It's the best game of it's type. It's not for everybody. Some will find it slow and grindy. Some will find it empty. But if you like space ships, travelling long distances, and the occasional realism over gameplay.

Elite Dangerous has a 1:1 recreation of the milky way based on real astronomical data, and they sometimes update it as new data becomes available. This means you can look up in the REAL sky, pick a star, and then fly there in ED. Along the way you may encounter pirates, strange stellar phenomena, a small chance of seeing other players, and even some hostile aliens.

But, since the Galaxy is huge, that means most of the Elite universe is empty. That doesn't mean it's empty, there are two human "bubbles" of thousands of worlds, space stations, NPC factions, and more. There are alien plants, black holes, nebula, and all kinds of things to find.

Though if you fly out deep into the black you may be lonely, and suffer space madness. But good news! It's a game! So just crash and respawn (make sure you can afford your insurance rebuy though, or you lose your ship!!)

You can "engineer" your ship which can be a grind. But it's not necessary, unless you want to participate in competitive PVP. But if you're just doing missons, exploration, and other stuff, you can get by with an unengineered ship.

You can also customize your ship with modules and weapons, bigger powerplats, and shields. Regular sci-fi stuff that works just as you expect.

You can also get out of your ship and run around, in a kind of FPS mode. It's not as fleshed out as a full FPS game, but it's fun to have the option.

I think it's a really cool game, but like I said, it's not for everybody.