Nipped into my local store last weekend and saw a copy all alone on the shelf. Never played the prequels, but heard some good things about this game.
It’s a terrific game, but with a few flaws (I’ll get to them in a sec). It’s your typical Elite clone with adventuring, piracy and trading, but better than most. For a start, you can buy your own battle fleet and build production factories for cash. Pilotable ships range from small scouts to destroyers - there seems to be about 40 different ships. The weapons seems to offer genuine variety, and it appears that each weapon can be useful for different situations. Damage model is non-existant - sub systems can get conked out at random and your speed reduced when you are heavily damaged, but no visual effects or significant changes.
The remote commands you can give ships are pretty exhaustive, and can cope sufficently well with trading and combat. The economy is ‘dynamic’, but this only relate to supply and demand on a single factory, not on a global scale.
Oh, and the whole universe is operated in real time. That means while you are off pirating your factories are still running, and our trade fleets are happily. In fact, while you are choosing menu options the game still operates. It’s pretty much a singleplayer MMO game.
The graphics are terrific. The line of sight within the solar systems are to infinity, and the nebula effects are nice. Ships have more than enough detail and the sense of scale is good (but not as good as Freespace).
Bad points: It’s probably the worst game I’ve played in terms of its overall polish. The menu is, ahem, thougher but thankfully has hotkeys. There also seems to be the odd bug and it’s easy to make things go cockeyed. The tutorial could also do with a bit of polish, as it’s too vague in it’s instructions.
Another downer is performance. I’ve only got a crummy GeForce 2, but there’s also some whining in the forums with computers exceeding the recommended specs. The developers seem to have a reputation to good support, so the code can be tidied up soon.
The flight model is a bit iffy. Although momentum is taken into account, turning rates are fixed and are not reduced at high speeds. On the other hand, the difference between ships is significant and a big destroyer can be an absolute pig to fly.
Overall, I like this game a lot more than Freelancer and Privateer. It’s more detailed and seems to be a lot more fun too.
After all that, has anyone else got this?