I don't know how I managed to sink 500+ hours into this one already, so I guess I must have enjoyed it. I like it, I'm leaving a positive review, but with a lot of caveats since this type of gameplay is definitely a niche taste. Welcome to the literal entirety of the Milky Way galaxy. The community has successfully explored about 0.06% of the simulated galaxy since FDev's servers somehow have enough server space to simulate potentially 100 billion stars in the galaxy and travelling more than, say, a couple dozen thousand lightyears away from Earth happens to take an obnoxiously long time (though some players are crazy enough that they've done it). This game simulates distance incredibly well. Outer space is huge. ridiculously huge. There is no fast travel system; your spaceship that travels several times faster than the speed of light *is* your fast travel system. It just so happens that outer space is so utterly huge that it can still take many hours of real-world time investment to get anywhere--even at several times the speed of light--depending on how far you're trying to go: A "short" jump that would take 20 years at the speed of light from one solar system to the next can be done instantly with plenty of ships. A longer journey of 500 lightyears can take a whole afternoon (or instantly with very specialized ships and environmental circumstances giving you a boost), Travelling 5000 lightyears to sell wine at a remote billionaire's getaway resort in space can take the better part of an entire day of real-world time. Travelling to 20,000 light years to the Coloneia system -- generally accepted by the community as the furthest reach of populated space -- can take a couple weeks depending on what ship you're flying. Going 60,000 light years(!!) to Beagle Point can take the better part of a real-world month (at least so I'm told). Space is a pretty big place. That's my first caveat: a LOT of your time in this game will be spent travelling, watching the "30,000 light seconds to next destination" indicator slowly tick down while your spaceship approaches it at a velocity that actually should just be straight-up ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ impossible within the known laws of physics. The game makes this process surprisingly difficult to get tired of: every spaceship's engine makes a different humming noise as it charges up, interiors are lovingly decorated and covered in sci-fi glowing lights. But suffice to say this is not a game where you can sit down and squeeze in a quick 15 minute session before work or school. You can't quite walk away from the computer while you're travelling either, because sometimes your ship's autopilot messes up and overshoots your target by a few thousand lightseconds or pirates will intercept you mid-travel trying to steal whatever you're carrying (or, if you're going through a system at war, the paranoid local authorities will casually pull you over for a spot check to make sure you're not fighting for 'the other guys'). Beyond that, gameplay really boils down to a few different tasks: combat, mining, exploring, trading. If you're like me, then combat is the only thing that actually feels exciting while the rest is just filler, but I would say the combat definitely feels great (albeit a little unvaried). Transportation is basically a cozy mode, or there to let you do something productive while you're learning the game's complicated flying mechanics but otherwise gets tedious quickly. Exploration is a bit of the same but with a caveat: you make a ton of money by being the first player to discover new systems. This sounds like something that has a limited time utility but, again, after a full decade the playerbase has successfully explored about 0.06% of the simulated Milky Way galaxy and I have a feeling that we have better chances of discovering actual real-world insterstellar space travel before Elite Dangerous' simulated map of the Milky Way galaxy runs out of unexplored systems. The very first player to arrive in a star system, to map a new planet, to set foot on a world, gets their username PERMANENTLY slapped onto each and every planet they discover forever for all players who come after you to let them know that YOU. WERE. FIRST. Not as exciting as combat to me, but I know some players go absolutely nuts over exploration so that might be your thing if it's not mine. Mining is an odd beast; it goes from very simple to ridiculously complicated and my current experience of it is that I literally made more money shooting down the NPC pirates who kept trying to steal my minerals than I got from actually selling the minerals themselves. It's the sort of thing where you need to look at guides and get advice from experienced players because it's more complicated than what the developers can bother explaining in-game. I think it should speak to the complexity of the game that I'm only just starting to learn mining now after 500 hours mostly focused on combat. Oh, and there's xeno hunting too. There's currently a single hostile alien species known as the "Thargoids" who sometimes cause trouble, and you can deliberately go after them or ignore them as you wish. Again, 500 hours and I haven't even spotted my first Thargoid, let alone joined a Thargoid hunt. The game labels itself as an MMO which is technically correct, but maybe not what most people expect when they hear that. There are discord communities where you can deliberately link up with other players and a "powerplay" system where you can cooperatively join a long-term team and work to spread your team's colour across the galaxy similar to Helldivers 2's territory system. That said, there's about 4000 concurrent players for a galaxy that's roughly to-scale of hundreds of billions of stars so it is incredibly rare to actually run into another player unless you're looking for them--and chances are if you run into another player in Open mode, you'll either ignore each other "like two ships in the night" as the saying goes, or the other guy is gonna try to randomly kill you for their own amusement. There is a solo option and I heartily endorse it until you've decided to join a Powerplay team and have an actual reason to interact with other players aside from being chased down by gankers. Aside from that, most of the galaxy is 'player-built'. Most of the space stations and planetary settlements you take resupply and take missions from are actual player-placed assets through the game's tedious but permanent colonization system. Like all MMOs, there's a microtransaction system, but you can earn ARX (the game's special premium currency) at a rate of 400 per week so it's not a permanent wall between haves-and-have-nots. At the time of this review, I can safely say that this feels like a game where it's safe to get invested in the long run since the monetization system doesn't feel like it's exclusively built to punish players who don't cough up more real-world money, which is honestly more than I can say for some bad purchases I've made in the past like the Company of Heroes franchise or even certain singleplayer games with hyper-aggressive DLC cycles (Paradox games, Creative Assembly games). Again, I think the big hangup some players have is once the 'honeymoon' phase wears off, some of the gameplay loops feel surprisingly same-y once you get the hang of it--but I think that applies to literally any game out there. Considering I managed to get this game for less than the price of a sandwich on a holiday sale, I'd say 500 hours is an excellent return on my money spent.