Recent reviews by Cammerhammer

The development team at Fdev have consistently worked towards reshaping this DLC from its rocky start, to call it charitably, to an actually lovely and decent update. It expands the base game to be more inclusive for non-space play, giving players the option to land on far more planets than before and engage directly with the environment through both violent and nonviolent means.

Exploration certainly gets a large glow-up in this expansion, giving players a reason to land on exoplanets in the form of exobiology, and terrain generation is completely reworked to give more variety to the planets to you can land on. Terrain and atmosphere improvements make landing on newly-discovered planets more visually appealing, and exobiology is varied enough that seeking out samples can be considered exciting (as long as it isn't bacterium or stratum).

I'm less well-versed on other ground activities, but the addition of new Odyssey-specific settlements gives several new ways to engage with the populated regions of the galaxy. Ground combat and infiltration are now viable methods to support your faction of choice with plenty of variety in personal weapons. Engineering is well-balanced for suits and guns, far more so than ships, and even a somewhat new player can make a substantial impact on a combat zone if they are careful and smart.

Unfortunately, this DLC is a little lackluster in the new vehicles department, since we have yet to get any new player ships and we have only gotten one new ground vehicle. Optimization has greatly improved game performance since the DLC was first launched but you should still expect significant dips in framerate as you approach the ground. I recommend turning down ground scatter and other ground-specific settings in the graphics to reduce the impact, but unless you are running the absolute newest gen hardware your rig is going to suffer.

Overall, I think the DLC is good enough to warrant a buy, especially if you are the type who likes exploring in Elite: Dangerous and want a more compelling reason to land on exoplanets. It's not a perfect product by any stretch, but it's a pretty good one and they are working on making it better.

It's alright

First up, I'll put it out there that I don't play this game very much, but not for lack of wanting to do so. It is just a very graphics intensive game whenever you get to the larger scale stuff like solar system simulation with a lot of collisions, and I only recently got the hardware to support more intense play.

With that out of the way, I'm going to talk about two different aspects of the game: The desktop play and the VR experience. Firstly, the desktop version is fairly easy to pick up. There are a lot of options of what you can create and do with the current kit, from being a malevolent god raining absolute destruction wantonly upon the universe all the way to being a maestro of the cosmos. Making your own planets with unique elemental compositions is fairly easy if you like to play around with making star systems for fun. The slider options are truly endless, making for an extremely customizable experience. If you don't like building stars and planets from scratch, there are menus with dozens of premade options of all shapes, sizes and compositions.

The VR experience, however, is a vastly different thing to behold. You have much less control over the universe, but it is so much easier to navigate and look at the simulation from all angles. The views are breathtaking, and the room-scale experience allows you to bend down to look in closer or walk into the disk of a spiral galaxy and surround yourself in stars. The view is so convincing it feels like I should be able to reach my hand out and watch the stars spill through my fingers like ethereal sand.

Now, the reason I call it a VR "experience" is that the menus are extremely limited compared to the standard game. The wands feel like there is a lot of functionality that is missing, like being unable to use the touchpads to scroll the sliders to the left or right. The interface itself is pretty buggy, making it difficult to use the wands in a natural, intuitive way. For example, you can scale the universe by using both wands together, but you are completely unable to rotate it along the horizontal axis. Sliders are buggy and unwilling to go in both directions unless you manually point and click at the +/- buttons.

However, the most damning thing to the VR portion of this game is that it will not close. To successfully close the game while in SteamVR you have to go to your task manager on the desktop and end the task manually. If you attempt to close SteamVR while Universe Sandbox 2 is still running, the simulator will force the program to reopen over and over until you manually close the sim.

My final verdict is that this is a great simulator, but if you are wanting it for VR interaction wait until they have worked out the worst of the bugs. It's truly an amazing experience, but for the limited functionality compared to the base game it is not worth the hassle of fighting to close the application.