This review should come with a disclaimer. I played this game a lot. It was probably my favorite game of the genre. As such, I think my opinion of it might be slightly compromised and my ability to give a completely fair and unbiased opinion of it is definitely questionable. That being said, X-Beyond the Frontier is one of my favorite PC games that I have ever played. I don’t really know why but it is. It isn’t particularly great in any one area, nor is it going to blow anyone’s mind as a complete package. Be that as it may, I still love playing it and in fact this was my fourth or fifth time playing it.
X-BTF as it is known by the fans, sees you take the role of, as far as I know, an unnamed test pilot trying out a new jump engine in a ship. The test goes horribly wrong and you wind up hurled to some unknown galaxy with a busted ship and no clue what is going on. A “friendly” alien ship offers to fix your ship so it doesn’t explode right then and there and even gives you a small loan to get you started. From there you must trade your way to upgrade you ship and raise your affinity with the alien races to get some answers to your questions. Eventually you will finally get some answers, but that is many countless hours into the game and the payoff for all that hard work really isn’t there.
This is a space sim in every sense of the word. You start with nothing, a lowly trader filling his cargo bay with products and hoping to find a good place to sell them to make a profit. The crux of this game is that this part takes WAY longer then it should. My experience was shipping energy cells to the flower farms until I could move to the next step. That next step would be to build your very own factory. Once you do that you will really start making money. So that is pretty much the game. Build factories and collect money from them. Explore your surroundings and eventually get some answers to find out where you are and how to get home. Pretty simple really.
Like I said, I don’t know why I like it so much. Does Freelancer have a better story? Well that’s debatable. Is Freelancer a better game? I would say yes. There are more options in Freelancer. You have missions you take, ships you can buy, etc. Even the game looks and sounds better then X-BTF. I mean, X really looks old. You can even see the seams in the background for crying out loud! And the sound quality is very poor with the same three or four songs and the absolute nothingness of space. At least Freelancer had random AI chatter on the radio. The one advantage X does have over Freelancer is it supports a gamepad. Other than that fact, I really don’t have a leg to stand on in support of this game. But I still like it. You might like it too, who knows? And I finally have the expansion pack to it as well so I will play around with that a little and type up something for that as well.