Recent reviews by jasonbarron

I love the game and franchise but I'm giving this dlc a big fat thumbs down because of the false advertising: you DO NOT GET 5 trailers. The Food Cistern and Low Boy are not included, despite explicit claims otherwise. The three trailers that actually do make it in are quite lovely, but I never would have bought them if I knew going in that the other trailers were missing.


EDIT: ok, so the dev's came in and decided that I had a point and modified the dlc store page description to reflect my concerns, clarifying the fact that while the 2 trailers (Food Cistern & Low Boy) are actually in game and usable from the Freight menu they are NOT ownable by the player, which the store page description clearly implied.

Since my complaint was never that they were not ownable, and instead took issue with the fact that it implied that they were, I have modified the review from "negative" to positive to reflect the dev's changes. As I said in the first part of the review the actual trailers that you DO get to own are quite lovely and well modeled, and apparently the missing trailers will arrive some day.

10/10 easily.

This game is, simply put, sublime. With all of the dlc enabled there’s a wealth of content at your fingertips to be enjoyed, allowing you to fulfill your trucking fantasies across seven massive states. From one end of the map to the other you can easily get up to 2000 mile deliveries, taking you from the deserts of New Mexico to the lush green mountains and forests of Washington State, hauling loads that consist of everything from dynamite to milk, gigantic bulldozers that way in excess of 117,000lbs on three part articulating trailers to diesel fuel. For a reference point, hauling a heavy load 1700-2000 miles might take you upwards of three hours steady driving depending on your route (not all highways are easy to negotiate as others, obviously).

The scenery is stunning to behold, yielding an eerie resemblance to reality that is as comforting as it is varied and visually interesting. The trucks are amazing to drive, giving you a real sense of their size and power, and you’ll find yourself watching the side mirrors as much as the road ahead at times because of the length of your trailer. The rumble of the engine coupled with the different highways and the sounds of the road combine to create a nearly hypnotic gaming trance where the best parts of video gaming come together in a stunning package that delivers and delivers and delivers EXACTLY what I long for in a game.

Buy it. Love it. And may the weigh station odds forever be in your favor!

I’ve heard it said that Elite Dangerous has no soul.

But I’m here to tell you that it does. I know, because I found it.

At first I doubted it, too. I mean, sure, from the time I climbed into my starting Sidey, strapped the shoulder harnesses on and flew out of that first Coriolis, I’ll admit it; I was blown away by the visuals. And the sound, too. Isn’t everybody? It really was very magnificent. But where was the game? What was I supposed to do? It wasn’t obvious. Just the opposite in fact. Space was black as the bottom of a coal bucket and endlessly, impossibly huge. Where were all the amazing sci-fi staples, such as neon colored nebula that were so bright they lit the screen with their pretty colors? There were no quest markers to tell me where to go. No guideposts, no “attaboy!” taps on the shoulder every thirty seconds for having not died, or successfully left the airlock, or some other trivial activity.

My screen didn’t start magically popping with messages and tutorials and information about such and such quests that were suddenly available. I was left alone to figure out things, and what became apparent pretty quickly was that I wasn’t ever going to even make enough money to get to the next ship up, much less be the ruler of the universe at some near point in the future. I flew into the hotspots where a great deal of the game’s combat takes place, or so I gathered at the time. I engaged hostiles with my pitiful kpew kpew lasers in combat inspired more by a surrealistic take on WWI aerial combat than anything resembling hard science fiction; the Sideys engines roared and grumbled, and when I banked to come about to keep track of an enemy, it sounded and felt like the rivets in the floor panels were struggling to fly apart under the stress of the manoeuvre. Everything happened at point blank range.

Still no pop-ups telling me what to do.

I struggled with landing, and when in stations I visited various mission bulletin boards that held a bewildering array of missions that if I happened to be qualified to accept in the first place paid peanuts and were very unclear about how to accomplish, and most spoke of distances far greater than my starter ship could even reasonably be expected to jump.

