Guide for people who are new to Elite: https://pastebin.com/CgkRM05Q
A limited, but stunning space exploration game with completely fluid 3D play. You have an overworld and a huge universe to indulge in, but really your options and what to do are limited, when you mostly stick to trading things inbetween planets and shoot pirates who attack you. Buying additions makes life easier, but the primary objective of the game, reaching the Elite rank, is only attainable after you destroy about 6000 ships, which demands an impossible ammount of dedication for one person. More fascinating today as a tech demo, than as a skeleton of a gameplay that somehow wasn't even updated with Elite: Dangerous either.
On the original, BBC Micro version, the controls are nice and tight, and I recommend it. (3.5)
The ZX Spectrum version has nicer wireframe rendering(to be perfectly honest, any port after the BBC Micro hardware is an improvement), but the controls have suffered and for some reason are slippery. The steering never centers but almost as if it intentionally veers off into the sides. I don't know if the programmers tried to make the game more tricky by providing this element of instability to the controls, but it is not useful in the slightest, and makes flying and navigating the cosmic waters a lot more taxing than it already is. (1.5)
A limited, but stunning space exploration game with completely fluid 3D play. You have an overworld and a huge universe to indulge in, but really your options and what to do are limited, when you mostly stick to trading things inbetween planets and shoot pirates who attack you. Buying additions makes life easier, but the primary objective of the game, reaching the Elite rank, is only attainable after you destroy about 6000 ships, which demands an impossible ammount of dedication for one person. More fascinating today as a tech demo, than as a skeleton of a gameplay that somehow wasn't even updated with Elite: Dangerous either.
On the original, BBC Micro version, the controls are nice and tight, and I recommend it. (3.5)
The ZX Spectrum version has nicer wireframe rendering(to be perfectly honest, any port after the BBC Micro hardware is an improvement), but the controls have suffered and for some reason are slippery. The steering never centers but almost as if it intentionally veers off into the sides. I don't know if the programmers tried to make the game more tricky by providing this element of instability to the controls, but it is not useful in the slightest, and makes flying and navigating the cosmic waters a lot more taxing than it already is. (1.5)
Reviewed on Jul 28, 2022