Reader Reviews

X2: The Threat (PC)

by Dirtbox

I'll admit it. I'm a fanboy.

Hooked early by playing the likes of Elite and then along the way hooked upon many other similar games which filled the gap, but never quite beat it. X:BTF and it's expansion, X:Tension completely slipped by me somehow and I'm kicking myself, but with the invention of the internet and a spot of clever wrangling on my part I've managed to snag myself a US copy of X2: The Threat, which many herald the new Elite.

I'll start with the graphics as that's the main thing people are interested in. And yes, graphically it's quite a thing to behold; everything is bump mapped, shadowed and anti-aliased for those with the luxury of a DirectX9 video card. Bump maps are about as far as a non-DX9 card will let you go without chugging, but it's still a gorgeous looking game. The ship designs, the cosmic vistas, the planets, everything looks right, and more importantly, realistic. There are occasional glitches; the bump mapping can make the approaching highly detailed asteroids 'fizz' for example. The only major graphical letdown though is with the rather dodgy looking character models in the story missions and the even more dodgy animation as they totter and swagger about, but you can overlook this. There's also various small gameplay bugs and minor annoyances that will grate slightly, but not ruin the experience once you learn to work around them. They almost add personality. Almost.

You start out, as these games often do, with a small, basic ship, a starting position and the offer of work. So far so good. Your ship is, for want of a better word, poop. It's at least capable of getting you about fairly comfortably, but getting about is a lengthy procedure at best, although once you get the set controls down (they aren't user definable) and learn how to best utilise the various add-ons you can buy for your ship, you'll soon be tearing about.

Until you get the hang of the myriad of keys, you'll spend a fair amount of time in the various menus that control your passage through the game, they cover every facet and manage to do so quite elegantly, with little fuss. At first glance, it seems they could have learned some valuable lessons from Freelancer, but as what's available to you becomes apparent, you realise it was a logical option that soon becomes second nature. Its no nonsense approach will allow you to pick up useful ways of approaching the many ways of playing the game. Needless to say, you'll need to master every facet before you get to a stage where you can concentrate on one area. The learning curve is nicely weighted to ease you into its complexities, no real brick walls to halt your steady progress and have you scratching your head for a week before uninstalling the game in a huff, which is good. Games that grow with you are few and far between these days. If, say, you can't find somewhere, stop and ask the crew of a passing ship for directions. They might not tell you, but the next one might.

This leads me to the worst thing about the game - the ship control. You have various options at your disposal to use as your control yolk: mouse, cursor keys or joystick. Cursor keys are my chosen method at the moment as both the joystick and mouse will throw you into a flat spin if you try and take too quick a turn. While this can be remedied later with the rudder optimisations, you'll break into a cold sweat many times before you can afford them when you're faced with a situation where you have to fight for your life against pirates or similar. Decking out even the smallest and cheapest ships with all the mod cons is a pricey affair, so dogfights aren't an option for quite some time. There's also an odd feeling to the controls, it seems to slide from point to point as you turn as if snapping to the points of a grid. Enemy ships also seem to move in the same angular way as you track them with your crosshair.

X2 makes a lot of wild claims, and boasts depths previously unheard of. Reading through the manual it begins to dawn on you that they weren't kidding. In fact if anything they were playing it down. Creating a space station isn't, for example, a case of buying a station and plonking it wherever. You have to hire a ship, speak to the captain and navigation officer separately, buy the parts, load the ship, etc, etc. It's a slow paced affair, but very satisfying. The depth and thought that's gone into it is simply astonishing.