Over the weekend, I’ve been playing this new space simulator game called X2: The Threat. It is a beautiful game, sporting all the latest bells and whistles in 3D graphics, and it is as complex and complicated as a full-blown flight simulator. Every key on the keyboard has a function in the game. It took me about 2 hours studying the manual and about an hour of going through the training missions to figure the game out, but I think I got the hang of it.

The game is very open-ended, and you can become a pirate, hunting down ships for their cargo and trading them for profit. You can build power plants and produce resources to make money that way via trade. You can harvest asteroids and mine them for profit. You can even build an empire, complete with fleets of battleships. You can control every ship you own easily. Every ship in the game can be communicated with, asked for directions or other questions, and every space station can be docked into. As I said, the game is very complex, and takes a while to learn, but once figured out, it’s a blast to play.

The game requires a beefy system to play smoothly. Even on my high-end computer, it slows down in some spots, mostly due to the fantastic graphics, and lots of A.I. routines. This game is fantastic for those old school space simmers that enjoyed the old Elite game, or Privateer. Don’t get this game expecting a Freelancer or Freespace 2-type game. This one is a true sim, complete with Newtonian law of physics.

If you’d like, you can check out a screenshot I took of the game in the gallery.