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Review: Elite: Dangerous is the best damn spaceship game I’ve ever played



This is my third attempt at an Elite: Dangerous review. It’s one thing to play a game for a few dozen hours to form some opinions and then write a release-day review—not to trivialize game reviewing, but that’s a relatively easy task (in the same way that any kind of journalism is "relatively" easy—it’s mostly a straightforward process, at least). But I’ve been living with Elite: Dangerous since June of 2014, and it’s been in a state of almost constant flux the entire time–adding features, removing features, changing gameplay elements. That means I’m not condensing a few days or weeks of playtime down into a review—I’m trying to wrap my head around ten months of time spent sailing out in the black.

Here is the plain truth: Elite: Dangerous was released unfinished, and it’s still unfinished. There’s every indication that the December 16 1.0 release occurred in order to hit an arbitrary "before the end of 2014" release date, and the 1.0 product we got was not release-worthy. Major gameplay mechanics, like the much-hyped "background simulation" whereby the galaxy’s economy and politics evolve, were broken or flat-out missing. Multiple poorly tested or overlooked gameplay exploits were present. The game’s peer-to-peer networking architecture was easily subverted and eminently hackable. The game’s multiplayer was just a wreck, with broken and unreliable player comms and no way to group up or trade money or cargo; in fact, until very recently, the only meaningful way to interact with another player was simply to blow them up.

And yet, in spite of how broken the game was at launch and all the ways in which it remains plagued with bugs even now after two major patches, Elite: Dangerous is so damn good that it transcends its problems. When I strap on my Oculus Rift DK2 and look around my cockpit, I am flying my own spaceship.

Blasting through Witch space, docking at stations, hauling goods on long trade routes, hunting for bounties, blowing away NPCs or other players in conflict zones, or exploring a thousand light years away from known space—David Braben and his team at Frontier Developments have built the best, most immersive, most gripping "you are flying a spaceship" experience I have ever played in the 30 years I’ve been playing video games. When I’m cruising in silence above the plane of a gas giant’s rings, banking slowly and looking down for signs of pirates that I can drop down on and crush like the fist of an angry space-god, it doesn’t matter that the game still isn’t fully baked, because I am flying my own spaceship.

My buddy Matt insightfully described Elite: Dangerous as "the best game you’ve ever thought about playing," and he’s right—long after I’ve logged off, I think about what I want to do next. I imagine new weapon layouts for my ship, or new goals I want to hit—gotta gain some Imperial rank so I can get an Achenar permit!—or new things I want to try. And that’s perhaps the key to Elite: Dangerous: it really is the successor to 1984’s Elite, and to enjoy it in the long-term after the new game shiny has worn off, you really need to be the kind of person who enjoys setting and reaching your own gameplay goals. Because there’s not a lot of structure in Elite: Dangerous to guide you.

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