Aidan Hibbard

This game feels so close at achieving the best space sim title but every time you think they’re going to do something great they release an update that makes you want to quit the game. I started playing a number of years ago now, I really couldn’t figure out how to get started. The controls are fairly unintuitive but with a few hours you can get the hang of flying around. However once you’re in a sidewinder in space there’s no directive as to what to do or where to go. This game is built vastly on tribal / 3rd party knowledge and elite doesn’t have a great API making third party sites fairly unreliable. So your friend tells you to start mining, you pull up a mining tool to find a good hotspot and only grow more frustrated as the many jumps you’re making to these systems are worthless as the information is probably stale or wrong. Once you do find a friend who can explain everything to you and help you get familiar with the third party tools this game will become a second full time job if you want to get anywhere quickly. Mining was nerfed, hard, meaning that if you want to make non combat credit be prepared to spend hours jumping to different systems and scanning planets. Which you also wouldn’t know how to do unless your friend explained road to riches to you. And I’ll touch on that since odyssey servers are bad. So half the jumps or traveling you do are going to get stopped by connections errors that reset you back to the last system or make you lose a couple mill in bounties. Even doing PvE is a brutal grind, sitting at extraction sites waiting for police to start engaging and hoping you make a few mill in a few hours is the best you can hope for. Even if you’re willing to grind up to a medium ship so you can start running cargo / mining / combat the millions you are going to have to make is staggering and you’ll start to resent the grind. I played warframe and this is still worse. Making it up to your first medium / large ships you’ll realize that now you’re just mining, exploring, doing combat or missions but it’s all still the same. The conflict zones and aliens in a space game are locked behind a grind that most new players wouldn’t even know to begin. You’ll jump into a conflict zone with your outfitted anaconda or python that took you days to get and watch yourself get obliterated by ships you didn’t have a hard time killing in extraction sites. So you finally find what engineering and guardian modules are ant then you realize how much of a grind again it is to get those blueprints and materials before you can fight aliens in a space game. I mean I get the premise of aliens are more powerful than humans but even scouts shouldn’t require a fully specced ship if you’re getting a 10K credit pittance from Fdev for all this time you’ve put in. If I could bring myself to do it I’d quit playing this game but once you’ve put in the grind and can start fighting thargoids, doing conflict zones it becomes just enough fun to keep you engaged. However for new players I’d highly recommend not playing this and getting into eve, star citizen, space engineers or literally anything else.