Reader Reviews

X2: The Threat (PC)

by Lutz

I hate marmite. That yucky brown stuff that goes on toast, ever noticed how 99 per cent of people either love it or hate it? X2 is marmite. X2 is a double-edged sword pot of marmite too because whilst I love X2 I'm also kissing my life goodbye.

X2 is the direct sequel to X: Beyond the Frontier and X:Tension (Groan...) You take the role of Julian (Double groan) who is saved from a jail sentence by Ban Danna (Triple groan) to help him out to do some of his dirty work. Thankfully for Julian you can rename him; he's probably never been so grateful in his life. You are loaned a basic ship, a Discoverer light fighter, then given a simple mission to carry out for Ban. This leads to rewards and more missions and a bit more cash. Well, "meh" at all of that.

The whole point of this game is none of the above. Once you've got your ship, done a couple of missions to familiarise yourself with the controls (Which are split 50/50 between intuitive, like "C" for comms; and friggin awkward, like "U" for equipment listing) and taken advantage of a nice little way to get 400K sharpish I highly recommend you ditch the plot and start the real game.

But what is the real game? Successor to Elite some have said. Not Freelancer or Freespace others have piped up with. Indeed not, for at heart it's none of the above in any true sense. It's an empire-building game at heart, coupled with a lot of the elements from Elite's trading system (And promotion system too.) and a dash of combat chucked in for good measure. Nothing along the lines of Freespace (For then I would have quit work and lived on the Dole to play it 24/7) but still there is some combat.

You are tasked with... Whatever you want really. Pirate, trading mogul, business entrepreneur, your call. Ultimately the bulk of the cash is to be made in building your empire though. Get together some cash, buy a factory and have a huge transporter move it to the correct place and set it up for you. All very nice isn't it, sat there doing nothing. Ah, right. Next up get a freighter. Haul resources into the factory, wait a few moments as it churns said resources into products then get the freighter (or another one) to sell the products on to other factories for profit. Rinse, wash, repeat. Sounds a bit boring, doesn't it, after you've done it for the third time? Not so, oh not so... Building an empire is all well and good, but making it successful is another story. Naturally you start at the bottom of the food chain. One factory at the top end of the entire production cycle may have as many as 20 to 30 factories that are all contributing towards making your own personal Ion Cannons. You have competition out there too and you have to deal with it. Will you attack rival freighters, will you undercut the rival factory prices or will you be extreme and nuke the factory? ("From orbit, it's the only way to be sure.") Of course you can always find your own method.

That is the most amazing aspect of this game. You decide everything. How you're going to do it, set your own targets (Make money fast or destroy pirates for example) and what you're going to get out of it. Would you like another factory in a different area of space (Which by the way has about 8 or 9 distinct species) or would you like to buy an engine tweak and a boost extension for your ship? In fact, would you like a new ship? Or ships? Why have one when you can have twenty? Why have a fighter when you can have a destroyer? Want to build your own fleet of uber destroyers? Go for it! But of course all ships have their Achilles heel and just because it's big and expensive doesn't mean it can't get toasted by something one twentieth its size.

A lot of people of moaned over the controls for the joystick, mouse and/or keyboard too. Whilst I've not tried a joystick I can say that the mouse isn't as bad as people make out. Each ship has a turn ratio/circle to consider (as you don't want a destroyer spinning on a sixpence do you?) and each one can be improved with modifications. This makes transports sluggish and light fighters very nippy. The keyboard is also very good at flying and the controls have a large "Elite" feel to them, especially when you manually dock at a rotating space station. The only real glitch to movement is that there appears to be a bad "cut off" on the momentum for the X (Left/right) or Y (Up/down) axis. When you stop moving you drift slowly, slowly, slower, then instead of gliding to a halt you sort of "snap" to a halt. People who have played it will know what I mean, but it's nothing major. Strangely it works fine for the Z-axis (Forwards and backwards) momentum, as you find out when you bump into something and drift backwards for 100 metres before stopping nice and smooth.

Graphically it is beyond stunning. Nebulae in the backgrounds, gorgeous looking ships in the foreground and everything is bump mapped. However it comes at a price. I'm running an almost top end PC and it really does struggle in the busy sectors; Kingdoms End is a bit of a joke at times. Even in the quiet sectors the PC is tracking at least 16,000 objects simultaneously, no mean feat when each object has a heading, a speed, a destination and a purpose. Unless you're running some sort of government funded super computer you can expect to drop some of the visual settings.

The sounds are average for me. Whilst each one is nice enough and serves its purpose there's nothing that staggering. The music is in the same boat; it's nice, it doesn't bug you, but it doesn't add to the atmosphere like some of the pieces from Freespace 2 did. The lifespan however is beyond imagination. The only way to end it would be to have no rival stations and the amount of time that would take defies belief. Even when you get to the point where money isn't an issue the actual process of suppressing an entire universe is a bit daunting, although if you want to create your very own Star Wars Empire esque thing then go ahead.

Last three points. Promise. The script editor. You can write your own AI into the game for your own transports (for example) and trade them over the Internet. There are some basic scripts in the game that work very nice, but why settle for simple? Instead of a simple command like "Sell my products for the best price in the nearest two sectors" why not go a step further and say "and after that find some resources and bring them back"? The AI in the game is supposedly very bad when it comes to fighting as enemy ships have a tendency to ram you to death. Future patch fix is high on the probability cards. Which is the last point, patches. Egosoft are working on the next one as we speak and they have a very good reputation for supporting their games. As PC Gamer said, they'll "Patch it all the way to perfection". Whilst this isn't a perfect philosophy (Why should you have to apply loads of patches to game you've paid for?) it's a better one than most others considering that patches are a way of life for PC gamers.