will
always feel better once you have progesssed.

Every single time I come back to check the new content in this game i'm reminded why I uninstalled it in the first place

It's so realistic that it's not fun, however when it can't be bothered to be realistic you get blatantly unrealistic mechanics like being able to respawn call of duty style in specific missions, therefor it is neither committed to being realistic nor fun

A little more than 50% of any play session is waiting for your ship to agonisingly slowly reach a point of interest/station/planet/whatever because 'muh physics simulation'

Almost all space combat is based on either having a team of people with you or having a meta ship (good luck getting one of those in under 40 hours of pure grinding), as some NPC ships tank is nearly unbreakable without exploiting a meta or just ramming your own ship into them and praying - the accepted working strategy is unironically that you fire at a ship once to aggro it, then just let the AI police do most of the damage for you if you're a solo

The MMO-style multiplayer component is essentially just the vietnam war if the vietnamese were role players and the americans were griefers, just an in-game money sink to even be involved in (since it's completely optional and has no effect on in game rewards whatsoever)

All ground missions of substance are pretty much either A. call of duty domination mode with respawns or B. Extremely slow paced stealth mission where the instant you break stealth there's a 50-50 chance you end up in a 10v1 whilst trapped in a room smaller than an apartment, complete with only one long hallway exit to make your attempts at brute-forcing an escape impossible and in which if you die, the game forcibly teleports you to another system altogether

Every objective based mission that involves space combat is more or less "go to this shooting gallery, shoot ships belonging to specific faction, maybe fuck with a freighter or scan some shit if you don't die" and can take hours to complete for absolutely pathetic rewards - it seems that according to elite dangerous, the minimum wage after we've perfected space travel will be the equivalent of $2.40 an hour

Apart from that you've got exploring and trading, with the former of the two being the decent experience for the pure reason that it can throw some serious scares at you if you're not staying completely alert - trading is literally just 'google this, fly there, buy/sell that'

Oh, and there's mining too, but you don't *really* want to park in front of an asteroid and fire a laser at it all day... Do you?

In summary: this game boiled down is a near 1:1 emulation of being a loser stuck in a dead end, minimum wage job after inflation has risen to 40%, but it's in space so I guess that means it's 'fun' now, huh?

Horrible game couldn't even get passed the Odyssey tutorial, I tend to explore a lot and I ran out of power for my suit and tools then I tried to find batteries but had used them all up. With no power for my tools or suit how was I supposed to get passed the tutorial? Absolutely ridiculous the tutorial made no mention of a limit to the power or batteries or gave any clear instructions.

technically great game but frustrating as fuck mechanics at times, and one big loss will make you not want to pick up the game again, I regret ever playing this.

I cannot recommend this game after multiple tries and over 200 hours of playtime on the books. What the game essentially boils down to is a fantastic flight model on top of an empty sandbox with no sand to play with. There are dozens of different activities and types of missions to play through. However, they all require dozens of hours of grinding and there is no sense of progression or accomplishment outside of money.

Quite literally no content type in this game has more depth than a 30 minute gameplay loop. The problem is that most of those loops either are not enjoyable (Exploration sounds amazing until you realize its just 3 button clicks without any actual sense of exploring things), or they provide no depth or continued mastery (Once you have done one trade mission, one combat mission, one exploration mission and one Odessey ground mission you have done all 4 mission types and there is no variety).

TLDR: 5/10 Captivates you with seemingly limitless options but lacks any direction, goal or sense of meaningful impact on or with the game's world.

It's been 2 hours, and... I have failed 3 times at trying to get through the tutorial. I keep dying.

I just watched a youtube video tutorial of how to do the game's tutorial. If it wasn't for that video I might think more seriously about refunding the game. Needless to say, the game has a reputation of being very difficult. The tutorial is only the first taste. I only now noticed many discussions all over the internet of how difficult the game is. So it's tempting to give up while I can still get my money back and spend it on a game I know I'll keep playing, versus trying to gauge will I have the willpower to keep going on this?

What got me here?

Well I had seen Elite Dangerous years ago when it came out and wondered about it, but decided I could get similar fun from other games and these all just boil down to playing with dolls anyways. I mean they aren't dolls. They are dolls shaped as spaceships. And you dress them up and put guns on them and they are still just dolls. Same as RPGs too.

