Another swing… and a miss! Sorry, space sim lovers. Just keep playing X3 for a while longer.

User Rating: 6.5 | Space Force: Rogue Universe PC
By markiie | Review Date:
First of all, kudos to the developers for even daring to venture into the “cursed” genre of space sims. As you know, major developers avoid it like the plague due to the widespread belief that there is no money in it (or at least not the kind of money Blizzard is raking in right now). Unfortunately what we got here is another candidate for the Wal-Mart bargain bin. Space Force tries to combine features from the classic—Elite, Freelancer(2003), X3 Reunion(2005) and others, and ends up doing just that—producing a truly mediocre composition. The GOOD: interesting fighter ship design, colorful world (if you’re not one for realism), descent size galaxy, balanced gameplay between fighting, trading, and exploration. Being able to craft your own ship upgrades from mined asteroid resources is an interesting option. It allows you to bypass trading altogether and provides for quick funds (although it takes something away from the depth of the economy). Finally, the learning curve is pretty mild—don’t believe Gamespot’s half-fast review on this one! At some point they decided that we have all become lobotomized monkeys and started recommending games like DarkStar One(2006)—a lazy excuse for a space sim with the depth of rock-paper-scissors. Just print out a key chart for quick reference and you’ll be zipping like Han Solo in two hours.

The BAD: The graphics use many of the latest DirectX 9c bells and whistles like shader model 3.0, blur effects, HDR lighting, etc. (and therefore require a pretty powerful rig) but you still cant say the game looks good. Textures are washed out and overly bump-mapped. Ship models (especially bigger ones and stations) are boxy and lack detail. The “tiled” minimap looks abysmal. Cutscenes (not that they matter) were drawn by some middle-schooler. Finally, (imho) everything is just too darn colorful! It’s like a tie dye t-shirt factory exploded in there. Contentwise… the capital ships and space stations (of which each race has only 1 or 2 varieties) lack the scale to impress, as they seem barely big enough to house your fighter (oh and yes, you will only be flying fighters). Teading and mining is numbingly repetitive. Case in point: there just isn’t enough variety in the content whether it is mission types, ship types, activities, or plot. So if you are a diehard space sim fan, this one will get you through 2007 until the next one comes out, but if not, I say: PASS.

By the way, if you never played X3 Reunion(2005) because GS sandbagged it with a 7.2 rating (justifiably so, because it shipped with many bugs), you must pick it up now!!! The bugs have since been fixed and new content was added. The game is breathtakingly beautiful, like you always dreamt space travel would look. And it will run well on any remotely current machine. There is about as much content and depth as in ESIV Oblivion (100 hour+ game). Fly anything from tiny interceptors to mammoth carriers through a vast universe. Trade a complex supply-demand driven economy and build an empire of ships and stations. Explore a vast universe with no loading screens between sectors (god only knows how they did that). Yes, it’s a complex game to learn, but you can do it, and learning is half the fun. Anyway… I’ll stop gushing here because this is actually a review for a different game, but I think it will be a long time before X3 gets wrestled from its throne as king of the space sim genre.

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