Recent reviews by Lightning Dust at periapsis

I never knew I could rock out to metal this hard before! Nor knew that metal is a genre I could even get behind in the first place!

*Cough* Bullets Per Minute *cough*

Updated as of 7 April 2024


This game can cause motion sickness! Buy at your own discretion!

It has been close to 1.5 years since I posted this review and the motion sickness issue hasn't been fixed. All the devs had to do was allow us to adjust the vertical FOV, or much simpler yet, the aspect ratio itself.

Because from the game does, it feels like I am playing at 80 or less of FOV but I have set it to the max of 120 FOV. This is on top of removing all motion blur and head bobbing.

Plus, it became obvious that the setting for my 1920 x 1080 feels very off after looking away for a while. It's like the left and right is too short. It feels like the aspect ratio is not 16:9

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Previous review

It has been almost a year now and there doesn't seem to be a fix to this at all! No mention in the news section or any place. Not even with my suggestion for custom vertical FOV slider.

The discussion here: https://steamcommunity.com/app/1106840/discussions/0/3722818378186063314/

I have 3 other friends that plays this but it only allows two players per boat. The only solution is to split us up in pairs and play separately.

And we all still had a blast! I believe this Great Lighthouse release brought a lot of replay fun. All these trinkets, artifacts, and ammo can make anything broken, which makes every round very different from each other. Heck, melee only can even be broken!

Plus, almost anything can be used as ammo!

The issues the arises from this is that only two of the hosts have their progression saved, whereas the other two, me and my other friend, doesn't have their progression saved. The only progress that is saved are what characters that we have unlocked in our pair sessions. Maybe the game tracks steam achievements for character unlocks?

This can be either an upside or down, but either way, the game is fun and expense enough that I would still enjoy even if the game began anew. Could even make it all the way to the end without any rewards or ammo and we might be able to beat the end! It's a matter of skill issue.

Get the game with a friend! It is really addictive for a roguelike with simple mechanics. Hell, check out the sea shanty trailer for this game! It is definitely a buy!

Do NOT get if you are easily ill from playing at low field of view!

Otherwise, look at other reviews, this game is promising!

Let me help you visualize what you might be getting into:
You choose your starting preset equipment from decked out with rifle and armour with decent backpack, all the way to just a pistol and 1 food and drink, without armour or much ammo. Then you drop off a train anywhere on the procedural map: top, bottom, centre, left, and right. The map size is decently medium-large-ish. You don't have much objective there other than loot and extract, and any quest you accept in the bunker.

You could take on the bandits, but you'll probably die because you didn't set your bandages or medkit to your hotbar. Now you'll bleed out from the arguably the easiest humanoid. Then you reset back to the train conductor prior to deployment with nothing lost other than time. Your skills still go up apparently. Then repeat the process for the 4-5 available maps.

There is story progression, but it is all mostly in interacting with the bunker residents and any friendly you encounter in the maps. It is very short if you do manage to breeze through.

At this stage, this game is true in development: early access. There isn't too much bugs I've recognised and the content is pretty short. The weapon customisation is somewhat deep, though some weapons can't equip most of the attachments; you can't attach anything to the makarov equivalent pistol. There is a Resident Evil 4 aspect of organising your storage and inventory; you need to craft or do quest to get the storage box upgrade. This game is fun, but is still not complete (you cannot access one of the map that is given by the conductor).

For it's price? I recommend considering rather than buying

The game is fine.

The main issue is the AFK kick system and the heavy penalties to those "leavers". I left my computer for half a minute and was treated to a "left the match" screen in the main menu where I cannot rejoin the match and have to wait until the initial match ends. After the initial match ends, I get incurred a leavers ban for the amount of time the match took.

I may still play, but I cannot say this is a good look on the future of the game

Tl;dr
If you are not spastic or not giving your full attention, you mill get kicked and short banned for being "afk"

Elite has been good while it lasted.

So many stuff to see and experience. All those interesting ships and modules. Curious missions and Background Simulations. If you are thinking of buying, you won't be disappointed in these first couple of hours.