But what got me to change my mind and buy this was a video by Galactic Hunter (which is a couple who do astrophotography videos, and they have one of the best astrophoto websites that actually got me started in astrophotography myself, as they would explain all the gear they used to take their pictures, and it gave me a way to buy a telescope I could afford and all the other equipment that goes along with taking astrophotos). Galactic Hunter put out a videogame video where they listed all the games they knew of that had good space - accurate representations of the night sky. And Elite Dangerous came out on top of their list. They never mentioned Space Engine but I think they should have, although Space Engine isn't really a game.

So, okay. Count me in.

Now I am fairly certain, even though I've failed 3 times at trying to do the tutorial, that I still have some new ideas after watching the video tutorial of how to play the tutorial. I have ideas I want to try. Namely jumping. Because in the tutorial, the planet you are on has a very low gravity, so you can easily jump really high, and I think it's high enough to jump to the building's rooftop, which might make it easier to take out the final enemies that keep killing me over and over. And by the time I try that, I'll be well past my 2 hour mark when I'm already at 2.3hrs at the time of this writing.

Other stuff: The game is supposed to work with a game controller - but I really think I'm going to have to start using Voice Attack for macroing things like turning the shields on and off, or recharging the batteries. I don't want to have to think in the middle of combat, and being able to say voice commands to have those keystrokes pre-programmed might make the difference between life and death in this game.

I'll write more if I can make better progress. If you're a glutton for punishment, here it is.


UPDATE:

Another hour or so later - yes it was not that hard to beat the tutorial after I came up with a strategy. It just takes a little planning to get through it. It sure didn't hurt that I set up a lot of voice commands in Voice Attack too.

Now I find myself in the first station. I still need to do the pilots tutorial, but that will have to wait for later. But I also looked on the galaxy map, and I'm a long long long way from Sol. That will be a nice first goal to try to reach! Wonderful game!


UPDATE 2:

The number of controls are truly insane and overwhelming. They keep saying "you'll have the hang of this in no time" over and over, but I have my doubts. Not only is there a whole game's worth of controls for ship control, there's also a whole other game's worth of controls for navigating on-foot as a first person shooter. Instead of learning all this, which I know I would promptly forget the first time I take a break from the game, I'm spending a lot of time programming voice controls into Voice Attack.

And then there are the tutorials. There must be at least 5 hours of tutorials - more like 10 hours. There are scenario tutorials and there are game-locking tutorials (for example you can't start flying your ship until you've finished some tutorials - and some of those tutorials are broken so you are forced to say "skip tutorials" just to fly your ship). And there are video tutorials. When I'm just tired of learning more crap playing the tutorials I watch the videos.

This game is maybe about as complex as learning how to be an expert in Blender. Crazy! I have played a lot of hours in Kerbal Space Program, and it feels like that game, as complex as it is, is maybe a 10th of the complexity for controls as this game is.

Most of this is mitigated by just looking things up in the game control key bindings settings, where you can change the controls as you like too, if you can find enough keys to control them all.

If you're like me, and you JUST WANT TO PLAY, this game will punish you. I took a mission when I really didn't know what I was doing, and I'm pretty sure the mission will expire (oh! did I mention that mission timers run in real time, so if you close the game even as a solo player, the missions can expire while you didn't even have the game running!) and there are penalties for failing to complete them - so I'll probably lose some of my starter money because of that.

UPDATE 3:

I watched a "tutorial" video (only this one was very advanced) where the person doing the video takes you from a nobody to having over a billion credits in the game and getting a big carrier. The first thing he has you do is go fight pirates, which sounded pretty scary. The second thing he has you do is go way outside the "core" and sample genetic data, which, if you get far enough out, can sometimes be on planets that nobody else has seen before and you get a huge bonus.

