Introduction
Third in the X Series of space based 3X type games. The game sticks you in a small fighter in a far off galaxy at the beginning of a story that takes you through an alien invasion and the 'quest for earth' (tm). A strangely familiar story to those who have played the previous games. From there you build your economic and military might, controlling a fleet of ships from fighters to hulking great carriers and pwn everything you want.
Gameplay
The gameplay has been refined slightly in this latest version. If you have played any space type flying/shooting games before (e.g. Wing Commander) you'll quickly recognise and settle into killing stuff. Interface and control are fine and judicious use of shortcut keys mean that once you get to know it you can zip around the in-game menus pretty rapidly. The 'Artificial Life' thing they have going is pretty convincing too - with lots of other space ships trundling around doing their own thing: trading, pirating, fighting etc. It does actually bring the place to life and you don't feel like you are the only one out there. The storyline is fairly quirky and the missions are imaginative and reasonably fun with only the occasional frustrating 'Damn, dead. Reload, try again. Damn!'. It is very short though, and can be completed in one sitting. Thankfully that is not the meat of the game and it all goes freeform from here on in. It's really up to you what you do, but trading, pirating, building lots of factories, building a fleet is all good. Did I mention that you can fly pretty much every ship in the game? That's a neat touch.
Sights and Sounds
Sounds are adequate but nothing spectacular. Some of the music is very nice and reacts to whatever situation you're in as you'd expect these days. Graphically this game is very pretty, but yet again it's really only what you'd expect from a full priced space game these days.
Stuff that sucks
Yawn! It can get sooo boring. It's a single player game, so there's no one to talk to whilst you are bumbling around desperately trying to eek out a living. If you have the patience and get a few factory complexes going, you can then sit in a safe place overnight and hit the 10x speed key. Hopefully by the morning you'll have enough to buy yourself that funky new capital ship and go wtfpwn something juicy. But this is not the way I like to play my games. Also, there is a singular lack of direction in the late game. Once you do get a corporate powerhouse and a huge fleet, it's kinda difficult to work out what to do with it.
Conclusion
I was an X2 fan and nearly an X3 fan. Played X2? Got bored of it? Then don't bother with X3. It's the same game with slightly prettier graphics and the ability to join factories together to form one big complex. narf, it really is the addon that they spoke about in X2 so much. That said, there is a good fan base out there with lots of mods coming in that could improve the game (the mods for X2 almost made it for me - especially the Star Wars Mod and once it converted, I might just have to re-install X3 to fly my Victory Class into battle again
) If you like the idea of these kind of games (and I really do) this is almost at the top of the genre. On the other hand, check out my X-Fire profile and come to your own conclusion 
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