But the downside, if you choose to pursue a goal like a fully engineered ship, is an ever eternal job. There comes a point when the tinted glasses wears off and the fun turns into monotony. The grind is inane, the "narrative" is practically nonexistent, the game requires heavy usage of third party tools to even make a profit, and the DLC owners cannot interact with the base game owners (now merged with Horizons) if they don't launch Horizons in their own launcher.




You will reach a point pretty quick where you need a lot of credits. This is when you, unfortunately, google and discover so many legitimate ways to earn enough to buy the next best ship. Posts where mining Low Temperature Diamonds could net you large sums of credits, bounty hunting is roughly 10x worst at money making, trading and passenger is the relatively fast, middle ground. Nerfed.

Find a hotspot, mine, then re-join into the game, mine the respawned hotspot. Now there is a shared global 6 hours respawn timer to any main asteroid and a local 2 hours for any minor ones. Solution: use third party website to find a pristine ring of untouched materials.

Bounty hunting was really worthless. Imagine making 10k per bounty but your mining is doing 100k+ per material. They have buffed it, but it is on par as every other money makers as of 2021, which is very average.

Trading and passenger trips are pretty safe money makers, and they still are. This is still relatively true, but it has lowered its better money making potential.




You need credits for everything. Ships, modules, re-buy cost, and weekly fee (if you own a Carrier). If you are at end game, it doesn't get easier. An end game stock ship can easily cost 192 million. Roughly double that and you could have about enough to have max grade modules.

If the ship is wrecked one way or another, you have to pay 5% of the total ship cost. In the example above, the total is 384 million and the minimum way to get it back is paying 19.2 million credits. If you cannot pay the amount in that very specific screen, that 7 days of grind means nothing and have to start with the starter ship again.

You own a Carrier? You better pay that millions of credits every week or it will become decommissioned. You cannot pay during the decommission period? Good bye to your billion credit Carrier.

Then there is that very inane and insane grind. You want to hunt Xenos, but you have to travel far to an alien site and do some grind and re-login strategy to get enough materials to buy an anti-xeno module. Engineers eat your resources to play some mini "spin the wheel" game where RNG decides if your upgrade progress is a lot or very little. For every single module, per upgrade rank. That is also not including the stuff you have to do to just unlock the engineers in the first place.

Same goes for all ranking in game that has ships or weapons locked behind a faction. Sometimes even access to a solar system. Especially Earth's solar system.




If you still do go ahead and buy the game, I do hope you enjoy it while it last. Elite do have the potential to beat all space sim in the category. But the only thing holding it back is the developers and the company themselves. This has been a problem since 2016, after the release of Horizons.

Why I personally liked this game:

Become captain in multiplayer.
You could rewire just about anything in your submarine and use logic gates to program anything to your will.
Reroute power to 3 diving suit lockers and 3 oxygen tank shelves.
Constantly losing power whenever the engine spikes because all those buffer power goes into the suits.
Loses power and rams into wall.
Load an alien artifact while the crew repairs the damages.
Sail to destination.
The ship explodes every 30 seconds and losing power.
Captain and Doctor dead.
Respawns in the next area as our secondary job, Electrician (me) and Captain.
Attempts to fix the low power reactor by loading TWO radioactive fuel rods.
Security comes and ask what is that black smoke.
Electrician and Security died two seconds later from explosion.
Everyone alive has a concussion and is still without a medic.

Died laughing as these events played out

As for the single player? It is pretty good. You get to control more than one person and you can use workshop mods to spice things up.

This is one scary game, be it VR or on monitor. New or veteran to the horror genre, the atmosphere and the ghost will get to you. Especially when your life is on the line for this low paying job.

Too scared to play a horror game but is willing to do it if you are in a team?
Want to be able to interact with the entity more than through just some objects? Speech recognition is a thing!

This is the perfect game if it matches any of the category above! I didn't know I can scream this loud when the ghost replied to me through the Spirit Box and had to get a teammate extract me out after cornering myself with a camera for more than 10 minutes. Don't forget to go VR and be the Candle Man; two on the hip, one in each hand. You'll be invincible :)

Worth it even at full price. Now if only I can do something more with my excess money.

No FoV slider and the view is stuck at around 60. A highly undesirable setting when playing first person on PC. Motion sickness and headache will ensue. And apparently this issue has been here since the beginning if the dates on the google search tells me anything