You get to be a gay pirate

Elite: Dangerous is a game that will make you feel small for various reasons. The ships you fly range from being roughly the same size as a F16 in the case of the Sidewinder, in which you will start your career, to being so massive that the landing pads they can land on are larger than you average Football field. Another reason is that your choices will pretty much never impact the galaxy or even a single system. As the player you are just another drop in the ocean and not the stone thrown into a puddle. For some this alone may already be more than enough to convince you that the game is as good as I believe it to be.

When you first start out in the Pilot's Federation district the game will overwhelm you with its many possibilities of customising your own ship to do whatever you want. And that is sadly one of my two big issues with the game. Elite: Dangerous is admittedly not very beginner friendly, and the aspiring commander will have to look at tutorials from more experienced players (Shout out to CMDR Exegious on YouTube. His videos are, in my opinion, the best quality wise) because the game does not really tell you what any of the plethora of available options mean.

Once that first hurdle has been overcome and you have outfitted your ship for the role you wish, the game will finally open up to you and you will begin forging your own path through the galaxy. As an Explorer you will see things you may never have been able to imagine, as a combat pilot you will feel the adrenaline rush through your body as your opponents ship disintegrates in front of you while you either scramble to get your ship repaired or begin looking for the next target to send straight to Stovokor/Valhalla/Hell or whatever kind of afterlife you believe in, and as a trader you constantly have to worry about pirates interdicting you while your precious cargo is eager to be sold a few systems over.

But once you have settled in your favourite role and wish to specialize your ship even further you will without a doubt have to partake in the, in my and many others’ opinion, worst aspect of Elite: the Grind. Engineers offer the only way to upgrade your modules. These Engineers usually need some conditions to be met before they contact you and even then, they will request you to deliver to them ranging from just a few hundred thousand credits in the case of “The Dweller” or, as is more common, a rare commodity than can only be purchased in specific systems. And even then, you will need to gather materials of varying grade of rarity to fully unlock your module’s potential.

And even with this second complaint I have with the game, I still very much encourage you to purchase the game. The flight mechanics of the ships are great, pretty much everything in this game sounds great and even though it was released back in 2014, the game still holds up visually thanks to its highly detailed models. All of that combined makes for one hell of an immersive experience, which is supposedly even better in VR, however I can not confirm that as of my writing of this review. Coupled with the point I made in the very first paragraph of this review, I am willing to say that Elite: Dangerous is on the more realistic side for space sims.

Also, unlike Star Citizen this game is actually finished.