The game sound is somewhat underwhelming. While appropriately soothing and spacy music plays during flight, with enough variety not to get old quickly, the sound effects themselves are not particularly impressive. Weak laser sounds, 'spaceship engine' sounds and the annoying burble emanating from the space stations add up to weak aural presentation.

EAX was used throughout, and the sound in the mission briefings was fine and environmentally appropriate.

The inclusion of mining into the game seems to be more of an afterthought, as it is the only major activity that you cannot assign to your AI ships, meaning that you can only have one mining ship effectively. The procedure itself is time-consuming and cumbersome, and not particularly rewarding.

Another letdown is the handling of the cut scenes. Egosoft elected to use the in game engine to do them, and it is not really up to the job. Producing impressive, bump-mapped spacecraft models is one thing, but realistically animating a human being (or alien) in a cut scene is quite another.

The characters in the (often overlong) cut scenes are stiffly animated and not at all convincing, especially the protagonist, who walks as if he had a very unfortunate incident with a broomstick... Also, not being able to skip quickly to the mission objectives is a pain for those of us with raging cases of A.D.D.

While the game remains impressively atmospheric, there are a couple of design choices or oversights which irritate. For one thing, though each 'sector' of space is supposedly based around a planet, the planets themselves (though well rendered) are neither central to most sectors or visitable, except in mission cut scenes.

The factories and bases that occupy each sector are just, well, floating around in space. They are not orbiting anything, certainly. Makes me wonder why they didn't just weld the whole thing together into a space-supermarket and forget about the fleets of transports needed to ferry goods around each small sector. Secondly, though factories and bases are unique to all races externally, they are often the same inside, which is a bit of a letdown for the atmosphere of the game.

One feature which may be considered either a flaw or a plus, depending on your outlook, is the management that is required to run a fleet of ships.

As we mentioned before, you remote control any ships you are not piloting through a series of menu interfaces. In practice, once you have more than one or two other ships, you will be spending a LOT of time in this interface, which is not graphically thrilling by any means.

On the plus side, your ships do what they're told, and if you like, you can just direct them to follow you around (not that this is useful if you have an armada of freighters, though that could be impressive in its own way I guess).

Personally, while the remote interface could be more streamlined, I found it rather enjoyable to send my freighters on their way, but I could see where others might not be thrilled.