When comparing Cosmic Trip vs Elite: Dangerous, the Slant community recommends Elite: Dangerous for most people. In the question“What are the best HTC Vive games?” Elite: Dangerous is ranked 1st while Cosmic Trip is ranked 33rd. The most important reason people chose Elite: Dangerous is:
When Elite Dangerous come out, development won't stop. To build a game with the huge scope of Elite Dangerous, not all of it can be done at once, so the developers have adopted an approach of incremental improvement. Various game play elements are being designed as a foundation for later features. For example, although planetary landings aren't going to be available until a later update, the engine has been designed to be able to support going from lightyears away to meters away.
Specs
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
Pro High level of polish
The look of the game as well as the gameplay has a great level of polish reminiscent of a AAA release. While this is in early access and not finished as well as made by a small indie team, the level of detail to the game and its gameplay far exceeds most release offerings for the Vive.
Pro Immersive base defense gameplay
The implementation of virtual reality in a base defense game is done quite well. It is all in first person, where you mine different nodes on an alien planet in order to build machines and structures, which will then allow you to automate the process (much like an RTS). From there you can attack enemies on your own with an equipped frisbee, all while you send out troops to attack incoming forces as well. What makes this work so well is the design of the game, being that you actually take part in all of these tasks, it makes the user feel more connected to what is happening.
Pro Great use of haptic feedback
The haptics used in the game allow for pretty accurate sensations when manipulating objects in VR. Being a new technology, many games are having issue with the accuracy and "feel" of their haptics, luckily the team developing Cosmic Trip have nailed down how to create a game that feels right, out of the box.
Pro Built with future expansion in mind
When Elite Dangerous come out, development won't stop. To build a game with the huge scope of Elite Dangerous, not all of it can be done at once, so the developers have adopted an approach of incremental improvement. Various game play elements are being designed as a foundation for later features. For example, although planetary landings aren't going to be available until a later update, the engine has been designed to be able to support going from lightyears away to meters away.
Pro Exploration at every level of detail
Full exploration of the galaxy is planned, allowing you to be able to jump from star system to star system, and fly around within a solar system from planet to planet, eventually going all the way down to a planet's surface at a 1:1 scale in a later update. Planetary landings will require a lot of details to be developed and designed, but you can still see the level of detail shift in action when flying into a planet's rings, where getting close enough show the individual asteroids within, which you can then interact with through mining, or by having a battle among them.
Pro Very realistic representation of space & star systems
Elite Dangerous uses publicly available real world star maps that we have of the Milky Way consisting of 150,000 star systems. Although in the current beta, full access to the entire galaxy is limited, in the final game, you will be able to visit any of the 400 billion stars in our galaxy on a 1:1 scale. Stars that we do know of are properly mapped in place and are of the correct type given the information we have about them. Stars we haven't collected data on are procedurally generated which allows you to explore any of the 400 billion of them.
Star systems are intelligently simulated using the "Star Forge", a generator that simulates the creation of a star system forming from its nebular cloud to determine what celestial bodies appear and what orbits they have. This feature leads to many varied and unique star systems possibly with planets that can co-orbit around each other, or with binary star systems, and infinitely more possibilities.
Pro Great Oculus Rift integration
Elite Dangerous has very good integration with the Oculus Rift thanks to its cockpit view only gameplay philosophy. All ship UIs are part of displays that appear on each side of you that appear when you turn your head, so accessing the navigation or ship menus happens seamlessly just by looking in their direction. The game also uses the direction you are looking in for targeting, so your lock on target is whatever you're head is pointing at.
By sitting in the cockpit of a ship, you are given a stationary frame of reference that helps prevent motion sickness associated with movement in game when you aren't actually moving.
Cons
Con No completion point (lack of content)
You either die at the hands of AI attackers on your base, or you succeed long enough that the hardware being used cannot keep up with the amount of bots created in the game, causing too much lag. There is no end to the gameplay, it will continue to the point you lose or the game just lags out. Mainly this is all due to the fact that this is an early access game that is unfinished. There are not many options to change up the gameplay, making for something lacking in content, which may get tiring after repeated plays.
Con Currently too easy
The gameplay itself does not offer as much challenge as it should, while this may change in the future, since it is still in development, currently it may be too easy for many players.
Con Really complicated to learn
Looking up faqs and trade routes from first hand users will be the norm for figuring out many aspects of Elite: Dangerous. On top of this notes will have to be taken, which is made more difficult by the fact the game does not support in game not taking. So a pad and paper is recommended to remember all of the minutia of the game.
Con Boring
It is more a simulation than a combat game.
Con Launcher issues
I bought the game on multiple stores and were never happy how the laucher and the account linking worked.
Con "Mile Wide and an Inch Deep"
The game has a serious problem with depth and requires the user to repeat the same few fun actions over and over again. The world is massive and beautiful but feels empty. The game gets stale quickly despite being visually stunning.