Elite Dangerous review: Half-way to orbit

Into those slight, wireframe images you could read a multitude – casting yourself as a heroic trader or plundering pirate when all you were doing was gazing at fuzzy lines that looked a lot alike no matter where in the universe you roamed. That’s not to knock Elite’s achievement - making space trading sexy and creating a plausible world that gave back in spades the more you invested in it.

The same is also true – with similar reservations - about the fan-funded revival Elite: Dangerous, a wildly successful Kickstarter that, like many Kickstarters, isn’t quite finished at version 1.0.

Elite author David Braben heads the team that modernised the complex space-trading/shooting sim and Dangerous is still very much true to his 1984 vision and execution. But it’ll be a little tougher to engage gamers beyond the Kickstarter fanbase because this new Elite makes few concessions to the newcomers.

Dangerous kicks you out into its vast cosmos with the spaceship equivalent of a Nissan Micra and expects you to learn the ropes with insufficient help from its authors. A series of tutorial stages go some way to redressing the balance but it's no substitute for better in-game guidance. As for the finer points of the Dangerous universe, prepare to pore over acres of fan-created wiki pages to make sense of it all.

This is a game that expects you to pay your dues, to toil long hours, to earn respect. You’ll grind for days, possibly weeks, before you graduate above the mocking rating of “Harmless” assigned to all noob pilots. It’s not difficult to imagine a sizeable proportion of the audience giving up before things get interesting. Some may even baulk at the first docking manoeuvre, which is bloody difficult to the uninitiated. Your best move is to invest in a good joystick at least.

Persevere, though, and you’ll begin to understand how Dangerous can be so rewarding. The career paths available feel pleasingly diverse, once you’ve upgraded your ship, of course. Maybe you’ll make your name as a bounty hunter, or a pirate or a pure trader, a smuggler, or an explorer. Maybe you’ll have a bash at all five.

Along the way, you’ll come across some awe-inspiring sights – though, as much as Dangerous tries, you’ll still have use your imagination somewhat. This isn’t quite Rutger Hauer’s speech in Blade Runner (“attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion … C-beams glitter in the dark."). For a game set in the inky blackness of space, it has its visual moments, though. If you can play it on Oculus Rift, frankly you'll be blown away.

However, you will find that the locations begin to repeat themselves – a space station can be identical to another hundreds of light years away. That’s something Dangerous will presumably develop over time – Braben and co promise this is a multi-year project with all the trappings of an MMO like EVE Online.

For now the multiplayer options seem rather stunted – you can even engage solo mode and ignore others if you like. You will have to trust that Dangerous blossoms into a more convivial place, one where hordes of players align with each other for epic battles and power struggles. It’s not there yet.

For now, it’s a game with a beginning, middle and – sort of – an end. The beginning is a somewhat tedious, confusing place. The middle is compelling, engaging and addictive. Then maybe you get tired of its repetitive nature and perhaps your love affair ends.

But you have to believe Dangerous has a future with such solid foundations. If the developers continue to work on broadening its universe, this new Elite can finally fire on all engines.