REVIEW : Elite Dangerous: Odyssey (PC)
A buffalo circles through the sky. No bird except the Core Dynamics Vulture which is a little bigger. His motor reverbs over the surface of the moon as it boosts into an orbit and ignores me. I don’t really valuable the hassle. My Sidewinder, the Elite Dangerous trash tier space banger is parked on the edge of a massive meteor crater quietly and unoccupied. You see, I’m out for a walk with the waited long-for legs of the next expansion of Odyssey. Nevertheless, it’s gratifying not only to find a walking simulator but also a moon-walking simulator to start your favourite space trickery game.
Odyssey is Elite Dangerous’s biggest sideways move, mainly incorporating a first-person shooter in its already running space sim, such as some chocolate truffle.
It works just that. You are landing on a planet or moon and you click on ‘Delete.’ You’re on the surface, waddled around the place gleefully. For a moment you are dark. HUD monitors the supplies of oxygen, health, proteins and energy in a spacesuit. Energy is depleting over time and your energy bar is dissolving quicker if you are in a particularly cold setting (as space would be). But you can keep the juice topped up in space stations with small energy package packets. You’re going to use your legs because it’s one of the other positions.
These stations are so far a little straightforward. Elite is hard, dry sci-fi, so there is no colour of something like No Man’s Sky or the Outer Worlds in gris metal interior and direct discussion of the shopkeepers and NPCs. I’m really dull, that’s okay with me. The real difficulty is that these stations (and all the others) need your computer a little more.
With this extension, there is a graphical update. New effects of witchspace, shiny reflections, warty soil. Many people would be invited. But the graphic boom for those of us who sleep a large-card graphics card without being able to obtain a new card at a reasonable price (thanks, Borkcoin). It feels like a concession for a game that has so long looked amazing. Although optimization and tweaking are probably still a lot to be done.
When I met an NPC in a clinically undirty bar, I fell victim to this too and embraced a task that was easy to think I thought was. In a manufacturing plant, I was robbing some chemical from a box. Simple. But for 150,000 light seconds, the plant was away. It took me 18 minutes to get there as I played with the information displays, but I couldn’t influence the spacecraft. Take a bow in the boredom glove compartment.
These are like the bases that you should have shredded in the SRV before (your space jeep). You’re on foot just this time. I inevitably died in the whizzing bullets of the industrial goon at my first mission destination. But at the freezing temperature of -250oC, I liked to run around in the dark. Scut off guards’ lights and panic each button on my suit as I tried to keep my electric juice box wherever I put it. The moment to open your feet is reminiscent of the vanilla elite as you hear what is going on in and out of Spaceflights and press the buttons.
This is obviously a case of decreased returns. So far, all settlements are very the same, and when you have touched down, there are a very small number of objectives. Find item X, restore Y control, destroy each Z moving. Oh yeah, the murder.
Enemies seem not to respond until the last couple of blows, and the AI is erratic. Bot soldiers spray their bullets much of the time with a pacifist’s determination to miss. You run out in the open and you ignore even though you are close by.
It’s hands-off, in other words. And it is difficult to say how much of this is because of the acknowledgeable distance between a sim and how much unintuitive architecture has resulted. Elite has always been unable to articulate its intricacies and wanderers with a fresh face will be as distracted as ever if Odyssey is freed without tutorializing bones.
In spite of the vibrancy and the gunfoolery of the FPS segments up to now, I’m always hoping about how promising Odyssey is. I’m just thankful that Frontier kept a promise he had made years before. Even though they are very lightweight, they have stuck to their weapons. The best thing a returning pilot can do when all is fleshed, in my eyes is to land on a far-flung moon and get to the surface. Enjoy the view, take some screenshots, skip down and watch over the buffs.
