X2: The Threat Review

The AI works well during the entire game. Enemies are challenging and worthy adversaries both in dogfights, as well as large scale battles. As you assume control of a colossal space frigate, the AI takes over all of your turrets in order to fend off enemy fighters. Managing an entire fleet can be a nasty business though. Although the CPU can handle some actions, you may want to assume responsibility of controlling your vital ships and that's when things may get a little complicated. If you have up to a hundred ships in your fleet there's no way you can look after all of them. Also, in these situations, the game exhibited an annoyingly choppy frame-rate, which understandably did not help the situation.

The frequently sluggish frame-rate can be a serious drawback during gameplay. Reducing numerous effects such as bump-mapping, shadows, and anti-aliasing can improve things slightly, but that decreases the overall visual quality. Apart from these frame-rate issues, the game is pretty sound from a technical standpoint. We did not experience any serious bugs or crashes, so I guess the programmers did their job well in that respect. On another good note, it appears that the designers went all out to create an amazing range of ship models and space stations. Other details such as lighting, asteroid and cloud formations, particle effects, help express the atmosphere of a genuine space epic. It's very unfortunate that character animation wasn't done with similar meticulousness. Each time there's a cut-scene, players will witness atrocious lip-sync and rigid character body movement - quite pathetic when compared to the spectacular ambiance in outer space. Again, I should stress here that although the game looks pretty once you glide out in your spacecraft from the docking bay, the incredibly steep hardware requirements will ruin the experience for most players whenever the screen clogs up with enemy ships.

The audio is pleasing to listen to as you travel across the far regions of the universe. It would appear the developers created a praiseworthy diversity of sound effects to go along with the game's numerous space ships and buildings. Also, the music fits the ambiance quite well and goes perfectly with each star system. Naturally, the tunes change as soon as the action begins, making the gameplay a bit more dynamic.

After seeing how engaging the game can be in single-player mode, we were disheartened by the fact that Ego Soft did not include a multiplayer mode. We must remember that games like Freelancer offer a lot in that respect, which increased their replayability and addictiveness. It is a shame that Ego Soft did not opt to take a similar course of action, bearing in mind full well the huge scope of the single-player campaign.

Even with issues such as sluggish performance, tedious narrative, and the lack of multiplayer, it's actually hard not to get caught up in the many features of X2: The Threat. Its non-linear gameplay will occupy you for quite some time, until you become an expert pilot, professional trader or whatever. The sheer quantity of missions, challenges, and star systems is almost unbelievable, so there's no question that you'll have your hands full throughout the whole game. For that reason, we recommend all gamers to give it a try, especially those of you with beastly rigs and an aptitude for Elite-like space sims.