X2: The Threat review

There’s never been a game to rival Elite in terms of the execution of its ideas. Egosoft’s X: Beyond the Frontier series has been baying for the Elite title since its first release back in 2000. Of course, others have tried including Privateer, Freelancer, Escape Velocity, and Frontier but none have managed to claim the same place in the hearts of the space traders that Elite has occupied since its release in the mid-80s.

X2 brings a massive universe, quality graphics, dog fighting, trading and a career system, to the table to try and drag gamers away from their dusty BBC Micros.

More of an evolution

X2 isn’t a fully blown sequel to the original X titles and the original game plus the expansion pack “X-Tension” comes quite close to what we have in X2: The Threat. X2 takes what we had before and tries to tie it all together into a better whole. There are three main aspects to the game, which combine to make quite an ambitious title. The game is rooted in the trading system with a variety of goods being available from food stuff through to computer parts and ship upgrades. These are bought from one space station and sold at another to try and make the maximum profit so that you can afford to upgrade your ship and carry more goods around space.

Other aspects come into play such as a rudimentary fighting engine which allows you to attack other vessels to steal their cargo, attack pirates to protect other ships or stations and to defend yourself against attack. The other main aspect of the game is the career system. This allows you to choose the path you want to take through X2, whether it be as a vigilante defending all against the pirates, a trader, a pirate or even a miner getting your own goods to trade. As you get more experienced in the game you’ll be able to capture other ships and build up your own fleet which expands the possibilities for trade.

Story Time

The single player game can play out in one of two ways. A story is provided which will guide you through a game or this can be ignored and you can play the game for its own sake, as if in sandbox mode. The single player story is useful as a tutorial because the actual official tutorials are rather frustrating. You are instructed to complete a task but are given no advise on which keys to use to achieve this or how to play the game – think of the tutorials as a practice rather than a tutorial.

The story is told through cut scenes with a small amount of interactivity. The cut scenes are poorly scripted and voiced meaning that most of them will just be skipped to get to the mission. The interactivity takes the form of selecting your sentence for the conversation, although I found that you have to get through all of the sentences before you can move on anyway, so why bother? Basically, it’s worth following the story until you get the hang of what’s going on as it will introduce you to the main aspects of the game and give you a bit of experience before you go it alone.

Fighting Talk

The combat in X2 is decent but not great. The enemies put up a decent enough challenge but they don’t seem to be as intelligent as they could be - aiming straight for you in most cases and turning seemingly randomly over the area that you are in. The areas in X2 are divided by wormholes which act much like the hyperspace jump in Elite. This takes you instantly between areas for trading. There is also a familiar “J” button which will increase your speed as you head towards space stations for docking. The rest of the controls are pretty much fixed as they come. The layout isn’t the easiest to get to grips with being fairly spaced out across the keyboard.

The developers clearly had joysticks in mind and it is much easier to control with one rather than a mouse and keyboard combination. The control, generally, feels a little sluggish and not as smooth as it should.

Looks aren’t everything

The presentation of X2: The Threat is very good. The graphics shine from every bump-mapping and volumetric shading trick available in the DirectX library. The sound is never obtrusive and the sound effects blend in with the onscreen action in a very satisfying way. It requires a good mid-range machine to get the most from X2 but it will run on low spec hardware, although it looks far less attractive. The detail in the graphics is impressive with the space stations looking the part even as you get up close and personal to them for docking.

Once inside a space station you can communicate with other people in the station via a communicator, which presents a video phone style link for discussions. The other communication within space stations is the bulletin board. This has mostly news updates but also carries a few missions randomly dragged from the mission pool. These can be anything from taxi and protection missions to trading missions.

Too ambitious

X2 has so much promise in it, the ability to choose your path through the game, command a fleet of ships, own a space station and gun emplacements and generally have a free strategic run of the universe. The drawback to this is the amount of time that must be invested to make the most of it. This isn’t a pickup and play game, you need to be a real fan of the genre to be prepared to play with the starting vessel, which has poor handling, poor weapons and poor defenses. Once you get this up to scratch you’ll be playing for many hours before you can afford your next craft. If you want to be able to control this remotely then you’ll be playing for many hours to upgrade each aspect of the craft for remote control. This adds a realism and depth to the game but this isn’t necessarily a great thing.

It would be nice to be able to scale the depth of the strategy for this game so that beginners and casual fans could have these features available in off-the-shelf ships. This would open the game up a lot more, as would a better starting craft. The early struggle to get the ship to handle well and to get into the game is likely to put off more casual fans.