X2 The Threat

Rating:
Summary: A game that lasts
Review: I have been playing X2-the Threat for about a year, and I have not gotten board yet! There is a lot of stuff to do. And then there is some more.

You can own more than one ship at a time. A lot of them. You can own stations and factories. A lot of them. You can own battleships. If you can pay for them.

If you get tired of running the details you can automate them.

In most games things only run when you are there. The places you are not are frozen. But in X2 everything runs all of the time. All over the "universe" of the game. Even in places you have not discovered yet. Leave your factory and go exploring and when you come back it has made you half a million credits and boosted the economy for six sectors around. But one of its freighter ships has taken damage from a pirate attack.

The economy starts out in a recession (probably to give the new player opportunities for profits) and as you build factories and trade products the other nations economies start to wake up. If you corner the market prices will go up. But the factories will got buy from other nations when the prices get too high.

The menu controls are a little slow and the character animation is clunky, but I can live with that.

And it does too have a training and tutorial section! But most of my onfo I got from the EgoSoft Forums.


Rating:
Summary: Best Space Game EVER!!!
Review: As an "old timer" when it comes to gaming - over 25 years - this is the best Space Sim - check, best GAME, I've come across since the Civilization line. It DOES have a tutorial. It is EASY to learn. The trick is finding the right add-ons for your ship, which require you to travel around the immense universe and deal with many different species inhabiting the X-universe. Best graphics yet. Fly ANY ship from an ultra-fast scout ship to a full-blown capital ship - carrier or battleship. Wage war, fight pirates, trade for credits, build factories and automate trading throughout the universe. Follow the story line (much better than Freelancer's) or follow your own path to fame and fortune. Freelancer took all of three days to beat. Five months later, I'm still exploring the X-Universe. And Egosoft keeps coming out with free add-ons for registered owners! If you want entertainment and value for your gaming dollar, don't miss out on this one!

Rating:
Summary: Best Space Game EVER!!!
Review: As an "old timer" when it comes to gaming - over 25 years - this is the best Space Sim - check, best GAME, I've come across since the Civilization line. It DOES have a tutorial. It is EASY to learn. The trick is finding the right add-ons for your ship, which require you to travel around the immense universe and deal with many different species inhabiting the X-universe. Best graphics yet. Fly ANY ship from an ultra-fast scout ship to a full-blown capital ship - carrier or battleship. Wage war, fight pirates, trade for credits, build factories and automate trading throughout the universe. Follow the story line (much better than Freelancer's) or follow your own path to fame and fortune. Freelancer took all of three days to beat. Five months later, I'm still exploring the X-Universe. And Egosoft keeps coming out with free add-ons for registered owners! If you want entertainment and value for your gaming dollar, don't miss out on this one!

Rating:
Summary: update
Review: Basically, all was said above. The Patch 1.4 removed the flaw of ramming enemys, much features came in addition, and on my AthlonXP 2.8 with 1024 RAM and Radeon 9600 256 MB it runs smooth with all Details in 1024*768*16.

Genrally I tend to the higher reviews as stated above. It IS needed to "bite your way through" at the beginning, but the reward is good. The story is a bit short, not in the time needed to complete, but in a somewhat open and unsatisfying end. On the other hand, most of us probably wont buy a game of this type for the story alone, but for the empire to build. Another problem is the fact, that somewhere in midgame wealthness-wise, you get some troubles with protecting your ships and have to do lots of repetive work to advance, which in itself isnt bad cause it stays fun. But the living-universe-feeling looses a bit once the news on the blackboards of the stations begin to repeat only "news" you already know. As I didnt play for a while because of hardware damage, I cant tell if that is still present in 1.4 though.

All in all nothing more but small flaws in a great game, if you are looking for freedom. 'Cause thats what you got, what freelancer always missed. The freedom to abandon storyline, to pirate, patrol, trade, build and explore as you wish. What keeps the station still somewhat alive are the audio-announcements like "Small Lisa is missing her parents, please come and get her at the casino, deck 20, section 23."
or
"Deck 34 is closed due to maintenace work on reactor."
or
"Please note our special offers in the family market on deck 12!"

Just a small detail, but it really adds. And there are many such details in this game.

Rating:
Summary: Buy at your own risk...
Review: Enlight has seen fit to add an extremly lame-brained copy protection scheme to this game. The system is called exe cop, and, from what I've seen, it cripples your game (after many hours of play) if it decides you have a pirated copy. According to several posts on the tech support forum (which you can't access unless you have a registered copy of the game) things like having Nero installed on your system may trigger the scheme (or even for no reason at all). The result is a declining reputation (everyone becomes your enemy) and disappearing credits. This is a major bummer since the game itself is a lot of fun to play. I haven't experienced this myself (I've only played the game for several hours), but this seems to be a recurring post on the egosoft/enlight forums. Hopfully, the next patch - 1.2 - is going to address the copy protection problem.

YOU'VE BEEN WARNED

As far as the game goes I have very little to complain about. It runs fairly smooth (2.4GHz, 512MB, 128MB GeforceFX 5700 Ultra - patched to 1.1 w/all the goodies except AA enabled) and is VERY immersive and detailed (if you like a complicated space trader w/less action). The graphics are great, especially the bump mapping and lense effects. Despite what other reviews have said, I didn't find the learning curve to be a big deal. Help is available in abundance throughout the game (as well as an active community forum) and the tutorials are complete enough to get you started. The first two or three mission will reveal how to start earning a few bucks. The manual is a bit thin - but exploring the game and fuguring out what's what is half the fun. Given the amout of detail in this game, its hard to overstate how creative you can be in making credits (visit the tip/tricks forums to see what I mean - I believe you can access those without a copy of the game). The only other complaint is that it *seems* DirectInput is being used in an unbuffered mode. Key presses are somtimes lost between keyboard polls, and this becomes more pronounced during high CPU load situations as the frame rate drops (like during combat).

