Its not too exciting and the controls are tough on console but the mini adventures you have really make Elite a charming franchise. I recommend the PC version.

It can be really intense at times..
Had most of my money tied to cargo I was hauling when i got attacked by pirates.. accidentally jettisoned all cargo while routing all my power to shields, in the heat of battle

Kinda fun to learn to fly the ship and go exploring, but it is shallow as hell. The planets all look pretty much the same (1000 different shades of rock) and they try to make up for the lack of interesting content with "mysteries" like this that amount to little more than a tiny in-game event and a whole lot of forum exposition fluff. There's not much to see or do. Once you've gotten bored with the cool docking experience and mined a few asteroids it is a snooze fest.

My ship is somewhere a few hours outside the main "bubble" (the small part of the galaxy where all life resides) where I abandoned the game in the middle of an exploration expedition. Reason? I stopped to think "why?", realized how boring it was, and never looked back.

Frankly, even after all this time, it hardly even qualifies as a beta for a game. It's like the infrastructure for a game they have yet to make.

It's been 3 years and it still has massive flaws in terms of gameplay design. At some point it will be time to throw in the towel.