X: Tension Reviews

Ok, so I have been playing this game (X-tension) after starting with X: Beyond the Frontier. The first thing that immediately stands out is that it fixes a lot of the problems with the UI that made the first X game so painful. This is a much more pleasant experience - far from perfect, but a vast improvement. It's also a lot less directed. There is no primary story mission that points you where to go - you stumble on missions as you travel, and initially this was fine, but ultimately this just led to frustration on my part. While just being let loose on this space to make your own way feels attractive for a while, once I'd set up some factories, made a bit of money, upgraded my ships a bit, I was left with that "why am I playing this?" which never went away. I didn't get close to 'finishing' the game (whatever 'finishing' might mean) - there was clearly content that I wasn't getting to, but without any direction or clues as to where to go (and worse, when to go) it just became this overwhelming feeling of 'well I might stumble across something if I just wander aimlessly and do mostly the same repetitive stuff for ages, but seriously why would I bother?'. I could make lots of money and become bestest friends with everyone, but I'm already bored of what it would take to do this and without some indication of why I should be doing it it just bored me to quitting eventually. Steam shows a lot of hours played here, but a fair few of those were AFK or mostly AFK because the game seems designed to make AFK the most obvious way to achieve things, which is never a good thing in a game. The tuning of the economy is such that you need a lot of cash and a lot of time to build up anything substantial - orders of magnitude more tedious than the first game, and it just seems to want to push you into getting time to pass in the game so you can get some more cash to get you slightly closer to whatever goals you might have. Worse your computer has to be pretty much dedicated to this AFK play because the game pauses when you switch out of the game so you can't do anything else while you're waiting for whatever it is of the many things that you have to wait for. Sure, you can go off and try to stumble across some more of the same missions that you've done a dozen times already (find 50 BoFu, and drop it off here, yay, destroy these Xenon ships which you may or may not get help with in time to save this dumb freighter, escort this ultra slow ship which is more than likely going to be blown up regardless of what you do) while you wait, but really, why? Serious balance problems all over the place. The OCD in me kept me wanting to do more for a long time, but in the end the tedium defeated me. As I said at the start, there are some big improvements in key areas for this game over the first installment, and that gives me hope that some of these bigger plot/story/point issues will be tackled in the subsequent titles, but this one left me deeply frustrated and unsatisfied, and I think a lot of that just comes down to the complete lack of direction. Just some hints or suggestions about where to go to look for things to follow up on would have done wonders I suspect. And strangely for this day and age the net is surprisingly sparse in terms of resources or guides for this particular game which means there's not a lot of obvious help if you end up frustrated as I did.

Works on win 10 just fine. However, using the mouse to steer the ship is awful. Thankfully, you can use a controller to control the ship and use keyboard controls for everything else. The gameplay is very similar to X:BTF but slightly improved and expanded upon. There's missions you can accept, you can fly any ship (Except destroyers and carriers) and there's more sectors to explore.

A basic space trading game. Not overly complicated. You trade, upgrade your ship, make money. Buy bigger ships and eventually space stations or factories. Different races have to be able to trust you though before you can trade with them. And there is a few story lines or missions to follow. Simple but engrossing.

Game starts off slow..however once one starts trading goods in an upgraded ship and adding on needed ship upgrades it becomes addictive. Like the first X Beyond the Frontier, starts slow then it is up to you to do what you want. If you like action, then you'll have to find the fight and like real time everything cost money. Don't cheat it really takes away from the game. Yep! No real story line just do you thing, what ever that may be.

