The entire game is a kind of active "world", with many NPC vessels all flying around carrying out their own agenda (indeed, interaction with NPCs is the only way to progress in the game and make money), yet despite this, it quickly settled in that the entire universe felt… well, dead. Yes, every sector is filled with both friendly and hostile ships going their own way and doing their own thing - some making cargo runs, others shooting at anything that moves - but after some time, it all becomes apparent that there's no variation to this theme. Freighters will always be going back and forth endlessly between stations. Pirate ships will be picking on the weak (well, usually they don't even bother doing that) and just flying around aimlessly until someone starts shooting at them. Openly hostile races like the Xenon and Khaak (the latter a new race of bad-asses introduced just for X2) will always appear at random, trying to destroy stuff and usually failing. There are never any changes of power or sectors that become annihilated (aside from one or two, which are pre-scripted as part of the plot). No massive economical shifts that affect the trading aspect of the game. There's no real way to talk to NPCs beyond ordering them to surrender or asking for directions (the ability to hire out wingmen or escorts would've been nice, for example). The way Freelancer had radio communication constantly flying between different ships in an area might've been a little unrealistic, for example, but at least it lent some form of life to the universe. X2 has none of that. There's even a new bulletin board system in stations that players can check out to see the latest "news" (and even buy lottery tickets), but this all quickly turns into repetitive postings that don't change in the slightest based off events occurring in the galaxy. The stage is set, all the actors are in place and doing their jobs, so why doesn't anything actually ever change? There's no dynamics or big random events that occur, and even the plot missions don't do anything significant to the game universe. After a player has seen and done it all, there's just nothing to look forward to or keep him interested. Like I said, at least in Freelancer I had the idle chatter of passing ships to listen to while I was bored.

Combat, one of the game's biggest appeals (what's the point of making bucketloads of cash if there's no big weapons to spend it on and go blow stuff up with?) also turns out to be a big letdown. New to X2 is the element of hull damage, where ships have a little bit of something extra to hold them together after their shields go down (heavy hull damage will slow a ship down, which must be repaired for great cost at a shipyard), as well as the concept of subsystem damage, where various modules onboard the player's ship can be destroyed in a pitched fight. The former works pretty well, but execution of the latter just doesn't make any sense. It became incredibly infuriating to bump into something (which is easy to do on account of the stupidly erratic AI and terrible control scheme - more on both in a bit), have a chunk taken out of my shields, and all of a sudden end up with some critical system like my "cargo bay extension" or "Argon Police License" (yes, my police license) being destroyed, forcing me to go all the way back to friendly territory in an attempt to find a replacement. Why should I start losing systems if my shields are still at half integrity? The AI is even more of a letdown. Not only are NPCs essentially ignorant of what's occurring on the other side of the system (I've never seen ships try to come to my aid or anything unless they themselves were attacked directly), but occasional ships had the gall to come up and scan my vessel for illegal goods while I was in the middle of a pitched fight with several dozen enemy ships shooting at me from a bunch of different directions, leaving with barely a "okay, your ship is clean, have a nice day!", but fighting enemy ships is a huge hassle because of their erratic behavior which has them spinning around by 180 degrees on a dime unexpectedly and constantly running into your face. The sheer difficulty involved in effectively engaging faster opponents (that doesn't involve throwing huge numbers of missiles at them) makes combat tedious and unsatisfying in general - and the fact that the projectiles fired from nearly all the weapons in the game travel incredibly slowly doesn't help either.

There are a number of new weapons to toy with in X2, such as the Phased Shockwave Generator, which fires a projectile that explodes into an expanding sphere, doing damage to everything caught in the radius, as well as a neato Ion Disruptor weapon that is excellent versus enemy shields, but both weapons suffer from one major drawback - the fact that friendly ships tend to always somehow get caught in the blast radius during a pitched engagement, and before you know it, the entire Boron kingdom has declared war on you due to a few innocent friendly fire incidents. Another new addition is controllable turrets mounted on several vessels (as mentioned earlier), which are really neat at first glance (as they can be configured to shoot down incoming missiles, specific incoming attackers, or just shoot anything hostile that moves), but even these suffer their drawbacks. Just like X-Tension, it is possible to capture enemy ships by crippling them and hoping the pilot decides to eject, but turrets will not take ejections into account when engaging, and commonly will continue firing on a captured vessel rather than leave it hanging. An incredible annoyance. God, I could go on all day about the flaws. How about the way _I_ get yelled at because a vessel belonging to a friendly faction decided to come around and bump into me, who was essentially traveling in a straight path? Or the fact that capital ships are incredibly dangerous to joyride around in, simply because NPC ships have no concept of "right of way" (hint: bigger = "right") and will blindly hurl themselves at your front bumper like a group of Spaceflies attracted to a bug zapper? The list goes on. Suffice to say, combat is simply another notch on the large list of things wrong with this game.

But let's move on. I almost wince to pull this up, but considering the scale of the game, X2's interface quite frankly sucks. Initially it seems neat and flashy (and is very similar in a number of aspects its predecessor, X-Tension), but as fleet sizes grow and more and more attention must be diverted to managing remote assets over one's own ship, the flaws become obvious. The biggest complaint I have is that there's really no effective way to segment and control large groups of ships at once. A well-stocked carrier can hold well over one hundred fighters, but the passing thought of trying to manage that many ships properly gives me a headache. There are methods to either order ships directly or issue a given command to all ships in the sector at once (of a specific type), but this kind of control is very clunky, especially when you want to manage pinpoint attacks on multiple targets, or just perform some neato tactical maneuvers. Why the team never implemented some kind of proper interface solution to this is utterly beyond me, and, as I said, it makes large-scale combat incredibly difficult to manage - all one can do is issue an "Attack all enemies" command to every combat-worthy ship in the sector and hope for the best. Smaller engagements involving few friendly ships are obviously easier to manage for this, but then what's the point of having a huge fleet? I guess it's up to the modders to find some form of solution using the recently-unlocked script editor integrated into the game - a common thing with today's games, it seems. Do a half-assed job on the game, release an SDK, and let the community fix things for themselves, right?

