Very impressive game!! This will ultimately challenge you privateer space skills and stretch its limits.
Unfortunately never saw a game come close to this epic space adventure.
Impressive endless universe with real existing star constellations names.
The lasers used in this game will really cut your ship in half. Also you can encounter a full equipped pirate ship with heavy armoury. You will be unfortunate this one time and lose the fight for sure..... or be cunning as a good privateer and find you way to mislead or lure the pirate into a trap and finish him off once and for all!!! Big fun to do strategy in this classic game. I do remember loads of fun longtime. Weeks, months!!! Immensely addictive!!!
The universe seemed endless and it actually was. The algorithm generated endless new star systems with planets and a sun or even multiple sun's.
It was possible to explore the planets for mining. If suited you could send down a mining drone that could gather elements found on this planet. These element you could sell at the space stations or ground stations on planets.
You could upgrade your ship with a special feature that allowed you to capture H2 from a sun for fuel. But there was a catch. If you approached this sun in the wrong way your ship would burn up.
An high skilled needed thing was that you could use sun's gravity pull to catapult your ship through space, just like they really do now with deep space satellites. Very tough to do, but it saved precious fuel which was scarcely available in deep space explorations
Nice thing was that you actual could approach a planet from deep space and enter the atmosphere and land on the surface in a city or a docking area. Again it was very realistic. So if you entered with the wrong altitude drop speed your ship would burn up. But that is all the fun! You did need to practice and use all your skills!
An other thing was that the distances and the speeds where also realistic so to match your speed with a pirate and attack traveling almost light speed was very difficult and needed a special strategy. If you did master this strategy then you would promote yourself to a new level of combat and/or defence tactics.
To make the game a bit more quick there was a built-in time accelerator, again used wrongly you could crash on an planet or crash into a sun. You needed also time to decelerate like in the real world. So travelling at high speed was very risky. Especially when equipped with a low upgrade of your retro-rockets. These low powered rockets could not slow down your ship in time and distance. So you needed to take all this in consideration. But that made it so more fun and challenging! If you did not plot the trajectory of your space ship in a smart way there was no chance to survive.
Very very very unfortunately and that is why it did not receive the 10.0 score was that it was a buggy game. It would crash frequently and sadly Frontier did not supply adequate patches.
Still if this game was released as a classic game on the xbox 360 today I would buy it immediately. Never experienced, as a real die hard privateer such an creative game.
So developers of today -> buy or download this game and watch and learn!!
The original PC game I have in possession.