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X2
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Game Name:
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X2 |
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Console:
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PC |
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Reviewed:
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Unknown |
X2 is a very open ended space trading and combat game. It goes a step further than games like Elite or Freelancer though. In those games the point of trading and doing missions was to buy better weapons/ships. Most which were just souped up versions of what you had previously. In X2 you can actually buy your own factories and place them where you want them. You’ll have to buy ships to buy goods for your factories and might need to buy ships to sell for them as well. You can fly these transport ships if you want, otherwise it’s best to buy some software for them, give them orders and let them go about their business.
X2 is usually played from a first person perspective although you can switch to external camera angle to see yourself from the outside or look next to you etc. There are a large range of ships available in the game – these can be broken down into class and race. The main classes are M5, M4, M3, M6, M2, M1, M0, TS, TP and TL. The placing of M6 is not a typo; each class from M5 to M0 is from smallest size to largest. The M5 ships are scouts – fast and manoeuvrable but lightly armed and armoured. The M4 are fighters, the M3 are heavy fighters while the M6 is a new Corvette class which has been added since the last X game – they are like a super heavy fighter but are smaller than a capital ship. The M2 are the Destroyer class – they are very large and heavily armed. The M1 are Carrier class, they have less armaments than the M2 but can carry a lot of smaller fighters inside of them. The M0 are the battleship class. Only one of these ever appears in X2, and it belongs to the enemy. You can’t own one as a result. The TS are transport ships with very large cargo capacity. The TP are transport ships designed to carry people. The TL class are massive freighters designed to carry extremely large goods like new factories.
Each race has its own variations for each class of ship. Aside from appearance, they vary in terms of the types and numbers of weapons they can use, the types and number of shields they can mount, the cargo capacity, top speed, acceleration, rate of steering and the number of turrets they have. The different race variants have slightly different costs; generally the cost reflects how good the ship is. Each ship can usually be bought as one of three variants – S, M or L. The S variant is bare bones. The M variant has medium weapons and shields. The L variant comes with the best weapons and shields available for the ship. The larger ships don’t have these variants – they always come without equipment so you need to buy the weapons yourself. The races in the game are the Argon who are descended from humans. The Paranid who are an unfriendly religious race. The Boron who are an aquatic species. The Split where are a warrior like race. The Teladi who are a race of merchants. There is also the Xenon who are a mechanical race – they were created to terraform planets for the humans but went crazy due to a software bug. The Pirates who are made up of renegades from the main races. Finally there are the Khaak who are an enemy race who appear during the game. There is a religious order known as the Goner who have a special ship of their own.
You can buy ships from any of the first five races, provided you are on good relations with them. A race will get unhappy with you if you attack their ships or stations. They will like you more if you destroy Xenon, Pirates and Khaak in their space sectors. If they don’t like you enough you won’t be able to dock at their stations or trade with them.
Ship to ship combat in this game occurs much the same as most other space games. The laws of Newtonian physics aren’t applied other than you needing time to slow down and speed up. There are an assortment of weapons, each with different energy requirements, damage ratings and ranges. The different ships for each race have different weapons you can mount. Certain special weapons can only be mounted by ships built by certain races. The regular weapons basically fire energy bolts. If they hit something they will do shield or hull damage. The special weapons are as follows: Mass drivers use ammo, they are able to bypass shields and do hull damage regardless of how much shielding a ship has. Phased shockwave generators fire a conical stream of energy that damages everything it hits. It inflicts damage at certain intervals along the cone. It will actually hurt larger ships more because they will usually be caught within several intervals along the cone. Ion disruptors don’t do any hull damage but rapidly drain the shields of any ship they hit. They also have a good chance of destroying onboard systems. The last two weapons are particularly problematic because they tend to hit everything in the general direction you are aiming – not a good thing when there are friendly ships nearby. All ships can also fire missiles, these do an amount of damage according the type of missile they are – however each ship has a maximum size of missile it can fire. Missiles can be shot down though. Certain ships also have turrets which can be set to shoot at enemy ships or incoming missiles. It’s also possible to deploy mines and laser towers to defend your territory.
Each weapon does a certain amount of damage when it hits. Each ship has a certain number of hitpoints for the hull and for its shields. Shields will recharge over time. Hull damage on the other hand has to be repaired by docking with certain stations. The cost is directly proportionate to the buying price of the ship. If the ship costs 10,000 credits brand new and it has 50% damage then it will cost 5,000 credits to fully repair. If your ship is damaged enough your top speed will be reduced. The AI controlled ships don’t follow this rule though. For most ships that you fight, there is a chance the pilot will chicken out and abandon their ship. At that point the ship becomes yours. This sounds good but there are a few problems. Firstly, the odds of the pilot giving up seem pretty low; despite how badly they are losing or are outmatched. As I understand it, once a ship drops below 83% hull integrity, every hit to the hull has a small chance of making them surrender. The second problem is that it takes a second or two for it to sink in that they have given up. If you have shots or missile en route it’s easily possible for your new ship to be destroyed before you can stop firing. Thirdly, if you are engaging a number of enemies they might decide to target your newly acquired ship first. I’ve heard that you can avoid this by landing a shot on each of them – this will make them direct all fire at you exclusively. Finally, when a ship is captured, the game will usually strip most of the equipment out of it – even if it wasn’t destroyed during the fight. This is probably because powerful weapons and shields are usually worth more than the ship they are sitting in. My best guess is that the pilot shoves this equipment into their backpack before they bail out.