This game would get 5 stars from me without the exe cop garbage (and maybe a bit more optimization - although the 1.1 patch is an improvement over the out of the box installation).

Rating:
Summary: Yeah....
Review: Everything everyone has said about this game is true. I happen to like the game as it is, but I can see where ATI users would have a problem. The game's learning curve is tremendous, but the online forums at www.egosoft.com and the commander's page http://www.the-commander.com/ are a great couple of resources. Keep in mind that the gameplay mechanics are a little wonky at times, the developers do pay attention to the forums and there is a great player-mod community hard at work.

A note to college students: this is one of those games with ALLOT of thumb-twiddling. I've found this is a good time to read up, since I'm too stupid to pry myself away from the game for an hour.

Rating:
Summary: The best space combat-trade sim of the last 20yrs, almost...
Review: I am giving X2 the Threat, 3.5 stars. It could be a 5 star game.

The review above, "X2: Threatens to be great", pretty much covers it on content. This game could be the best space trading-combat sim ever. Since the "Threatens to be great" review is so concise and I larely agree with it, I am going to cover the system specs required to run the game.

My system specs:

1.3 GHz AMD processor
512 RAM
128 MB ATI 9500 Pro
Cyborg Gold USB Joystick
Windows 98 SE

I have all the eye candy options turned off and the game is running fast enough at 1028x780x32 to be playable. My system is very clean and runs every other game I have ever tried, with all video options turned on, as smooth as silk, but not X2. The game probably isn't playable with a system that is lower-end than mine.

Most gamers playing this game have some of the video options turned down, even with systems that have 3.0 GHz processors and ATI 9800s or high-end Nvidias.

THIS GAME IS PROBABLY NOT PLAYABLE ON A SYSTEM WITH THE MINIMUM SPECS LISTED ON THE BOX! It will be like watching a slide show. The lack of a playable demo really makes it hard to tell if the game will run smooth enough on your system to make it worth buying. Egosoft gets a minus 1/2 star for putting out a 'rolling demo' instead of something meaningful.

NOTE(added 1-24-04): There appears to be a serious problem with ATI video cards and the performance of this game. No matter how fast your system you will probably average about 20fps if you have an ATI card.

Right now, the main tactic of opposing ships is to ram you.

If the game's creators will optimize the game engine and modify the combat AI so it does more than just try to ram your ship, I will happily bump my score to 5 stars.

This is a hard game, but it could be one of the greats. Hopefully, Egosoft will put some effort into optimizing the rendering and AI combat code. With some fixes in those areas this game will stand on a tier above Freelancer. (Or any other game in this genre)

Rating:
Summary: addictive
Review: I am very happy with my purchase of this game. It has its issues, such as the horrible cutscenes and obscene learning curve, but once you get the hang of it the game is incredible. The graphics are beautiful, the economy is very deep, and the universe is huge and completely non-linear. If you liked Freelancer but felt it was not open ended enough, this game is for you.

Rating:
Summary: Hard but alot of fun. Well worth it, elite meets privateer.
Review: I only write a review if something is really good or really bad, happily in this case it's really good. I know its hard, if you don't have the rest of your life to play this game to build up the economic empire you'll need to complete the story or at least the credits you'll need to stay alive. I'd suggest you download the pre-made savegame that starts you out with 989,999,999 credits, once you get a chance to see how good and how much fun this game can be you'll be impressed. It's not only 21th century elite but it's the first space game I've played that I liked more then privateer and for all those who played Tachyon: The Fringe, you'll enjoy flying your huge capships around.

Not only can you own fleets but your ships can own ships and your bases too, all this going at one time. After you get a large empire you'll find that you don't notice the long waits for the next gate. Also some alien ships go alot faster, you have at least 5 races worth to choose from and you can capture pirate ships aswell.

But you'll need some real hardware or a clean running system, the 1.3 patch runs ok on my P4 1.3ghz but if I were you I'd get a faster system for this one, it's worth it.

Only bad things I can say really is that the cool stuff costs too much (as in life), the weapons are hard to come by even when you have the cool ships and the character animations are a bit stiff.

All in all I am very happy with this game and there are fan mods for it aswell. Haven't tested any yet however.

Rating:
Summary: So much hope, So much of a let down...
Review: I tend to see what others say about games and very rarely take the time out to write one of my own but after (wasting) spending some time playing X2: The Threat I felt that I needed to share my views so that anyone looking for a Privateer(esque) game can weigh them in.

Frankly, wait until this title hits the bargain shelves and only if you have NOTHING else to do!!! I went out and made an impulse purchase of this title because I needed something to do while I was sick for a few days and read that this was a great game. Never saw one bad review on it and the screenshots looked action packed and simply breathtaking. After a 45 minute install and patching process (patching to 1.4 required 3 separate downloads off of a VERY slow server) I finally got into the game. No tutorial and a hefty printed manual in my hand I set out thinking that I was a rather intuitive person I could figure it out. I did with relative success and found that the troubles that I had weren't problems with my knowledge, rather the way that the game is meant to be played.

No way is this title meant to be picked up and played like Privateer, or given the empire building tactics as in Masters of Orion, Rather think about picking up an Encyclopedia at the age of 5 and trying to read from beginning to the end.

Granted, the graphics and in ship play are spectacular though nothing can make up for a game that you would have to devote your entire social life to.

My ultimate thoughts, if you are looking for a Privateer substitute look elsewhere. If you are looking to spend countless hours performing repetitive tasks in hope that something better comes of it you may find enjoyment in this title.