Playing the original Elite on a BBC Micro or a ZX Spectrum emulator is a baffling experience for contemporary gamers more used to being walked through tutorials on how to play a game, so kudos to the makers of Elite Dangerous for replicating this experience perfectly on a game coming out on the current generation of consoles. ED is impenetrable for a variety of reasons ranging from the tiny, tiny onscreen text to the poor gamepad controls (I don't think I've seen compulsory use of yaw/pitch/rotation controls in a flight game for over a decade), but on balance I would have to say its biggest problem is its lack of a decent tutorial, as it took me three hours to get through the second mission for the tutorial this had, and a good chunk of that was spent on Reddit forums reading how people with exactly the same questions and problems I had got around them - again: I had to go online to find out how to finish the game's tutorial. After overshooting my destination for the umpteenth time (slowing down makes you speed up sometimes, for reasons not explained in-game), things started flashing and when I got out of my seat to put my head less than a foot from the screen so I could actually make out the microscopic update messages, it seemed I was being attacked somehow, but that was it for me and I quit the game, uninstalled the data, and sold the game on Ebay for a fiver, an act that feels less like a monetary transaction and more like passing on a cursed parchment that brings only misery.
A frustrating, joyless slog of a game.
Far Cry: New Dawn, on the other hand, is a hoot. Instantly accessible and easy to play, you shoot your way through the jerk redneck inhabitants of a valley which by some fluke has managed to survive the bummer ending of Far Cry 5 in what is arguably this century's most accurate adaptation of Z For Zachariah. It feels most like a stripped-down Fallout game, only with the RPG element disguised as a perk tree. Good fun, looks fantastic, costs buttons to buy, doesn't outstay its welcome.
