This is the closest game I found in the Elite genre of space faring simulations, which is both good and bad. I always enjoyed Elite on the truly Old School gaming computer platforms, and I remember being discouraged at it's difficulty and obtuse interface - but eventually satisfied knowing that I used skill to overcome those obstacles. X2 comes with many of these same problems and reminds me that it will eventually have the same reward. It's a fantastic trade-combat space simulation based in a giant universe, filled with hundreds of stations and planets and plenty of bad guys. You fly around in a ton of completely configurable and different ships, dock and trade with many stations, create your own factories, and eventually develop a fleet filled with fighters, cruisers, and destroyers - all of which you can put into formations and control at any time, including any of their turrets. Sounds great so far. I was hooked. However, there's a very steep learning curve involved at first, and the tutorials do little to help you other than give you basic controls and only a slight mention of how the economy of the X2 universe works. The game is not originally in English and the cutscenes are often poorly translated and very lame, with bad character animation, awful camera angles, and confusing mission parameters. Personally, I chose the "sand-box" mode by ignoring any mission past #2 and giving me free reign throughout the galaxy. Anyway, you have to find out much on your own, and you'll find yourself creating multiple Save Game files before and after you buy/sell some expensive items - just like the original 1990ish Elite. That's a good thing for experienced and "realism" sim players, but bad for the casual player. In another nod to Elite you can only save at stations or when you have bought "Salvage Insurance". The game can be very unforgiving. You'll be excited after your 2nd mission when you are rewarded with a decent sized freighter, just to find it comes with NO weapons or shields... AND there isn't a base selling those things anywhere near you. Or, you'll find this freighter MUCH slower than the ships you piloted before - we're talking 10 times slower, requiring you to spend 4+ minutes travelling to a station before you can even dock to sell your Energy Cells for a mere 7 credit profit each. The initial pacing of the game is more than a little bit off, because you'll barely want to spend time exploring the trade opportunities in the first system, let alone screw around in the other 4 systems you discovered during the first mission. Manual flight and combat is very hard, mostly because your initial fighters behave like a slug, and you can tell the navigation console in the game is NOT built for real time action. Forget the intuitive control of Freelancer or even Freespace 2. Learning to use the mouse or joystick for control is a fairly involved effort, especially because the game simply doesn't let you remap many hotkeys. After 10 hours in the game, you'll rarely bother to pilot your ship manually, often relying on Sector maps, auto piloting and time compression - and pre-programming fighter wingman defense - to get your to your destination. However these automatic features make the game a ton more fun. With enough cash, you can create a massive, shielded freighter - or five - and assign each of them an escort of completely configurable fighters. Every figher or freighter can have multiple turrets, each with individual AI. If you don't care for the AI, you can use the Remote Monitor features to jump into command of any ship in your fleet, at any time - in the current system or any other system. The options are daunting, especially considering that you can create your own factories (and transports for those factories), and then set fighters to defend them if they come under pirate attack. Although difficult to get used to, and not necessarily for the average Freelancer-ish game player, X2 is not without it's charms. The graphics are gorgeous, the universe is huge, and the options to create your own stations / factories / economy / fleet are there. The options to manually dock with stations and escort your ship inside the station and into their actual loading bays grows old after a while - and you can skip it with autopilot and the right equipment - but it's still a nice touch. Definitely head to the developers website to download the latest patch after you install the game, which improves on the often suicidal enemy AI and fixes a ton of bugs that ship with the commercial reelase.
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This game is not going to blow you away with hyperfast action, this is what can only be described as, a modern day Elite. Now, for those of you who were not around when Elite rocked everybody's world, Elite was a pivo... Read Full Review
X-2 The Threat is not a game for anyone who wants a game where you shoot down enemy fighters to win the war. No this game is a game in which you win the universe through means more then war. X-2 is a strategy game con... Read Full Review