Excellent follow-up to the first game. However, this is more of a game for fans of Egosoft's X-series. For newbies, I recommend looking at X2, or one of the X3 titles. With that being said, this is WAY more accessible than the first game, with an enormous number of useful features being added. This game is very light on plot, so some players may pass it over if they prefer a more story-driven game. There is exactly one plotline, which is unlocked fairly late (you need good relations with the Paranid) and which is quite difficult, so you will want to take your time and expand your resources before starting it. There are some annoyances. Viewing sectors that you are not in REQUIRES a navsat in that sector. This also goes for using the jumpdrive and ordering ships. If you are not in the sector and do not have a navsat there, then you CANNOT jump to that sector or give orders to your ships and stations there. People coming from X2 or newer games will probably find this very irritating. There are also some other details, like a lack of sell orders for trade ships, for example. In general, the complexity is higher than the first game but still much lower than X2. This game is complete enough that you might play for some time after finishing the plot, but due to the aforementioned annoyances and lower quality compared to later games you probably would not make this your mainstay as an X-series fan. The first game in the series to really nail the 'I could just keep playing this for hundreds of hours' feeling is X2: The Threat. In my opinion. Compatibility-wise it suffers from similar issues to the first game. Compatibility with versions of Windows newer than 7 is flaky at best. Linux users may have an easier time as the game works on Proton Experimental as of September 2024. However, while the game is more stable than the first on Proton, intermittent crashes are still a problem. And NPC portraits are still broken. GE-Proton9-11 made the game more stable and fixed the portrait issues. Lutris' Wine-GE also works and was more stable than GE-Proton in my experience. Pretty good considering its age. Definitely one of my least played X games though. I jumped from the original straight to X2 so I had barely touched this until recently when I finally got around to finishing it.

[i][b][u]IMPORTANT[/u][/b]: If you end up buying the game, read the manual - as you always should with any game released before 2004. The main guide of X-Tension is actually very well made, at least compared to X:BtF.[/i] This game is a standalone DLC for X: Beyond the Frontier. I've made a review for it [u][url=https://steamcommunity.com/id/hanapon/recommended/2840/]here[/url][/u]. Keep in mind that many of the things I said in that review still apply to X-Tension, so I'll focus on stuff added compared to X:BtF. This can make the game look better than it actually is, since many of the negatives present in the original were solved. but the main thing that pushes the game score down is still present. X-Tension made huge improvements compared to the original game. First and foremost, you can drive any ship instead of being locked to a single vessel. This in itself increases massively the amount of stuff you can do in game. You can fly a transporter class ship and make copious amounts of money by trading - but having a bad cruise/rudder control and being vulnerable to pirate ships -, or you can buy and use a small hunter ship, which is fast and has great firepower to face any other ship - but also does have a small cargo space, making trade with it inefficient. Furthermore, the game improves it's UX/UI. You can manage your factories remotely even if you're in a different sector. You can take a look at everything you've discovered in the galaxy without moving an inch. You now have menus that makes sense and makes your life so, so much more comfortable (in a good way, since the difficulty of the game wasn't a positive of it, but rather a catalyst of boringness). You can finally center your attention on managing your commerce empire, which is the somewhat fun part of the game. The biggest weakness of the original game, however, is still here. Your early game still comprise or you going from place to place doing basically nothing, and it feels just as boring as the first one, with nothing to do or look at while doing it. At least now you can do this boring work while looking forward to something to experience later in the game. If you like space games, X-Tension is at least worth checking out. There are people who can find pleasure in it's gameplay loop. [b]X-Tension: 5/10 - AVERAGE[/b]

I didn't buy this game on steam, I bought the boxed version as soosn as I could get my hands on it. X-Tension (be sure you have the V2.0 upgrrade. is more than an addon it's really a new version of X-Beyond the Frontier. And the game it always should have been. It's a true open world sandbox game where you can fly any ship in the game from shuttle to Carrier. It is also the game where the X series hit it's peak as far as I'm concerned. X2 had a different Manga type style Ididn't like and they stopped giving every ship it's own interior. And starting with X 3 they done away with interiors at all. It spoiled the atmosphere for me. X-Tension V2 is old now, but much like Morrowind in the elder scrolls series, it still stands out.

