I remember being a kid and watching Star Wars Episode IV, very vividly. I remember how much I wanted to fly an X-Wing. Flying through space, dogfighting with other ships, and blowing up the Deathstar seemed like the most awesome things you could ever do in your life. There hasn’t been a game that quite sated that urge, but Elite: Dangerous looked like it might come close. There are a lot of things in this game that are well designed, fun, and just plain cool to use but there are also a small number of, but worryingly large, issues that really take away from the game.

Space: the final frontier... — Space: the final frontier...

Now, this is not a review. These are first impressions, since I don’t think I’ve put enough time into this game to speak to the whole thing. I’m also only talking about the single player rather than the always-on online world.

To start, the user interface looks awesome. You spend (almost) the whole game in your ship and you can see every part of the UI by looking at a different part of your cockpit. Look right and you see a technical readout of all your ship parts, your inventory, and more. Look at the left part of your cockpit and you can open the system map, the galaxy map, see information about the current system, and your missions. This is a really cool way to get information and it fits really well with the feel of the game as well as the design of the world.

It's all very shiny and very cool looking, really. The cockpit has almost all the info you need, though it's not all directly in front of you.

Flying your spaceship is quite possibly the best part of this game. Flying feels smooth and responsive, but never too easy. You have a number of thrusters on your ship, so you can angle things pretty much however you want to and you can really pull of some ace pilot maneuvers when you get a handle on it. I was playing with a mouse and keyboard, but I think a joystick would give you the best experience. There’s a really good sense of momentum and weight when you try to bank hard, or spin your ship around quickly to shoot at a pursuer. While figuring out the initial controls is fairly easy, using them in combat, or pulling off anything more impressive takes time and practice, which I think is good. This gives the game a good sense of progression that goes beyond what kind of ship you have.

The open world aspect of this game is pretty close the ideal of the style, I think. There’s no side quests that warp you into some weird side quest-world, there’s nowhere you can’t go if you have the fuel, and there’s no jobs you can’t take. You can be a trader, ferrying goods from end of the galaxy to the other and buying low and selling high. You can be a mercenary, hunting down pirates and outlaws and doing corporation’s dirty work for credits. You can just explore the galaxy and sell the data to whomever else wants it, or any combination of these and more. The freedom here is awesome and probably the second best part of this game.

You really do get the feeling that you can go anywhere and do anything, which is hard to do in games.

The combat is also really fun. You can have all sorts of weapons, from lasers to miniguns, missiles and more. All of the weapons have a different feel, but they all fit. Lasers lance across space, minigun tracer rounds fly towards your target, and missiles leave plumes of smoke behind them as they follow your enemy. The number of different kinds of weapons, potential for a million kinds of combat situations, and easy to learn/hard to master nature of the flight and combat make every combat instance interesting and difficult.

Complex, but fun. You can attach as many weapons as you have hardpoints on your ship.

Now, everything isn’t roses and unicorns here. When I made a pros and cons list for this game, the pros outweighed the cons by quantity, but the cons had way more of an effect on how I played the game and what I thought about it.

To start, the user interface is clunky as hell. I can’t imagine trying to open my targeting menu to target the enemies’ cargo hatch in the middle of a fight, as I’d have to look to the right side of the cockpit (where I can’t see the enemy), click through two menus, and then return to combat. In this time, any decent fighter could have my shields down to zero and be destroying my hull. I love the idea and look of the menus, but I think that they fall apart in combat. It might be better if you could hold a button to create a targeting overlay on your enemy while fighting them, then choose which part you want to aim for. This would allow for the same level of detail in combat without forcing players to “take their eyes off the road” to speak. This might not seem big, but given how much time you need to spend in the menus to play a lot of this game, it’s a constant annoyance and drags down the experience.

Another really big issue is the total lack of explanation the game offers you and how many steps everything takes. There are several tutorial videos, the first 7 of which I found useful, though I think you could start after the first 4. Each video is about 5-7 minutes long, so you’re looking at a minimum of 20 minutes before you actually start playing the game, which is definitely a bit annoying. You would think that with 12 tutorial videos, how to complete some of the missions might be included, but you’d be wrong about that.

I mean look at this. So intuitive. A child could do it. Screw those round peg square hole puzzles, just give kids this game. — I mean look at this. So intuitive. A child could do it. Screw those round peg square hole puzzles, just give kids this game.

The first mission I found was a mission to hunt down some pirates who were harassing a corporation’s supply line. “Sounds great!” I thought. What a fun way to start out a space adventure. So, after using the galaxy map to plot my course to the relevant system, flying a minimum distance away from the station I was docked at, jumping to the system the pirates were in, entering an in-system mode of travel known as “supercruise” (as flying from one end of the system to the other would take real time days), lining up my ship with my destination, waiting 5 (actual) minutes to reach my destination, fiddling with the controls to drop out of supercruise at the right speed, and arriving at the navigation beacon at the center of the system, I found myself looking around at the other ships, trying to figure out who was a pirate, or how to locate them. Now, this may be an issue of taste rather than an actual problem with the game, but the thousand steps needed to do one thing makes playing Elite: Dangerous feel more like work than fun.

I had to go online to find out that the game doesn’t actually tell you exactly where the pirates are or how to identify them. Turns out, pirates will be the ships scanning other ships, trying to find valuable cargo. They could be at the nav beacon, but they could also be one of the literally dozens of random signals that you can only see from supercruise. This means that you have to keep going in and out of supercruise around the system (a 1 to 2 minute process), not overshoot the signal locations (add another 2 minutes), drop out of supercruise, see if people are scanning other people like crazy, then go back into supercruise to try to find more signals. Then, if you somehow find your target, they can jump to supercruise and you literally cannot force them out of it unless your ship has a special upgrade that you are never told about. It’s so frustrating because with combat and flight as fun as they are, you would think that hunting pirates would be awesome, but instead it’s a massive chore.

Worth Playing?

Maybe.

It really depends what you like. If the idea of a space trading or exploration sim sounds great to you, then yeah, this game could totally be what you’re looking for. If you want to enjoy fun combat without resorting to attacking friendly ships and piracy, I don’t think you’ll like this one. It’s possible that somebody could enjoy the work associated with finding your target, but I have a really hard time imagining that you could. Personally, I love a lot of the ideas in Elite: Dangerous, but actually playing it is frustrating, tiring, and so far from the space adventure I want.