I didn't really appreciate the vastness of space until I tried to travel anywhere in Elite: Dangerous ($39.99 GPB, or approximately $60 USD). This PC game by Frontier Developments is a crowdfunded follow-up to the classic Elite series of space sims. It's a game that gives you a ship, a handful of equipment, and a full tank of fuel, then sets you out on your own in the vast cosmos. It's huge, slow, deliberate, and open, and it will reward players with the patience stay with it.

Do Whatever You Want

The concept isn't much different from the original Elite, related in 1984. It's the thirty-fourth century. You're the pilot and captain of a ship. You can fly through space. You need money. Get to work. There's no epic story told where you're the main character and the universe is at stake. You're just a guy trying to make his way in space. Once you leave stardock for the first time, your actions, goals, and destinations are entirely up to you. And the galaxy has 400 billion star systems (the vast majority of which are procedurally generated, and yet to be explored) to see while you do it.

That isn't to say the galaxy is empty or static, though. Elite: Dangerous is a persistently online game that automatically lets you encounter other players online if you're in the same part of space; you can optionally play solo without the player interaction, but that mode still needs an Internet connection. Politics and economics are the lifeblood of the galaxy, and every cargo run, government crackdown, and pirate raid influences the price of goods in a given system. Larger, overarching events take place in the background, letting players work en masse to back different factions in certain systems, running missions for them in the hopes of overthrowing the ruling government or protecting the status quo.

Careful Controls

Like most space sims, Elite: Dangerous is ideally played with a flightstick. However, they're increasingly rare these days, and the game is perfectly playable on a gamepad, which is how I played it. The default settings covered nearly everything I needed, though I had to turn to my keyboard for a few more-specific ship functions, such as lowering my landing gear or extending my cargo scoop. The dual analog sticks of my controller gave me yaw, pitch, and roll controls, plus helpful up-and-down thrust maneuvering, along with easy access to targeting, throttle, weapons configurations, and system power-balance levels.

Everything in the game is slow, careful, and deliberate. Jumping between stars requires charting a course to your destination and making a series of warp jumps that will take your ship several minutes to go any significant distance. Even when you get to your target star system, you have to navigate to your destination at slower-than-interstellar speeds, throttling up and down to get within a million meters of it at less than a million meters per second before you can drop out of sublight speeds and dock, mine, or attack. After that, docking takes a few minutes, as you fly into starbases and land carefully on a landing pad. Mining requires careful shooting of asteroids and then even more careful scooping up the minerals by aligning your ship at a specific angle and very slowly flying into them. Even combat is as much a game of cat and mouse as it is dogfighting, with jumps, chases, and jockeying for position.