Recent reviews by Joif

Not sure how people can review this so harshly, you can literally fly anywhere in the world for £11.99 in 2 relatively well detailed and enjoyable aircraft with very plausibly generated scenery - As an out of the box package its fantastic value for money and a good entry game for people wanting to get into flight simulators but found the UI and training scenario's intimidating. If this was your first flight simulator you could literally spend 100's of hours in this game but ofcourse those coming from FSX looking for a replacement for their fully fledged sim with ££££'s worth of mods you should look elsewhere or atleast wait till Dovetails full simulator is released before passing judgement.

Comparing this to FSX when this is clearly only a small taster of their upcoming simulator at a fraction of the price of FSX is unreasonable.

As long as their full simulator is as open to mod support as FSX then they are unto a winner in my book, closing mod support off will see it the same way as Microsoft Flight being a dead and rejected game catering to none.

Pro's
-Clean UI
-Improved all round graphics, effects and optimisation
-Good stock aircraft
-It's still FSX under the hood which is an enjoyable experience no matter how it's dressed.
-Cheap price
-Flight planner is useful (perhaps an option to random generate a flight plan/conditions based on some set variables would be good for some)

Cons
-Static weather (possibly, I changed weather mid flight but it didn't seem to affect anything)
-No real world weather
-In game map has been stripped of some useful information like ILS and runway course information, no indication of signal range of VOR/NDB beacons
-Same old FSX button mapping leaves alot to be desired
-Same old FSX atc and radio system
-No cold and dark start up
-BUGS!

I understand some of these are picky given I come from a simulator background some of these cons don't apply to people looking for an entry level experience.

Some Screenshots taken over England (no mods used)

http://images.akamai.steamusercontent.com/ugc/271720179222118836/5C9DFC0F3455FA908CAC6FED91E862DBC08A3A0B/

http://images.akamai.steamusercontent.com/ugc/271720179222118229/C31D245F5AA8BC6014F7C2A505E5836FC0E8CDDC/

http://images.akamai.steamusercontent.com/ugc/271720179222119530/AC99EBBB23819021449DC688CA82CD4831999C93/

R8 upd8 I r8 1/8, the community doesn't appreci8 this upd8 m8.

edit: Dev's Listened, we chicken in jumpers now.

Tried to shower with my dad, he rejected me just like RL.

Oh you can race is this game?? I find myself just driving sideways and I love it.

One scene in the prologue in particular is going to be with me for a long whale..

My mountain has more possessions and life achievements than I do IRL.

Best Mountain Simulator on the market 10/10

What a save!

The "Main" story is pretty short but my my... what an impression it left.

Phantom Pain HYPE!!

Not a bad effort for early access from a one man indie dev team.

...But Joif this is a AAA finished title developed by 160 guys at the renown 117 Award Winning Rocksteady Studio's and published by the entertainment industry colossus known as Warner Bro's.

Oh... *awkward silence*

Having amassed half a billion in Assets with 5x A Spec Rated ships at my disposal ranging from the Cobra to Python/Type 9, ignore the steam time as I have been playing since Beta.. honestly I have put more time into this game than any other game but does that make it worth the money alone?

...In short no, 90% of my time was spent watching YouTube/Twitch/Netflix on my second monitor as I transported varying types of commodities in various quantities from Port A to Port B but unlike ETS2 where the journey is just as for-filling as the eventual cash reward at your destination with Elite trading however there's nothing that requires you to engage with the game to hold your attention as super-cruise is a boring mechanic that you point your ship towards a destination and you don't even need to do much in way of throttle control this becomes soul-destroyingly tedious flying from A to B after the umpteenth time, or endlessly farming kills in a war-zone or killing pirates which is a fresh change of pace until you realise it's a never ending spawn of AI that offer little in the way of a challenge once you get past the starter ships and your actions are having little to no impact on the galaxy security or crime (would be nice if bounty hunters were forced to move from system to system if systems criminal spawns drops due to overfarming)

Every career choice is some form of endless grind mechanic with little appreciation for your time, your forced to earn money and have fun separately to really progress or just to fund the more dangerous and fun aspects of the game where you should instead be doing the fun whilst earning money at the same time without it feeling like a chore, this highlights a running design ethos on repeating the same actions thousands of times for little pay rather than rewarding more pay for more time investing and more in-depth mechanics which would have helped the long term repetition issues of the game.

