I was going to write a long review on this space/trading game (based upon "Elite"), but I think that would be senseless. But I will tell this: If you have a lot of reading material or novels to catch up on, you'll have no problem doing that while playing this game. It is by far the slowest game I've ever encountered. For instance, it "can" take a player over 30 minutes to reach a planetary system's space station (after "witching" into the system). You heard me right. Over 30 minutes of watching paint dry! And that's flying one of the fastest ships in the game at top speed. The author(s), I guess, wanted the player to feel the vastness of the Oolite universe. In that, he/she/they succeeded.

However, the author(s) really didn't care about giving detailed descriptions of the planets or its inhabitants (unlike EV, whose descriptions are detailed and interesting). There are about a dozen different, one-line sentences (and all are silly) that are copy and pasted throughout the 255 systems in galaxy #1 (believe it or not, there are 8 galaxies ... or about 2,000 systems to explore). But since the author's didn't seem to care to describe them, I didn't care to explore many of them (they are all the same anyway). Actually, you can get by very nicely by exploring perhaps a dozen systems or less.

Oolite's saving grace is that the player is viewing everything from the cockpit, which is amazingly compelling. The artwork is first class, and it has kept me going much longer than I thought it would (I almost trashed it in the first few hours of play). Plus, I've caught up on my reading (I've read three novels so far) while playing this game.

Hey, it's free and there are those that really love this game (they are obviously far more patient than I, and I'm a pretty patient guy). They also have a site to go to for FAQ, etc.