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Very good complex space economics game (don't forget combat)

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 3 / 3
Date: December 15, 2004
Author: Amazon User

X2 is definitely a complex game that can be difficult to learn and even more difficult to master. However, if you like games that are similar to Privateer and Elite, then X2 shuod be worth the time and effort to learn how to play.

For the most part is an economics game that takes place in space. Yes, yes there is combat too, but how do you think you will be able to afford a heavy fighter, not to mention a carrier than can carry large numbers of fighters? The game focuses a lot on making money. One way would be to trade commodities from stations that supplies such products to those that demand such products like energy, and silicon waffers. The game is truly expansive and there are more ways than one to make money.

Pros:

1. A space simulation that focuses on making money as well as combat.
2. A simple to understand economy, however due to the dynamics of of the economy, mastering it can be difficult.
3. Multiple ways of making money be it trading, providing transportation, travel tours, or assassination missions, and a few more.
4. The ability to change the economy be build several different types of factories. There are some factories that are unique to certain races. You can truly build an economic empire that can span throughout the explored sectors.
5. You want ships, or better yet, your own space faring armada? You got it! Provided you can make enough money to buy capital ships, various types of fighters, corvettes, and a fleet of transports to keep your factories going.
6. Each ship has different flight characteristics so learning how each ship fly can be interesting or exasperating depending your point of view.
7. Space is huge, and so are the number of sectors to explore. The game is expansive and freeform, but not to the extent Morrowind is.
8. The Forum. Yes, the Forum. Believe it or not, but one of the best features about the game is the Forum at Egosoft.com. Are you stumped, want to learn tricks, or just looking for info? Then don't hesitate to go to the Forum, you'll be glad you did. There is a wealth of info there.
9. Scripts and mods that are freely available that can change the way the game is played. Some user created scripts are even signed off by the developer. Thus, they are completely safe to run in the game.
10. Oh, did I mention the nice graphics?

Cons:
1. Not a game for those looking to jump right into combat.
2. Can be a little time consuming just to get acquainted with the game.
3. Different flight characteristics for each ship. What, you expect a frieghter to turn on a dime like a scout ship (light fighter)?
4.Do you want to humble your computer? Think your system can handle any current game out there if it can handle the likes of Doom 3, or Half Life 2? Then go build up a sector with lots of factories, and watch your frame rate plummet. You'll think there's something wrong with your computer or graphics card. Nope!!! There are a lot of calculations going on in the background. The more factories there are in a system, the more traffic there will be, and your poor CPU will have to calculate the path of all those transports running around.
5. Combat can be frustrating in very populated sectors.

This is not a game for everyone, but it is the best game there is for those looking for a space econmics game like Privateer, and Elite. Oh, wait let me rephrase that. It is the only game out there.

A game that lasts

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 3 / 3
Date: February 18, 2005
Author: Amazon User

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.

So much hope, So much of a let down...

2 Rating: 2, Useful: 3 / 5
Date: July 21, 2004
Author: Amazon User

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.

Buy at your own risk...

3 Rating: 3, Useful: 2 / 4
Date: January 17, 2004
Author: Amazon User

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).

Awesome Space Game

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 1 / 1
Date: January 10, 2005
Author: Amazon User

This game is the best space game I've ever played. If you like freelancer, then get this game. One thing I love the most about this game is that it isn't linear at all, unlike Freelancer and such. I love the idea of building stations and factories. All the makers of this game need to do is enable you to land on planets and simply add a lot more weapons, ships, etc. One more thing about this game that is cool is how it evolves.

Enjoyable and Worth the money

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 1 / 1
Date: July 17, 2004
Author: Amazon User

This truly is a great game but with any game it has its strengths and weaknesses. You simpily have to weigh them according to what your looking for in a game. As far as economic empire building and large scale naval stratagy it shines above many others. The economic model is very complex yet easy to learn making it fun to explore and build up massive industrys all with fully automated transports that actually do what you tell them (the AI actually uses a bit of common sense when doing so).

However, if your looking to hop into the cockpit of a heavy fighter for a dog fight with lasers blazing you'll find that the flight controll is so sloppy that you will want to turn the auto-pilot on and sit back and watch the computer smoke the enemys itself. Which again it does a decent job at. As far a the people anamations go, yea there so terrible I actually found them rather houmorous but it takes up about 3-5 minutes of a game that may last you several weeks or even months. At any rate its not what you would buy this game for so who cares, hit ESC and skip'em.