Elite was released in a very obvious early state, lacking content and polish, cumbersome GUI, and a good majority of the mechanics in this game either currently don't work as stated or don't work at all, it doesn't take long to realise that whilst a near infinite amount of procedural generated systems sounds good in theory but you'll soon be aware your seeing the same old objects in different places with different names and without some good old hand crafted polish not an awful lot makes one civilised lifeless system stand out from the next the galaxy is too big and too empty which may be realistic but doesn't work well for game play and eventually you'll find a good cluster of systems that facilitates every type of career path where you can settle at an unofficial home port and you'll have no desire to explore the other 99.99% of the galaxy you are yet to see.

6 months on from release and still not an awful lot has been done to address the major issues instead of focusing on improving the core game it has been rushed unto Xbox One which will no doubt divide their dev resources even further trying support the various platforms this game is now playable on. With each update comes a new host of painfully obvious crippling bugs that shouldn't make it through QA and some of the design decisions lead me to question whether the Dev team have spent time play testing their own game for a length of time outside of their own Dev build. The latest update was promised to be the biggest content update so far but it only seems to have added in more grinds on top of your old grinds because we heard yo like grinds with no major changes to the core game play added which means this huge patch brought nothing to the table for the people that have no interest in participating with Power Play which is an easy thing to do as it doesn't offer much financial reward for the risk involved unless your willing grind your way up to the highest reward levels which then requires you to keep grinding to stay in the higher reward bracket.

Don't get me wrong though it's not all dull and boring, the remaining 10% of my time was spent in complete awe as the first 20 or so hours of game-play or the "Honeymoon period" is pure bliss, amazing sound design, visuals, flight model, the most appealing things about the game are the flight model and being close to the surface of the planets which both are very under utilised as you spend the majority of your time in super cruise and any such battles never usually take place near the surface of a planet so you dont get that scale and beauty of the planets which some are truly breathtaking some good progression has been made with the AI in the last patch (1.3) considerably improving AI combat which has made PvE combat fun again.

I do enjoy this game when I play it purely for fun regardless of progression, it basically currently boils down to currently that this game has been designed for a very long life span out of the consumer but simply doesn't have the content to back it up, I still play Elite it's only out of passion for the game I have spent so many hours building my assets and writing this review in hopes some one will take note as I really want to see the game blossom to it's full potential in the future but I can't recommend the money/time investment at this stage in development unless your quite tolerate of grinds, if it wasn't for the slow cash generation compared to buying/outfitting/maintaining high end ships where modules can cost more than the ship itself I probably wouldn't have spent as many hours as I did to make a conclusion but I was always motivated by the "What If's" of owning one of the bigger ships that kept me progressing I just had to own one myself, but honestly it wasn't worth the time investment as whilst yes they do feel bad azz to fly but owning a big ship does not unlock any new aspects of the game that you previously didn't have access to before from the first 10 hours of game play, just makes what you were doing all this time just that bit easier.

If I could leave a mixed review then that would be more fitting to my feeling it's just too unfinished to recommend at its current price, I know this review will eventually be changed from a NO to a YES at some point when Elite's ray's of sunshine will break through the clouds but nobody knows when for certain as the Dev's aren't very open to sharing their own visions or publishing a road map, my own personal estimation is to wait at-least another 12 months for the game to mature further and it may be worth its purchase price.

This review will split the crowd as it's a niche game and many have waited for 20 years for a reboot they will have convinced themselves that this game can do no wrong and overlook poorly implemented mechanics because of the nostalgia of "Elite".