Elite: Dangerous

Immersive space exploration goes to infinity and beyond

The Milky Way’s 400 billion star systems are open for business. Set a course to Sol and gaze upon Saturn’s rings, touch down on a planet and spin your rover’s wheels, or fly directly into the sun. Before doing any of that, though, you’ll need to do a flight check. Is your landing gear up? Is your cargo scoop retracted? Have you diverted power to the engines? Do you have a system permit? Oh, you’ve exploded. Authentic space flight is ridiculously complex.

This reboot of 1984 classic Elite is about trading goods at spaceports, mining raw elements from asteroids, upgrading into bigger and better vessels, and dogfighting with both AI and human ships en route. The problem is, it’s a constant battle to actually do any of this when there are a dozen ways to die at any given moment.

On one occasion our oxygen suddenly starts depleting and we suffocate. Another time our landing gear gets stuck and we can’t use our thrusters. Relegated to a Sidewinder, the puny free ship you receive every time you’re killed, it’s not long before we overheat by incorrectly distributing the ship’s power. Compared to No Man’s Sky’s ‘Space Exploration For Dummies’, Elite: Dangerous is ‘A Brief History Of Time’.