Although the game has a plot, it’s somewhat ignorable and there seems to be no major penalty for ignoring it. You can do a lot of things to make yourself wealthy – build factories, fight pirates or even become a pirate yourself. Many of the stations you can dock at offer missions. Most missions have a rank requirement though. Your character has two ranks – merchant and fighter. You improve in the former by making money and the latter by winning fights. Most missions require a certain level for one or both. Often they also require a certain ship type as well. They might need some goods transported in a hurry so you need a TS. Or someone might need to be shuttled from place to place which requires an M5. Some also require you to have a certain amount of cargo capacity for hauling goods. Be warned, even if you meet the requirements, some are impossible to complete like getting to another station within a certain time limit.
There are many upgrades you can buy for a ship. Software allows you to give certain orders to ships in order to automate certain tasks like fighting or trading. The Teladi sell best buying price and selling price indicators which can point out bargains for you within the same sector. Some of these are player only though; AI ships can’t make any use of them. When buying cargo, you need to be aware of size. Each ship has a maximum size it can carry. Cargo comes in S, M, L, XL and ST. Generally the larger the ship size, the larger the cargo size it can carry. However, different cargo takes up different numbers of cargo units so an L type might take up 5 cargo units. ST cargo are station kits which only a TL can carry Advanced technology allows certain ships to increase their cargo capacity via spatial compression. This comes at an increasing cost though so each unit of capacity will cost more than the previous unit. The TP class ships can’t use spatial compression, nor can the TL, M2 or M1 class ships. Spatial compression is kind of dicey in terms of cost/benefit. To fully upgrade cargo capacity generally costs a lot of money. But most of the time you won’t have enough cargo to fill that capacity. The TL, M6, M2 and M1 ships can’t dock at most stations – they are too large. They can only dock at shipyard or equipment type stations. Even then, they can only trade for goods and upgrades – they can’t access the stations BBS. The BBS is where you can take on missions. If you want to take on a mission in a large ship you need to dock in a smaller ship then return to the larger one. The missions are all randomly generated and will disappear after a time.
The “world” of X2 is broken up into a number of sectors. These sectors are linked by gates which were built by an ancient race. Generally, sectors are grouped together and controlled by a certain race. A few of them are controlled by the pirates, the Xenon or the Khaak. Travelling through the gates to another sector is just a matter of flying straight through. You can buy a jumpdrive which, at a cost of energy cells, can take you directly to a gate anywhere in the X universe.
The graphics are quite nice in X2 while flying around. However, the cutscenes aren’t so great. It appears they used the same graphics engine that powers the rest of the game and it looks plain weird. The sound is pretty goods though; the voice acting is decent with the different races each having a different sound to them.
It’s gripe time, and there are quite a few of them. The first problem is the manual for this game – it sucks. There simply isn’t enough in the manual to get you going properly. There are some tutorials but they are kind of limited as well. One of them even gives you false information on how to do something (or used to, I haven’t tried it again with the latest patch). Most of what I know about this game I learned from the official forums for the game. The interface is pretty cumbersome as well. Most of the keys can’t be remapped. It’s easy to get confused and overwhelmed at first. Most of the weapons in X2 fire energy blasts at a fairly low speed, against a faster opponent it can mean you almost never hit as long as they keep on moving. The Khaak however have a laser beam type weapon that reaches their target instantly, provided their aim is good. In a large game like X2 the computer can’t directly handle everything. As such, any combat occurring in other sectors is handled by basic math – comparing weapons and shield stats. The game doesn’t consider things like the position of stations and ships. As such, you might drop a satellite right next to a station so that it can’t be shot easily. While you are in the sector, that is the case. If you are outside of the sector it’s a sitting duck. As a measure of adding atmosphere there are all sorts of news items to be seen on the BBS systems inside of stations. However, much of this information is just made up and might refer to something non-existent or even contradict the reality of the game. It would have been nicer for them to be consistent and refer to real things. Kind of like an RPG where you hear a rumour of something which you can actually track down. The economic system of X2 is kind of tipped on its head as well. The manual suggests that goods are more profitable the more value added they are. For example, in the real world if you sold steel, rubber or iron you’d expect a certain amount of profit. If you put them together to make a car though you can expect much more profit. In X2, generally it is the raw materials that make a lot of money while the higher end products don’t make much at all. The most profitable factory is generally agreed to be the solar power plant which makes energy cells. I’ve heard that some of the very high end factories are actually unprofitable although I’ve never actually tried one out. The game needs a fair amount of computing power as well to keep frame rates up at a decent level.
If you have enough patience to get past the steep learning curve, then X2 can be a very good game to play. Some players have been playing it exclusively for months over any other game. It should be noted that the next X game is expected to come out soon.
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