Well, I thought because I have barely finished most of the in-game tutorials but I haven't done any of the challenges, why not try to find some genetic samples in the starter system, instead of going after pirates a few systems away? So I found a planet not very far from Chamberlain's Rest (or whatever the starter city is) and found 3 different genetic samples, without even knowing what I'm doing and without doing the planetary scan like I was supposed to. Awesome! I was guessing I'd probably get something like 50k or 100K credits tops, but instead when I sold them to the genetics shop, they gave me over a 14 million credits! Holy crap! That was some easy money, and I got some good practice flying around and driving on a planet in an SRV. There were at least 2 other planets in the starter system I could do this on, and possibly even the same planet that the starter city is on too, so I'm going to try going that way.

Not a real VR game, in that YEAH you can see things in "VR" but the controls don't work.

Have fun trying to find the right keys on your keyboard to press and crap. LOL.

Would sit in cockpit going "WTF?" trying to figure it out all over again-just-kidding-not-really 1/10

Also why does everything lock you behind an idiotically slow voice-over? I just want to take off and get flying not hear some dude mumbling about some random stuff with way too many words, it feels like 2 or 3 minutes, the guy won't STHU. I don't even care about what they're saying "OH, you need a mission. You know you need a mission you know. Here, let's see if there are any missions. Looking for missions, here is a mission. Oh and by the way...don't forget that if you aren't sure about how to this or that or something and such and such before I forget to mention it after you already went through it before or skipped it and all or whaver, that you can go back and do the training thingmajigarwutschamakallit and get more experience in order to get more experience and then you can later do the mission that you need which I just got the mission for you which by the way should be on your thing now for you to review so you can see what your mission is. Please be sure to read it so you know what the mission is and let me know if any questions that come to mind to use your thingamawhat to look up online how to do thing that you're not sure about you need more information on."

HOLYSCHMOLY! WHAT IN THE ACTUAL...All that just be should skippable.
I can't imagine how many people got so turned off by all that delay and dragging out this garbage dump does (not to mention the gating by needing a "Fronter Account" lmao) and game trying to be singleplay-but-aktually-online-requires-internet-to-play. So far, this isn't anything to celebrate but run away from.

Finally, it controls don't work in VR. It's random. Cant orient the craft and all but can't thrust forward. I randomly started flying backwards. Oddly, there are multiple and redundant "controls" for "thrust" It's listed like 5 times with different wording to describe the same thing.
Doing any of what it says is the control bind doesn't work anyways. Just dumb design.
Literally, I should be able to press a button on my control to go forward or back. Or just push the stick forward to go forward, simple like that. BUT NOOOOO....that's to much common sense, which the game design clearly has run far away from. And apparently keeps running.

Finally, there is no guide, no forum, no thing as nobody has the language and mental capabilities to actually explain anything correctly. "How to Fly with VR controls?" Answer: "Watch this video-->" (video is 1hr long without checkpoints and doesn't actually show it anyways) or "Well I use a joystick" (useless answer) or "HOTAS" (no one knows what that means but the term is used by people wanting think they're special and l33t - let me fix that: it means HANDS ON THROTTLE-AND-STICK, it sounds like something somone would drool out while saying. What is does that mean? Like a stick of wood? A hand on a throttle? But one has a keyboard or VR controller. Lol). Or "People might use a VR controller to which the game has settings but there are other optoins the game does though have bindings in there you can review to use and... (tldr; avoids simply saying "Press ____" or move _____ that way" or whatever).

Good luck! Not a very Elite game.

Just kidding, finally the VR is so bad, your head isn't represented like an actual head or viewpoint you'd find in other VR games. Instead, or "floats around" so if you lean to the left or right, it "detaches" from your body". Want to sit back and relax while you cruise? Enjoy clipping through your chair to see the back of your pilot's chair. Just very poor VR. If you lean to the side or forward and look back your character doesn't even have a head. They just couldn't render it apparently. Tasteless. No way to lock it in place or mitigate this.

Finaly, finally, the controls are so atrocious and buggy, you risk getting "menu-locked". This happened way too many times and I had to eventually hard-exit. No keys or controls were responsive whatsoever. It just clunked out me AGAIN. And despite exiting, the insipid game kept running even after I left it hard from VR, so I had to taskkill it just to close it. What a piece of crap. Wasted a whole night trying to get through the issues and finally gave up.

I got this on sale for like $5 and it's not even worth that. Save yourself the trouble.

Any other space-sim is 10x better than this fiasco and actually fun to play.