No "X" puns, only me x-pressing myself *groan* (X - Beyond the Frontier (PC))

Member Name: The Duke

Product:	X - Beyond the Frontier (PC)
Date:	17/01/01 (136 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Elite-like, nice graphics and sound, good story

Disadvantages: Very slow start, only able to save at certain locations

I've been gaming since I were a nipper, and while the power of computers these days means that first person shooters are now my genre of choice, I've yet to find a game that makes me feel the way I did when I first loaded up Elite on my Commodore 64, and later Amiga.

I've seen X - Beyond The Frontier (XBTF from now on) get more than it's fair share of good reviews (but to be fair some magazines have trampled all over it) and I quite fancied the look of it, but due to my being a student, I rarely buy full price games (Deus Ex was the last)

I was in Game a few days ago, and saw XBTF plus X-tension (the add on pack) on the shelves for £24.99 which put me off because I was in the mood for a space simulator game... then in the budget section I saw XBTF for £4.99! How could I go wrong?

Ok - this review is based on only a few hours play, and I'll come back and update it after I've spent more time on it, but my initial reactions to the game are thus:

I installed it with no problems - it recognised my graphics and sounds cards with no problem, and upon launching the game, it also found my game pad.

The controls are intuitive enough, and I am very impressed by the graphics. I have no problem running the game on my system (AMD K6-2 500Mhz, 196Mb SDRAM, GeForce SDR, Soundblaster 1024) and the sound is good and clear.

I don't think I'm giving too much away by mentioning the plotline... You're a test pilot in a ship that is capable of travelling long distances very quickly. On your maiden test flight, something goes pear shaped, and you drop out of hyper space (or whatever) into an area of space run by some lizard like aliens. There, your ship is badly damaged, so the aliens give you some shields, lend you 100 credits, and tell them that it's all only a loan - you need to pay them back 3500 credits when you've made profit. (These guys are like the Ferengi in Star Trek: Next Gen
eration - everything is profit) So there you are, at the start of the game with no equipment worth speaking of, and already you owe 3500 credits. How do you get home?

The start of the game is very slow - looking at the prices of the equipment, and the trading you have to do seems very daunting. This is only to be expected really - Elite and Frontier were exactly the same.

Maybe it's the gaming world we live in now, but I can't help feeling that the starting few hours of XBTF are too slow paced. A lot of time is spent trading from one station to another in the same quadrant of space, not even going anywhere (unlike Elite where at least you went to another planet, and encountered some pirates) although I never tried it, there are jump gates there for you to use.

I've built up some credits and armed my self with some weapons, and I'm about to embark on what seems to be the driving force behind the plot - finding and killing an evil race of aliens, and this I imagine will help me find my way home to Earth.

Hopefully, the action will get a bit more fast paced, but I do like the scope of this game - you can buy your own factories (I don't know whether they produce goods for you, or cash, or both) but it sounds like a good, novel idea.

I don't mind the fact that the game has a storyline. One of the very few things that I never really liked about Elite (and Frontier only half fixed the problem) was that there was no definite end - once you were Elite, you kept going. In Frontier you at least had the military rankings to keep you going (longer if you were working for both sides) but even then it was still open ended. If there's no end goal, I can imagine myself losing interest after a while.

As I said earlier, I've only put a few hours into this game, and I've only started off, but the storyline is good (there's a lot of information to be found to aid your return to Earth) whi
ch will at least keep the interest up through the boring start up time when you will be too busy building up your account.

At the time of writing, it's well worth a fiver of anyone’s money (unless you don't like space simulators)

**NOTE** The 3-star rating is only because I've just scratched the surface of the game, and is based on what I've played so far, and how I'm hoping the rest of the game will turn out to be - this may change!

**Update**
I've been playing this game for a few days now, and have built up some cash and equipment. There are some neat features - you can buy factories, transport them to a site of your choosing, set them up, and they'll generate cash for you! You have to actually visit the factories to pick up your cash though - no wire transfers in this sector of space. It's also quite annoying that you can't save your games while at one of your own factories. Combat, I have found, to be quite tricky, but not so difficult as to put me off. Any time I have been beaten, it's by a narrow margin, and gave me hope that I was either unlucky, or just needed a bit more practice. Another point is that sometimes I don't know what to do - I think I know what the overall goal is, but I'm having trouble in finding out how to go about it, and where to pick up information. The game manual is this sense is useless, and as far as I can see; there is no way to "browse" through your ships database for information or clues. The pace of the game hasn't picked up since I first started playing, but with a few cargo bay extensions, and a factory under my belt, at least I now feel as I'm getting somewhere.

I'll upgrade the rating to 4 stars because the game is entertaining, if frustrating at times, and there's enough here to keep you going a while...

**Update**
I have completed the game, after spending many hours traversing the game gala
xy looking for clues, artefacts and specific weapons. One aspect of the game that really frustrated me was near the beginning of my quest. I was pointed toward a certain sector, and told to look for an asteroid with an unknown element in it – this meant buying a mineral scanner (no problem – I have plenty of cash), but it also meant flying across the whole game galaxy (which is roughly 8 by 8 sectors, and with the time acceleration device fitted, takes about 5 minutes to fly across a sector). So, having docked and saved my game in the required sector of space, I then, over the course of 2 weeks, spent about 8 game hours trying to find the bloody asteroid. If I weren’t so stubborn, I would have thrown the game in the bin! Luckily, after that, things did get more straightforward, but the games pace seems to be very slow through out the game, even coming to the climax of the game. This was one of the things I hoped would change, I thought the pace of the game would increase, but this appears not to be the case. So, still a fairly good game, but due to frustrations and slow pace, I’ll down grade again to 3 stars.

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