I worked with the game, struggling to learn its mechanics and features, but felt little sense of progress. I had fun and felt like I got my money’s worth...but after the initial amazement over the game’s visuals and sound wore off, I slowly began to lose interest. I felt like after I visited one Resource Extraction Site I had seen them all. The same for the 2-4 station models. The “world” was vast, but lacked personality, a reason to explore its contours and borders.

It seemed like those who claimed the game had no soul were right after all...

And then on one cold, boring day in December, Horizons released and I decided to pick it up and give the game another chance. I landed on airless worlds that were as rugged as they were beautiful, deploying my SRV like a futuristic 4-wheeler and exploring everything, from mysterious downed satellites to rare and useful mineral deposits that could be used for crafting everything from ammo upgrades to jump boosts.

Suddenly, my interest was engaged and the story telling part of my brain kicked in; I was Han Solo, and my ship was my Millennium Falcon. I smuggled slaves, one step ahead of the law; I ran blockades, joined Power Play, learned how to survive unwanted PvP and began to define an identity within the game’s universe. For the first time I felt like even though I would never be the master of all I surveyed, the identity of my CMDR was enough. I joined a group of Intergalactic hippies and followed them for over two months to the very edge of the galaxy where we stood shoulder to shoulder as brothers and sisters and gazed into the abyss, the dark night between galaxies before us, the blazing golden band of the galaxy’s core running from horizon to horizon over our shoulders. Many of us had ships that were so beat up from the voyage out that there was little hope of making it home.

As I took a moment to contemplate the game, the scope and breadth of the galaxy I’d traversed for no better reason than to say I did it and to shake my fist in defiance at that strange, black alien sky, I finally realized that I had been wrong: Elite Dangerous does have a soul...but it is cold and austere, a chill wind that blows through your center when you’ve been pushed to the point where you feel you’re made of glass and will surely break. It will only reveal itself to you when the immensity of the game finally, crushingly sinks into your bones.

Oh yes, Elite does indeed have a soul, but it’s not for everybody. It is only for those who persevere, those who adapt, survive and prevail against all odds. For those of you who would shake your fists at the sky and shout the devil down from the arch of time, I salute you, for you too are Elite.

o7

This game isn't worth writing a long winded review, but it was fun for a while. Basically it's just your average little 10-15 hours "kick the tires and uninstall" time waster. I'd give it a 5/10. If you set aside the crazy hype which surrounded its development it would just be some trite little diversion. My advice is to wait until it goes on sale--the idea of buying it for full price now is probably not advisable for most people.

As a fan of previous X games, I pre-ordered X Rebirth and started playing it within minutes of release. Like many others, I was struck both by the sweeping changes to the “X” formula established in the preceding few titles, as well as the horrid, god-awful, soul crushing bugs and technical hang-ups.

I invested approximately 180 hours in the first couple of months, doing my best to study the universe and bludgeon my way through the infuriating campaign, and after doing so (the dev’s released a steady stream of patches through this period, turning the game from utterly broken to sort of kind of maybe just a little playable), and my private verdict to my gamer-y friends and family was “Do Not Recommend, Stay Far Away!” Which hurt a little, because I could see the game’s potential glimmering far down in the deeps.

I think the thing that troubled me most back in those early days was the fact that even if you got past the bugs, which many did by editing game files, the new universe was essentially simplistic and lifeless. Even if all the game’s systems worked flawlessly (and they didn’t, not by a long shot), there was really no point in playing because, in my opinion, the universe and the mega-stations that looked so darned pretty from a distance, were essentially just empty shells, no more interesting or compelling than glittery Christmas ornaments on a well dressed up tree.

Now fast-forward a year & umpteen patches later to the release of v 3.0 and the expansion Teladi Outpost.

