I bought this game when it was on sale for 5 bucks and had no idea really what it was about . I enjoy space games so I thought I’ll give it a try for the price of a cup of bad coffee.

Currently put in 372 hours into this thing and loving it. Well what exactly is it? Its a flight simulator in space where you have the freedom to chose and customize like 43 different ships. Each flies differently and you can feel this. The devs did a fantastic job with how you feel in the cockpit. You also have the freedom to play how you want, do you want to be a bounty hunter? What about flying through an asteroid field hunting for that perfect one to detonate open so you can harvest those rare void opals? You can live outside the law plundering other pilots as a pirate or infiltrate on foot a planetary settlement to assassinate a target, upload malware into their data system, or just deliver a care package from a friend. You can become a space trucker hopping around stations to find the best deals or maybe you just wanna head out into the 400 billion uncharted star systems thats 1 for 1 scale to our own galaxy to place your mark while finding alien life. The choice is yours.

People will say its a grind and yea, it can be if you make it that way by trying to min max your time as for some reason our western gaming culture has centered around optimizing returns per hour so any game they play no longer becomes a game.

The on foot mechanics has improved much more since Odyssey release and frontier is doing a decent job bringing new content to a game they always have on a sale and thats like 10 years old.

If you wanna fly starships then this is the game for you.

With a total of 1,570 hours between xbox and pc as of this review, I can safely say this is the best space sim on the market IF you're fine with complex mechanics and like exploration. The game is rough or people brand new to space/flight sims. The flying is while kinda basic has a learning curve steep enough to be improvable even with high hours in the game. The way ships feel are unique, weapons feel varied and missions are very diverse.

Compared to other space games, it's the most humble game. SC is still in Alpha since it's release in 2017 and has made almost 1 billion dollars in revenue. Starfield is made by Bethesda and No Man's Sky has the reputation of it's release and isn't exactly comparable in gameplay.

ED only let's you explore the Milky Way, but Frontier understood since the first Elite game that space is huge. Our galaxy being 100k lightyears across. The explorable space in-game being 1:1 to our real thing but it would take several lifetimes to explore every single system in-game. Frontier made it work though, the "bubble" of human inhabited space being roughly 300 lightyears across with a few small exceptions.
NMS in comparison give you 256 galaxies to explore, which is way more than any player could chew on.
Star Citizen is only one system, while it let's you explore massively detailed colonized planets, unlike ED only letting you explore RNG'd moons, dwarf planets and planets that are unsettled it keeps the gameplay contained.

ED let's you play however you want, you'd heard it everywhere but it seriously let's you play and do whatever you want. You could go mining in a planetary ring, tired of mining? Go pirate the loot from a miner who's already done all the work.
You could be a trader, courier, transporter, supplier or search and rescue commodities.

The amount the game offers is immense. Even with 1k hours I've still discovered new things, new mechanics, new features. I haven't even reached the midpoint of progress.
The game provides alot to chew on while being small enough to be able to enjoy the fact it's a 25$ game with minimal microtransactions.

The game has it's issues, connectivity with players overseas, syncing issues in MP, training missions being not to helpful. Some rewards being underwhelming. These issues can be easily overlooked though if the rest sounds appealing.

The ability to explore any system you want, your actions actually affecting the world around you, save or destroy minor factions, cause wars, be a menace, be a saint, manipulate the market, destroy the market, benefit the market, go on a outside the bubble adventure, be a architect, be a biologist, be a hunter. It's your game and it truly feels like it.

If you like near never ending and complex mechanics with a beautiful set of visuals and natural sights this game is for you.
This game is also fully compatible with any flight sim setup you may have already set up with enough controls to bind to every button.

i think i like men