Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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59 of 59 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
The new elite (patience required), 2 Dec 2003
If you love classic space exploration games, such as elite, spaceflight, tau ceti, freelancer, privateer etc. This is a game you must have. However, be warned that it is complex, and requires about a few days of solid play to get into. At first it seems overly complex and actually quite boring. You fly around in your spaceship and watch some dodgy cutscenes with bad dialogue. I actually considered taking the game back to the shop during the first few hours. Luckily, I stuck with it, and slowly, and incredible game with a living breathing economy (you actually feel like you're helping the economy when you trade), and a deep ambient feeling started to emerge.I haven't fought one ship yet, and my ship doesn't even have lasers (I've got a couple of missiles though). Most games would force mindless battles upon you (freelancer) just because that is what is expected in the genre. But not X2. It moves at a slower pace- not as slow as Battlecruiser Millenium (comatose), but it does pick up occasionally for tense battles. The game also has the innovative feature of leaving your ship and going for a spacewalk. This is surely one of the coolest features ever in a pc game. In one of the early missions, you have to scan a large destroyed gate in space- and the feeling of leaving your spaceship and flying towards this colossal gate is something I haven't experienced before in games: The feeling of being alone and insignificant. You feel absolutely tiny, and you can look around inside your helmet, giving a realistically claustrophic feeling of awe. I am very heartened that game designers out there are widening the emotional pallete of the computer game protagonist.
I reviewed this game on one of the X2 forums in the first few days of playing it, and wrote a review there- I gave it 89%. Now I think I would have to add 5% to that score. This is an incredible game. If you love exploring and like to lose yourself and have a bit of patience, get this game. Mirko
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54 of 57 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Fantastic! Elite for the 21st Century - well almost, 14 Jan 2004
If you’ve played Elite or know about it then you’ll have a good handle on this game. You start from humble beginnings, a small spaceship and a few credits, and start to build your empire – and what an empire you can make (theoretically unlimited)!
Background
The Universe is huge, with different races/species, each with their own technologies and ship designs. There are space station factories at which to buy and sell goods, to take on missions from the bulletin board, to upgrade or purchase ships etc. What is more, you can buy your own factories which will make you money, and you can buy additional ships to automatically get raw materials and sell your finished goods. One of the features of the game is that the trading environment is dynamic so that prices change over time depending on whether there is a surplus or a deficit, and how you trade affects what is available.
Story
There is also a story/plot for you to follow which requires you to complete various missions. These can be done at a time of your choosing so you can build your empire (or maybe just buy that additional weapon) before doing the next one. There are hostile races to contend with, as well as “police” should you be doing anything illicit.
Gameplay
The gameplay is excellent, though not without its weaknesses. Making “money” and building an empire is always fun and addictive but you can spend a lot of time just waiting for your factories/fleet to earn credits for your next purchase. There are optional missions available at stations (the usual stuff like take x to y within so many days) but these aren’t as lucrative, challenging or varied as they could be. A small number of products are significantly more profitable than the rest which limits the trading somewhat. The difficulty level merely affects your initial net worth (ship quality and credits) rather than the difficulty of missions or capability of enemies and killing enemies can get too easy later on in the game. Given that the more money you have the more you can make, improving your bank balance seems very slow to begin with but stick with it, you will get your have factories and ships in due course.
Graphics
Fantastic, but you need something meaty to play it on. Note that ATI (& only ATI) cards don’t support dual monitors in X2. The ships and stations are varied, well designed and good to look at. Nebulae give some nice colour to some systems.
Manual
Alas the manual is dire. You end up buying equipment and then having to work out what it does or how to use it: you can end up having to go to the Egosoft forums to get help. There are game tutorials which will teach you the basics of trading/flight/combat though.
This is a review of the Australian version so some of the criticisms may be fixed for the UK version which will probably have the second patch.
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60 of 66 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
To tell you the truth i thought it would be better, 1 Feb 2004
Dont get me wrong i dont listen to hype and i only heard about this game when i used to be a part of the freelancer community before it was released.I ordered a copy of X2 from the US, so i have had it for a while, it is definatly a big game, lots to explore and do, and the graphics are amazing, the original US version of the game was extreamly buggy but the european version will come patched to V2.0 so there shouldnt be any problems, and the tech support for the game is fairly good. The game has its good points like amazing graphics and plenty of ship and station types, with the ability to own many ships and stations, interesting weapons and technology and plenty of space to explore. But the game manual is bad, you tend to have to find things out for yourself, the US version of the game has some of the worst cut scene charater models i have EVER seen, althought this might have changed in the European version. The design of the systems lacks feeling, for example in a game like Freelancer you could enter a system and not know what was there, you may pass through several times before you find everything, X2 however you tend to be able to see through nebulas and asteroid fields and see theres hidden bases from miles away, so you dont have to fly around a system for half an hour to find everything. Some people may like this but i think its a bad point, it makes exploring nothing more than going through a few gates and seeing whats on the other side. A word of warning however, the system requirements for this game are way under spec, i wouldnt buy this game unless you have at least a 1Ghz processor and a fairly new graphics card, the main reason for this is the further you get into the game the more things are happening at once, and i started to suffer from slow downs after about 15 hours of play, and i have a fairly fast system (2.2Ghz, Radeon 9600 Pro, 512Mb RAM)
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