Recent reviews by Zeal

As with all other things in life, the solution is more archers

A game of surprisingly well considered complexity and depth. There's so much going for the game mechanics and gameplay loops that a re-release or sequel with fancy graphics for overworld travel and battle scenes built up on the existing work would be a cult hit. Has a history of frequent updates, and it has moddability support. It's always fun to see small publishers create stuff with this much meaningful gameplay variety.

One of the oldest games worth playing (they made this in 1997? jeez), immensely satisfying to marathon through, absorbingly dystopian and atmospheric as you struggle to find any way to get an advantage against aliens more sinister than in any other entry in the franchise. Apocalypse harbors the silent complexity of a roguelike and requires extreme diligence in learning layers upon layers of extremely meticulous world management. Like with roguelikes, the process of learning is part of the enjoyment. Has a real-time mode to keep the game from being too much of a time-consuming slog like the original XCOM.

Elite: Dangerous is an amazing game! You might hate it! If you want to know if this game's for you, think over the following sentence:

"It's a game about learning a game."

To expand on that: imagine two monitors. One monitor is where you're playing Elite on fullscreen, the display showing you the outside of your cockpit window and where all your ship steering controls are. The other monitor is an office suite full of stacked browser tabs where you do your actual business and trade research as a space privateer. Tabs to sites helping you tabulate ship building and engineering blueprints, to other sites helping you find what the most current prices are for valuable goods, to other sites helping you find out which stations near you will have the modules you're looking for, and to other sites with videos carefully detailing and describing the latest best practices for profit maximization and working through the latest hard issues with the quest to improve your ships and advance your standing and assets as a freelancer.

Elite is BOTH MONITORS SIMULTANEOUSLY.

That's the game.

If you can't 'play' both the metagame monitor and the flight sim monitor simultaneously, you'll never really get into Elite and you probably won't have a good time.

If you just play the "game" screen, you'll drift around somewhat aimlessly, get bored of wrestling with a seemingly impenetrable wall of interfaces and a bafflingly large and seemingly featureless soup of star systems, struggle with a mission system which freely lets you take on contracts which are neither comprehensible nor rationally profitable, maybe run out of fuel jumping between some star systems here and there, lose your ship without an insurance rebuy, get bored or frustrated, or both (frustboredrated?) and quit.

Think of an independent sea vessel operator. That's kind of like a game, too, and less than half of it is the part where you are physically piloting the vessel from the wheelhouse. The other half is where you have to manage your trade. Like, for instance, if you're a bering sea crab fisherman. You would have the Elite monitor (piloting the ship through choppy waters and maneuvering around your catch locations) and you have the metagame monitor (bartering for good catch locations, trading info with other captains, figuring out how to custom order improvements to your ship, meticulously checking market information and contract obligations, and always, always, always obsessively checking the updated Ocean Weather Services). If you couldn't do both jobs at once, you're a pretty ♥♥♥♥♥♥ captain, and soon won't be a captain.

Elite offers this meta-experience of being a captain in that wheelhouse, where you continuously step between the pilot's chair and the private office where you do your trade research. When you set foot into Elite: Dangerous, you have a tremendous universe of opportunities, but you've basically dropped yourself into the deep end of a hard sim, where the goal is to make your own way as a space privateer, and you're not going to understand anything about ANYTHING at first. To get invested into it, you have to play a game about learning a game. Eventually, you hit a groove. A place where you're playing both screens at once, building up a requisite trade knowledge and improving the satisfyingly deep quantity of in-game technical and piloting skills necessary for the business end of any of your chosen trade work, from courier runs to passenger ferrying to space tourism to bounty hunting to piracy to bulk cargo hauling to smuggling to mercenary partisan to subsurface mining to deep core mining to deep space exploration and surveying to search and rescue or resupply to anti-xeno operations to collecting screenshots of your shiny new ship in front of extraordinary astronomical phenomena to share online.