As a matter of full disclosure I've been playing this game (on and off) for around 17 years. I tried X2 and didn't like it; I haven't tried any of the X3 games yet either so my review is based solely on the X-Tension gameplay and not the progression of the series. All that said; I love this game and always have. I like the fact that you have the flexibility to fly around in almost any ship you choose (or at least can afford) and I like the fact that you can run a small empire of ships and stations as you see fit. I love the open world model of the game (I never played the XbtF storyline anyway) and that your choices, while consequential, are not linear. There's no 'good' and 'bad', just alignment with the various factions in their space. There are some downsides. The game feels very isolated in that you don't have station based interactions. You're always in the cockpit of your ship, not hanging in a bar or some other location on the bases, like you would in Freelancer or Privateer. The property management system is text and keyboard based and takes a while to navigate around to what you really want to do. Right-click, tree structured context sensitive menus would have come in really handy here. Mind you, when you understand the system well enough, you can do almost everything you want. That said, the navsat requirement to control any resources in system is an unnecessary complication that makes no sense. Far better to make your property menu accessible in all sectors straight off the bat. Speaking of which, having some of your ships just 'disappear' from your property screen because they're going through systems you haven't personally visited yet is confusing and very frustrating. It would be far better not to allow your owned ships to travel through sectors you haven't 'discovered' yet at all. Otherwise you're never sure if you've lost them for real. The one thing I used to love about this game was the on-line community. In 2001 at least, it was very active in the old THQ forum and the game almost felt like the modern MMOs like EVE Online, only you would never see your friends whizzing by in their ships. I don't know what the modern forum is like (because I wasn't allowed to preserve my Acid handle between forums) but if it's even half as good then it would still be a great group of people to hang out with. The thing I always liked about this game was the open world feel and the way you could amass a fleet of ships to fly, including a large transport. You never got into the battleships and the like, but the TL class boats could act as de facto carriers anyway, so that was pretty good. I lost interest in upgrading after X2, which (like a lot of MOO clones) thought that adding complexity added richness, which it doesn't. X-Tension got the balance right IMHO, although I'd be interested in knowing sometime if any of the X3 games went back to that formula. That said, I'm still playing X-Tension after all these years. That should tell you something about how playable the game really is.

This is the sequel to X: Beyond The Frontier. If you master the X-BTF game and getting bored stuck in the X-Shuttle, try this! The only thing you have to keep in mind is the pirates and Xenon forces. Your X-Universe empire and reputation is EVERYTHING. Also the X-Shuttle is locked until you master the X-Universe, but when you get a special mission from the Paranid, I strongly advise you read the Egosoft forums on a secret guide on how to progress the mission fully. Because this mission is a one-way ticket, read more on the X-Tension fansites!

X-Tension is the expansion to X Beyond The Frontier and this is where the series really really begins to take the shape we know from the later games. Multiple starting points have been added as well as the ability to change ship at your leisure making this a much more smooth and enjoyable experience than Beyond The Frontier. The graphics and interface have received a major overhaul not only making the game far more pleasant to look at but also much easier to figure out. The addition of multiple starting points now allow you a bit of an advanced start if you have to restart as well as the ability to specialize before the game has even started. This all goes a long way towards making learning the game a much easier experience. Satellite control systems now means you have the ability to manage your interstellar trading empire from a distance without the need to dock with every station you own to check on it's progress and this automation feature also helps makes the gameplay feel much more smooth than it was in Beyond The Frontier. A heavy duty AI improvement makes every part of the game better and the new addition of random missions gives a little purpose to those players that aren't completely satisfied with the open and unstructured nature of the game. This however is all just an appetizer when put against the biggest change of all. You are no longer confined to a single ship for the entire game. In X-Tension you are allowed to change ship at a whip and practically every ship you see in the game can flown, from the light scouts to the heavy fighters and the cumbersome traders you can now chose your ship to match your mission and this makes the game much easier to play in a huge way. All in all X-Tension is the game that introduced many of the concepts we now associate with the X series and in many ways it really is the game that made the series the industry standard it has become today. It's not a game without faults but for it's time it was a huge deal and a great game that holds many fond memories.