All in all I am glad I bought this game and the company "Egosoft" stands behind their product with free game "updates" which combine add-ons and patches into one and have a "modder kit" to help the gamer create there own changes to the game. Rather than microsoft who published Freelancer and abanded it this company continues to make it better by listning to what gammers have to say in their forum on the company website. And that says alot about a company and its product.

Year round gaming

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 1 / 2
Date: January 04, 2006
Author: Amazon User

This is a very very good looking space simulation. O man, my mouth dropped. The last good simulation I played was Wing Commander 3. Flying through Nebulas with the cockpit view made me feel like I was there. The cutscenes however could use some work (needs a good artistic touch with textures - they were off color).

This is a long long game period. The parts I played were fun. However, I didn't quite get what I am supposed to do at certain points. For example, Argon One... what the hell was that? It took me a couple of memory walkbacks later I realize it was the first ship I came out of dock with. You won't find it easily on the map without some searching or a good scanner. The economy is good and realistic enough to be fun. The only draw back is that I find the whole game to be really really long. Then again it could be a good thing since I usually beat the whole story of a game in just a week. Very replayable with the egosoft site pointing gamers to forums and a modding community.

Btw, simulators are an absolute necessity since the learning curve is more like climbing a cliff... a really large cliff... with no safety. Partly due to the difficult keyboard interface. The rest of it is due to the many things taking place around you. Not only do you have to keep track of the enemies in front of you. You can have around 5 "monitors" to look at in addition to the main screen in capital (larger) ships. It's not a bad thing nor is it a good thing. I just feel it is necessary to the playing of these game types. However, I do feel the tutorial should not need an update in order to function properly.

The update you have to be careful about. Some of the versions can't use certain updates. It took me awhile to realize this fault in the update system. (caused my system display error message after error message)

Graphics 10/10
Gameplay 8.5/10
Ease of Use 7/10
Overall 8/10

User Friendly as using a hack saw on granite

2 Rating: 2, Useful: 2 / 8
Date: January 28, 2004
Author: Amazon User

Okay, I couldn't give the game one star because it had really good space graphics. I actually felt like I was in a cockpit. But it certanly dosen't warrent anything above what I gave it.
Allow me to write this in a recognizable fassion.

Pros:

1- Great Space Graphics.
2- Somewhat Interesting Storyline.

Cons (allow me to clear my throat):

1- The character graphics are some of the worst I've seen in a long time. Even the original Monkey Island, or Space Quest had better character animation than this.
2- It has a serious problem with character interface, and user friendlyness. This is it's biggest problem. I will garentee you, it has no tutorial, training, hints or tips, or anything else to help out. It throws you in and expects you to know how to do everything off the bat. I couldn't even figure out how to repair! And I was DOCKED!
3- It had a review on the box saying: "This game could be better than Freelancer!" or something like that. But I consider this to be something a desperate company would do to sell a completely useless product. It's a very nasty, dirty thing to do.

In conclusion, This game ranks only two stars because of it's Bad Character Graphics, Terrible gameplay, and nasty marketing. If you want a Space Sim, get Freelancer, at least the characters look like they have joints!

Sail On Software - Dishonest Company

3 Rating: 3, Useful: 4 / 26
Date: March 12, 2005
Author: Amazon User

We ordered a DVD through Amazon via Sail On. They sent us a used DVD (no packaging), which did not work. After stringing us along, we returned the DVD and were promised a replacement or refund. Needless to say, they have avoided our e-mails since. I would recommend NOT dealing with Sail On Software.

Pathetic

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 1 / 4
Date: April 09, 2004
Author: Amazon User

Pure eye candy. I fired it up and started the tutorials. The business tutorial seemed to stall. The combat tutorial showed me that anyone who actually manages to shoot an enemy ship with a laser is just plain lucky. Combat was just pure frustration, with opposing ships crossing the screen in the blink of an eye. You'd need to be Luke Skywalker to win a fight on merit, because Han Solo wouldn't have a chance. Gee it looks great. Who cares because if you have to fight to get on in the game or protect your interests then you might as well forget it, because you're going to be tearing your hair out. I wouldn't give this game away to my worst enemy. There may be a rewarding game in there somewhere, but why should I put myself through hours of boring frustration?

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