X2: The Threat

It’s astoundingly beautiful, too – by contrast, "Freelancer’s" visuals are like watching a brick float around a bucket of custard. But, needless to say, X² isn’t for everyone – but if it’s immersive liberty rather than fast thrills you’re after, it offers an almost incomparably satisfying experience, just so long as the really bad stuff doesn’t stop you from putting the hours in.

What still stands out is the sluggish flight model that makes it nearly impossible to continuously target and hit an enemy vessel; the corrupted save games (which is supposed to fixed in the patch), and the general slowness of the design that feels like it was designed to pad length.

A bold experiment that ultimately fails under the weight of its own ambition. There is nothing here that hasn’t been done in other games and done better, and while X2 might combine these elements, it fails to improve on any of them.

A deep game worthy of exploration and discovery - you'll just have to exhibit nigh-infinite patience with its glacially slow build-up and general unfriendliness. [Mar 2004, p.86]

With the depth of everything and overall graphical sophistication in X2, it could have been a much better title. [Feb 2004, p.112]

Like its predecessor, X2 is still lacking in cohesion. Its scope has vastly improved and this is a very immersive title, but it doesn’t invite you in. You have to work for its love and get past its many ugly points – just how can you willingly subject a player to those cut scenes?

Please God, afford Egosoft the time needed to rework the game via some sort of expansion, patch or Gold Edition so that I may finally be content with existence. As is, this bizarre flip-flop of "Freelancer" that features no interface or enjoyable action but a ton of diversity and extended appeal just isn't any better than all right.

Fix the damn game up, give me an actual living universe, and a combat system that makes sense, then we'll talk. Until that point, I'm going to blast through "Freespace 2" again and look forward to the online-only rendition of the game series (due out in the distant future) with hesitant anticipation.

X2 contains a great sandbox adventure complicated by an ignorable single-player story and fiendish menu driven control system.

Lots of different stars, ships, and aliens may be nice, but there is no excuse for unwieldy controls, a horribly high learning curve and pacing that takes a good dozen hours before things get interesting.

Even regular space travel proves trying; rescued from the unconvincing hands-on control by an efficient autopilot system, your journeys become a case of merely clicking on where you want to go and fast-forwarding time until you get there. This reduces the game to a dirge of menu surfing and loses all the sense of adventure on which the genre was built. [Feb 2004, p.119]

Even a game with outstanding eventual depth needs to give players some evidence early on that rewards will eventually apprear. [Mar 2004, p.69]