Going into further detail, the player at least has a number of ways of keeping track of what's going on, both in and out of sector. Using the Comma and Period keys, the player can either access a map of the existing universe (listing all sectors currently known to the player), or a map of the local sector. Using the latter display, ships (and other objects (including stations, stray containers, and even asteroids) can be targeted, examined, and communicated with if necessary (provided the player is close enough). Not a bad system, but the lack of a mouse pointer gets old, fast (the mouse can be used, but only in a limited, linear fashion for scrolling up and down the list). Actually, the game's control system as a whole has a number of flaws, ranging from the unfriendliness of the help system (hitting "H" brings up a control listing, except it doesn't actually list all of the controls), the complete and utter inability to bind all but a few select commands to different keystrokes, and the fact that the actual ship handling is among the worst I've ever seen in a space game. Slower vessels with marginal turning speeds handle okay, but god help the person who takes an M5 ship out for a test drive with a maxed-out rudder upgrade. Believe it or not, spending cash to upgrade a fast ship's maneuvering system will result in a vessel that is unflyable for the common, joystick-wielding player, as the insane levels of drift and "floatyness" involved in the control scheme will cause the player to spin out of control at the lightest touch and probably ram the station he's exiting before even clearing the hangar. Of course, this isn't a problem if the player lets the variety of autopilot commands (only unlocked by spending money on certain command software modules) fly his ship, as the AI apparently isn't affected by the game's laws of physics. This was one of the major contributing reasons why I stopped playing the earlier games in the series (combat is literally impossible like this), and I'm astonished nothing was done to change it for this new, not-quite-overhauled sequel. Like I said, it's bearable if you either don't buy rudder upgrades or just resign to hanging out in an M3-class ship (which isn't known for high levels of maneuverability, even when fully upgraded), but the ship control system is still terrible due to the drift problem I mentioned above. All of this struck me with the urge to run down to Enlight and wave a copy of Freespace 2 in the developer's faces, but the fact that I'm hiding out in Canada put a damper in my plans.

At least one positive thing I can say about the interface changes is the addition of a versatile Picture-in-Picture system. This little gig is really neat to toy with, as it enables players to set up several different cameras on their screen at once (the effect is even cooler if multiple monitors are available) for any number of different angles. This can be something as simple as two windows showing an external fly-by camera of the selected target and a missile cam, respectively, or a complete array of different views showing the cockpit perspective of several different vessels and turrets. It's even possible to switch control to one of these sub-cameras and remotely control a ship without ever having to go anywhere. Good stuff, though it's marred by a couple of limitations. The first, understandable one is that ships not in the current sector cannot be pulled up in a PnP camera due to the way the game handles out-of-sector calculations. The second, more serious issue is that utilizing the PnP view can often destroy framerates in busier sectors, especially when combat is introduced. Still, the entire system is a noteworthy addition that deserves mention for the effort.

I think my greatest problem with X2: The Threat, however, is a lack of anything to do in the game - at least, not at the higher echelons. After a player has made all the cash he can, has a huge space fleet at his disposal, and has pretty much explored all the sectors, what else is there to do? Combat is unsatisfying, there's no reason to bother hanging around known sectors waiting for something to happen, and trying to knock off one's neighbors is only amusing for a limited time. I don't mind a non-linear title, but give me something to work towards! I guess the greatest goals in this game are the ones the player sets for himself (half the point to the title I suppose), but I personally do not find that to be enough. Not when there are so many flaws to the game and the universe is unbending and inflexible. A huge playground with nothing to do once the main story has been told, essentially. And what of the plot? The game only has a scant few missions (I think I counted less than ten), all of which don't require very much effort to complete and are ultimately unrewarding. The player goes around doing errands for a bunch of people, getting very little in return aside from gradually increasing nuggets of the story (you'd think the savior of the galaxy would get some big sacks of cash or something). More annoyingly is that the final mission doesn't wrap up the storyline at all - in fact, I think I finished the plot more confused than when I had started it. It's like the developers just threw up their arms, said "no, that's enough, just roll the credits and dump the player back into the game so he can do stuff on his own again", and gave up. What a disappointment.

Things don't look any prettier when I move on to the subject of game engine and graphics - a bit of an irony, as X2 is actually quite a beautiful game. With the graphics maxed out (full bump-mapping functionality and support for a neat dynamic shadow system is included), the game gives off quite a strong impression and makes for some really nice screenshots - the ability for players to plaster their own custom logo onto their ships makes for a more pleasing experience still. The 3d cockpits that differ from ship to ship (but, disappointingly, not race-to-race, though I haven't tried out every ship in the game yet) are the most strikingly detailed I've ever seen in a space game, with blinking lights and scrolling gauges all over the place (unfortunately, the readouts are completely linear animations that have no correlation on the game itself, and the animations themselves could've used a few more frames of animation to give off a cooler "sci-fi" appearance), and some of the backdrops to certain sectors are just outright beautiful. Just like the game's predecessors, planets are actual spinning models in the game rather than just being background art, though it is not possible to land on them (get too close and the player just dies instantly). Unfortunately, all this comes at a price. …Waitaminute, what am I saying? I have a Barton 2500+ with a Radeon 9600 Pro, 512MB of DDR RAM, and Windows XP with all the latest updates and best drivers. This game should scream on this system, right?