The ships of the Boron, a peaceable, aquatic race, are suitably marine looking, for example. Bump mapping is used extremely well in this game to add convincing texture to the... um, textures. See our screen shots a little further on in the review for some examples.

Number five is the sheer variety of things to do, see and buy in the game. Each species has its own ships, its own unique branch of the economy with certain goods that are produced only within its borders.

Beyond this, there are a host of useful add-ons that can be purchased for your ships, anything from mining lasers to navigation satellites that allow you to conduct certain trade and scouting functions remotely.

The weapons array is also fairly broad, with several categories of missiles and beam weapons, mass drivers and huge capital ship only guns which cost more than small spaceships.

The one thing to be said for the scripted missions within the game is that they will expose you to a variety of situations possible within the game. Fleet battles, for instance.... Mmm, fleet battles.

So to sum up the good things;

1. Lots' o ships to fly
2. Factories to own
3. An excellent economic model
4. Great graphics
5. An interesting and diverse universe full of things to do.

The not so fun stuff:   While it's probably obvious by now that I am rather fond of X2, the game is certainly not without its failings, some more annoying than others. Let's take a look through.

Control problems: To be honest, controlling the ships in this game with conventional mouse+keyboard is not much fun. Considerable over-steer is present in the mouse movements, often making combat extremely frustrating. It also makes manual docking (not actually necessary in the game, fortunately) annoyingly hazardous.

To be fair, some of this is probably intentional, as Egosoft has given each ship in the game a different maneuverability rating, and mammoth transports do handle considerably more poorly than scout ships, but the mouse control still feels bad.

You can purchase maneuverability upgrades for each ship at some of the trading docks, but be careful because it is possible to overdo them and end up with a ship that is too twitchy. Using a joystick improves the situation somewhat, but the controls, coupled with the fact that all ships are equipped with regenerating shields, can make combat with small, maneuverable enemies an exercise in frustration at times.