What a difference a year makes. After letting the game gather dust since early last January, I finally re-booted and started a new Free Play session and dove back in. Right away, I noticed a plethora of changes, ranging from cosmetic graphics enhancements to radical shifts in the design of the game’s UI and underlying mechanics, most of which a very vocal crowd had screamed to the rafters that the dev’s either couldn’t, or wouldn’t, change a year earlier.

-The menu had been switched from a cumbersome, un-intuitive radial style menu to an easily manipulated sidebar style menu, one that was lightning fast to navigate and cool as all hell to look at. Contained within this menu was a newly redesigned map, complete with two different information modes, and a wealth of new tools for tracking and maintaining my property.

-Now there was a reason to actually go into the stations other than to crawl around inside their air ducts: to find loot that was useful for crafting items that was either worth a ton of money, or even better, could be used in exchange for virtual seminars (training videos that could be applied toward your hired officers, increasing their various stats) or even better yet, hiring permanent Trade Agents on any given station who would constantly update your trade computer with current buy/sell offers from that station, the XR equivalent to X3’s Advanced Satellite Network.

--Haulers/Traders from far off systems now populated the universe, such as the factions LI or PMC from Albion trading with stations in Omicron Lyrea, or Canterran vessels docking at the No Limits Spice Farm in Albion space. This had the overall effect of making the universe seem a lot more meaningful and bringing it to life, for me.

--Faction owned destroyers patrol and react to threats and many haulers travel with either fighter or frigate/destroyer class escorts, and the player is free to assign these kinds of escorts to his/her haulers, too.

--Redesigned mission offers & rewards; now there is always something for the pilot to do, patrolling zones and engaging in frivolous but fun dog fights, protecting stations, sabotaging rival factions’ stations, etc. These missions are plentiful and updated regularly, and function not only as a means to put some credits in the players account during the early game phase, but also to build faction rep for the later stages when the player begins to build their trade fleet/station network.

--There are now ways and means to order your squad around that actually work pretty well. Not exactly fleet management, but getting there.

--The ability to place stations anywhere I liked.

--Small shipyards open for business! More capital ship choices for purchase in general, as well as an overall increase of the types/styles/configuration of ships in the galaxy.

--Redesigned highway travel. On this note, I’d just like to point out that with the release of the Teladi Outpost expansion, Egosoft is now introducing a whole new style of sector to explore (new to XR): in Teladi space, you are given a huge area to explore, filled with hidden lockboxes, interesting new stations and nebulous electrical storms that obscure your view and potentially damage your ship, and you are not given any highways to show you the way around. This seemingly small touch does a lot to increase the sense of mystery and epic adventure that was missing from the initial release, essentially forcing the player to explore again.

--Most bugs have been squashed, leaving no game-breakers that I could find. That is not to say that XR does not have bugs, I’ve found some ranging from irritating to downright aggravating, but in all cases they were minor and easily ignored.

I could go on and on listing the improvements, but I think I’ve made my point clear that the dev’s have been hard at work tightening up their systems and introducing new content. I’ve got roughly 100 hours into v 3.0 and I feel that I’m hardly scratching the surface. The bottom line is that they’ve created a rich, compelling, beautiful space-fantasy for the player to become engaged with and tinker about in, a universe that can easily gobble hundreds of hours of the players time.

The best way to approach X Rebirth is to just enjoy it for itself and not hold it up in comparison to it’s older siblings.

Final verdict 80/100

I give this game 4/10

I know there is an interesting story here, very Lovecraft-y mixed with some Japanese horror elements, and this is why I'm giving the game a 4 instead of a 3. Why the low score? Almost zero gameplay in this one. All of the elements/mechanics of the game there are, are introduced in the games "tutorial" and literally nothing else, gameplay wise, is ever added to that paltry set of overly simplistic mechanics again. Basically this is just a clunky walking simulator with some poorly thought out & boring shootouts with the same set of bad guys from beginning to end. I was so bored that I finally gave up and uninstalled the game.

The story is interesting enough, though, if you're into that type of mind bending alternate reality style of fiction, just not a lot of game to go with it.