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18 of 18 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
The Ultimate Space Trading Game has arrived!, 5 Nov 2005
X3 must surely be the greatest space trading and combat game ever. Yes, Elite was fun but X3 shows what 20 years of gaming development can produce.The game shows dramatic space scenes as beautiful as those drawn up by sci-fi artists. There are systems full of spinning space stations, mighty battleships, huge transporters and swift moving patrol ships, all set to a background of stars, planets and gas clouds. But this comes at a hardware cost. To view the game in its full beauty, you need a system with 3 Ghz CPU, 1 Gb RAM and a decent 128 Mb current generation graphics card - minimum. Now people new to the X Universe should get one thing clear - this game is tough. By tough I mean you could be flying around for hours and hours following the optional plot and end up with a damaged ship with no money to repair it. Newcomers must start on the easy option as the normal options should really be labelled hard. The game is at heart an economic simulator, so the object is to search around the systems for goods to buy low and sell high. It can take some searching. You can build space stations to supply goods and buy fleets of transporter ships to ship those goods back and forth. Players will also need to build up formidable military forces to defend their empire from alien races and pirates. You can even take aggressive action to affect the supply of goods and swing the market their way. What makes the game different from a strategy game, is the combat. You can only be in one place at once, so you can pilot one of your ships yourself and give orders to the rest of your fleet alongside you, or you can give orders remotely to your ships as you carry out business on the opposite side of the galaxy. You can even get out of your spaceship and float around in your space suit. In fact, you’ll need to do that to move between ships. As an alternative style of play, players can take advantage of existing trading empires and loot and steal ships and create their own pirate organisation. This is tougher still as everyone will be out to get you. I should add that the control system is complex even though it’s more mouse driven than before. Every key has a function and some have more when used with control and shift. So if you like challenging open ended game play then X3 is for you. If you like a quick blast Wing Commander style then it probably isn’t.
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