Recent reviews by smegs

This expansion follows from the original gameplay mechanics, which are formulaic and follow very similar game loops. If you like the base game, you'll like Odyssey. The fps elements are ok, not great, but it's something else to do to mix things up.

Played this with my 5 year old, it's just about the right pace for him, but the two-stick controls were sometimes too much and I had to help.

Good game to play with your kid, gets them excited about the ocean.

The environments are pretty, the narrative is mysterious and somewhat interesting, but it's so unstructured as to not really mean much. I'm a literature graduate student and I just couldn't find much meaning - the gameplay of walking around and navigating clunky terrain got in the way of really feeling much from the storytelling.

This game is pretty fun for political junkies. Elections are amazingly complex things, but this game has managed to distill the election process down into a handful of mechanics. It's fun for playing out potential scenarios that didn't happen.

It's an odd little short, but it's well-made for what it is. I'm not sure if it's trying to address misogyny or what, but it definitely would make for a good literature paper trying to argue that point.

The developer keeps re-releasing the same game under different names, and they steal assets from other games and then try to paint themselves as the victims. Plus, the developer goes around on Internet forums threatening to sue people for talking about those two facts. Complete scum.

I love this game - think something like Dragon Age: Origins but isometric in view. There's a decent amount of strategy to it, but not so much to be tedious, and the storyline is complex and multifaceted. This game represents fantastic world-building.

I haven't even finished the main plot, yet, and I've put over 75 hours into the game, so you'll definitely get a lot of gameplay for your money.

Horizons simply adds more areas where there's nothing to do but the same ol' same ol.

I've had my struggles with this game: gameplay isn't always very rewarding, often grindy, and Engineers are very grindy and frustrating farming materials.

But I keep coming back to it. It's almost everything I want in a space sim, with the exception being some sort of narrative/roleplay to get into. You have be very self-motivated to find purpose in this sandbox.

This is my biggest preorder regret since X Rebirth.


There is a massive inconsistency between space graphics and planetary graphics that lead to performance problems. With planetary graphics, they use a number of DX11 features - I'm fine with this. However, the result is that you can have your graphics settings at Ultra in space and have a great experience, but then you need to go in and change them to Medium or Low when approaching a planet - or suffer 10fps. Either that, or have low quality graphics settings everywhere. Planetary graphics need to be a separate setting area if there's going to be such a big difference between the two and how they affect performance.

The transition between space and planetary approach is slow - it takes a solid 10 seconds. You think your game might be frozen, but it's just transitioning. Talk about breaking immersion.



This expansion adds nothing in terms of story depth or adding substance to player interactions. You're still just doing randomly generated missions that make no impact on the wider universe. Every system is generally the same, NPCs all say the same things, etc. Still a pretty generic experience.

I don't know if it's due to the low FPS, but the planetary flight gives me some awful motion sickness.

No player guilds, player organizations, or any way to really connect with other players - except to join a wing and kill some NPCs for no purpose. For such a multiplayer-dependent game, there's nothing to do with other players except grief each other.


Frontier is trying to do like Guild Wars 2 - an expansion that's a completely new purchase of the game, essentially. The problem is that with Guild Wars 2, the expansion content was rich and nearly all completely available from launch. With Elite Dangerous: Horizons, beyond planetary landing, the rest of the exciting features are still "in development." Planetary landing contains more generic filler.

It also appears that Frontier is completely ignoring player feedback, giving the game more breadth with zero depth. Why should I help faction A versus faction B? No reason that I can see. There's no narrative occurring. It's not just that you're "creating your own story" - there's no story to create. What I do doesn't matter and makes zero contributions. Unless you're an avid roleplayer who makes up a narrative for every little game interaction, and posts about it in online forums and such, the game itself has no story for the player.