Ship-based space trading games have been a videogame holy grail since Elite hit the 8bits. Now it's brave Sir X -Beyond the Frontier's turn to seek the mystic mug.
Trenton Webb

X is not an Elite clone. X is bigger, bolder and a billion times better looking than both Braben's 8bit original and its flawed PC sequel Frontier. More importantly, X also has genes from every popular sci fi genre - Lost In Space, Star Trek, Silent Running, Battlestar Galactica and 2001 - thrown into the mix as well. Surprisingly, the result is not a grating cliché parade but a strangely familiar and readily comprehensible game universe.

Which is just as well because X is a sprawling epic set in a galaxy that's very big and in which you're very small. As a marooned star pilot you're supposed to get a grip on its galactic politics in order to find your way back to Earth. But before anyone will talk, you've got to trade your way to fame.

Such activity obviously piques the human brain's greed gland, because while the trading of solar cells for a 10 credit per unit profit could never be construed as thrilling, it's as strangely engrossing in X as it was in Railroad Tycoon. Travelling through a network of warp-gates, you've got to work out which goods are in short supply in one system and abundant in others. You then exploit this price differential until the big freighters arrive and knacker the market. It's spreadsheet gaming, but it works.

To spice up trading, X throws in ship-to-ship dogfights with pirates and hostile alien races. But while functionally effective, the combat offers nothing new or unique. X flies and shoots well enough, but there have been more effective HUDs and the fact that you can only save while docked at specific space stations promotes discretion above valour.