"Elite + Freelancer = X2"

It’s an awesome game with tons of depth, awesome graphics, dynamic universe and economy, and flawed only by it’s combat AI and control bugs. It has more depth than Freelancer, the trading style that Elite has, the combat is very reminiscent of X-wing, but is it the perfect game? If you are into more arcade-like games, you might be disappointed with this title, but I was defiantly impressed with the game overall. It’s most close to Privateer in terms of gameplay… but HUGE!

The Bad:
There are many ways you can approach this game. You could get yourself a cargo transport and haul cargo around and make tons of money by being a successful trader; take a light fighter and purchase a license that allows you to receive money for every pirate you destroy; etc. etc. But as the game stands right now, the only viable option is the trader route. It is a lot of fun to do some combat with your oppressors, but your best weapon is your shields.

The old Darth Bob syndrome that haunted me from Star Wars: Rebel Assault 2 is back with a vengeance. You can’t run, you can’t hide, these baddies have a death wish and studied in the Kamikaze School of Flying. The problem is further compounded by the fact that the controls are designed for heavier corvettes and capitol ships. There is an amount of smoothing done on the joystick (so that your turning arc doesn’t abruptly stop when you let up on the joystick.) Unfortunately, this needs to be toned down considerably.

You end up with the scenario of you getting a bead on an enemy by turning towards it, the enemy suddenly changes direction. Because of the smoothing problem, regardless of you pressing the opposite direction to follow the enemy ship, your aim is still going in the direction it was; you end up either losing sight of your target, or him slamming into you.

In the combat simulator section of the game, there is a light fighter combat training section. Out of 50 kills, about 40 of them were due to collision. This problem does go away quite quickly when you get into one of the heavier fighters or when you are controlling a light fighter that is a wingman of a larger capitol ship (more on that later.)

Another difficulty is the control scheme. The game was meant to be played with a joystick, you CAN play it with keyboard and mouse, but I think that would prove quite difficult; the controls are in no way similar to Freelancer. When playing with a joystick, you have the ability to remap some of the buttons… but not all. You have a very short list of commands that you can attach to buttons, some of them that should be there, aren’t even offered. Once you get used to how they work (hit the missile button once to change missile type, hold it down and release to fire for example) it feels pretty intuitive. I still wish they would have had a “target under reticule” button, but even the keyboard command one doesn’t work like it should; and a “target closest enemy” would have been nice too.

The in-game cinematics are (to put it nicely) the ugliest looking anyone has ever seen. The voice acting is actually pretty well done, but the character models are horrendous looking. Apparently the lead character has had one too many collagen chin implants and his hands are grotesquely disfigured. One of your contacts through the game is a Chinese woman who looks like her eyeballs are going to fall out of her head. The subtitles at the bottom of the screen, which you will be staring at because words are prettier than the freakshow that is being shown on the rest of your monitor, don’t even match what the characters are saying.

You can avoid the storyline all together if you want, just don’t visit who you are supposed to. There are benefits to doing them though (the first real mission you do nets you a good 20,000cr. and the following mission gets you a very nice cargo transport. I stopped doing missions after getting the cargo ship because after you do a soon-to-follow mission, hordes of aliens start invading every sector, destroying any of your property.

There have been many reports of game stopping bugs and slowdown due to graphical problems, but I did not see any. I did see a noticeable decrease in performance when shadows were enabled, but that’s an easy fix.

The Good:
If you are able to look past these problems and enjoy the game for what it is, you will be very happy with the results. The game universe is huge, roughly 4 times as large as the one in Freelancer. And they didn’t just add sectors ‘just because;’ each one has it’s own look and feel. The Hole is in the shadow of a planet, so it’s nearly black (with a few twinkling lights from the nearby stations,) Red Light is in a red nebula, etc. etc. Quite a few sectors are breathtaking and you’ll find yourself going out of the way to fly through dust clouds just for fun.

There are quite a few different races, each with their own unique look to them. And this isn’t like Freelancer where there are slight differences, the alien stations are ‘holy crap’ weird/cool looking. You can easily tell which sector is owned by which race because of the extreme differences in station and craft design. Graphically, this game is very nice (excluding the cutscenes… shudder.)

The game offers a dynamic economy, if an area is short on Bio Gas, the cost will increase; if there is a surplus of a material, the price will drop. This doesn’t sound too impressive, but later in the game when you own your own factories and stations, it means a lot. Yes, you read it right, you can own your own stations. They are very expensive and rather difficult to obtain and place, but by the time you are able to afford them, it’s the only way you have to earn money.

You can also fly just about every ship there is in the game. You can even amass a fleet of ships quite easily. If you have a transport and a fighter, you can purchase a communication upgrade and tell the fighter to fly as a wingman and protect you. This applies to larger fleets as well, just tell your wingmen to follow you. This might seem kind of limited, but you can also send commands to all of your fighters, all of your transporters, etc. which adds quite a bit to the strategic side of things.

Also, you can set up multiple monitors and assign any of your turrets/fighters/external views/missile view/etc. to. And at a press of a button, take direct control of any of them (assuming your fighters have a remote control upgrade.) This is a big advantage when you are in a larger ship, but still want to be part of the action (particularly when the remote ship gets destroyed, just jump into the next one.) You can also, at any time, leave your ship (via space suit) and board another ship that you own.

Overall, I am quite impressed with the game. I can’t wait to get a fleet large enough to start rampaging throughout the galaxy, becoming a tyrant. I’d list this game along the same lines as BattleCruiser 3000AD or Millennium. But imagine Battlecruiser Millennium that doesn’t suck or a Freelancer with much more depth. Hopefully a patch will be released that will fix some of the bugs in the game. The support on their forums is quite nice, they even let you know what issues are defiantly going to be fixed in the upcoming patch and the community as a whole there is very helpful.

I give it a solid 9/10. This is definitely the next Privateer. I just hope it doesn’t disappear off the face of the earth like so many other great games of this genre have (Terminus, anyone?)

Reviewer's Score: 9/10, Originally Posted: 12/08/03