X: Tension

Horrible controls and same problems as X-BTF.
Can be interesting only for nostalgia.

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.

My first X game was X2: The Threat. It was fun seeing what came before.

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.

Sounds great: build a space empire. Plays bad: horrible controls. I think I got this in some sort of bundle, so no money lost.

IMPORTANT: 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.

This game is a standalone DLC for X: Beyond the Frontier. I've made a review for it here. 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.

X-Tension: 5/10 - AVERAGE

Arguably the first proper X game, all staples of the series (the classic games up to X3 and its expansions, anyway) - direct and remote control over your ships and factories, ability to fly any ship (almost any, I guess M1/M2 were cut for time), much improved background simulation, galaxy map, generic missions - were introduced here, and the sequels build upon this framework without altering its core, mostly adding features and polish on top of what this game invented. Which begs the question - is there any point in playing X-Tension over its sequels? Well...

The tagline of the series is "Trade - Fight - Build - Think", and while "Think" is too abstract to describe in gameplay terms, trading, fighting and building are the three primary ways of obtaining riches, which is a reasonable self-appointed goal in place of an absent plot. Yeah, while X-BTF had central plot and an ending, X-Tension ends only when you think you had enough of it. There are a couple mission threads, most notably the Perseus mission, but they only appear under hidden conditions and are more like a side-activity rather than a proper goal.

Trading is interesting for maybe first 20 deals, then the novelty of dynamic pricing wears off and you understand that the economy is a Brownian motion where prices fluctuate like crazy, yet are balanced to keep your earnings on the same level no matter what you're buying and where you're selling, so a long-distance route is as profitsssssable as carrying goods between two stations in the same sector. It is a viable way of obtaining starting capital, but too boring and grindy to bring you to your end goals.

Building your stations is where the economy shows its better sides - you need to be aware of the supply and demand in the region, building supply chains (albeit quite simplified compared to NPC stations), sometimes play around competition. The station prices were completely overhauled compared to X-BTF - in that game, you could blink and discover your station pay off its cost tenfolds, in X-Tension however, the stations are balanced to return its cost in 50 hours on average (which is no less than 5 hours in real life), so you gotta invest early and build often, your empire's profitssss will snowball with time and care. At times it feels like an idle game, which is not necessarily a bad thing. I wish there were more freighter command options and money auto-withdraw, but otherwise it's the best feature in the game.

The combat, on the other hand, is the worst. Every aspect of movement or shooting is critically flawed in one way or another. Turning has heavy inertia so you often overshoot when trying to catch your target in crosshairs, throttle control is twitchy and sensitive so matching your speed with target is plain impossible. All that's combined with outright horrible shooting - your guns don't swivel to help you hit the target even if they are spread far away from the center your ship, your ship shakes violently when you get hit, and just as violently whenever you shoot, your ship gets randomly disoriented like 5 degree with each shot, so you need to be very close to your target to have a chance to land more than the first shot, and explosions after each hit obscure the enemy AND your UI. What's insulting is that NPCs don't have those disadvantages - they turn towards you without any inertia, their guns swivel, and their aim is not affected by anything, and all that is balanced only by their stupidity.
The combat is made worse by Hornet missile, which one-shots any combat ship you're allowed to fly, so whenever an enemy launches a missile, you must cease your attack and either try to shoot it down in panic (with inertial controls and wandering aim, yeah), or abuse strafe-drive physics to run away and wait out until the missile runs out of fuel.
Why would you engage in combat then? When you destroy a pirate ship, you may receive up to 1k credits in bounty and sometimes around 10k in cargo. In comparison, the cheapest TL class ship costs 16mil. So yeah, combat as a way of earning money is useless, though you can engage in it to clear out the pirate and xenon problems for the sake of your industrial empire, which is admittedly a good mix of gameplay systems.
Oh, also this game introduced the ship capture mechanic which remained unchanged throughout the series - you can force the pilot of a non-capital ship to bail out, and then sell his ship for good profitsss (up to 500k depending on the ship class). For that, you need to bring the enemy's shields to a low level and keep shooting at him without destroying the ship. Maybe the pilot will jump out immediately, maybe he will jump out after an hour of sitting on his back and sloowly shooting at him while trying to match your speed to his with the controls as finicky as those.

Graphically it looks leagues better than X-BTF, with higher-resolution textures and better models. Stations have such a cozy glowiness to them, I wish they retained that even in low LODs, they look too dark from afar. The UI is also glowy and cute, looking like teletext, though while functionally it is much improved over X-BTF, it is not exactly responsive, and its animations block you from doing routine operations in an efficient way, to the point that accidentally pressing "R" during the combat paralyzes your ship control for a few good seconds.

The game is stable and without critical bugs, the only two thinks which bothered me were framerate dropping to single digits whenever you intercom with someone, which can happen during combat, and gates sometimes being immediately destroyed when you enter a sector, permanently cutting off access to regions of space (so save often). A recent patch made the game playable without any hurdles on Win10 (and maybe Win11), though on widescreen resolutions, you'll have top and bottom parts of your screen cut off, and those parts sometimes contain useful information.

So tldr, while this game improves sandbox greatly over X-BTF, the only thing this game has over its sequels is its atmosphere, which is a copy of X-BTF with higher fidelity. X2: The Threat has practically the same economy and includes all mechanics from X-Tension, but with better polish, accessibility and enjoyment.

Don"t be fooled by the low data this game has. It is a universe where you must trade to grow and survive. It has many phases to it. If you are patient and love to fly and fight in a 3 dimensional environment this is the game for you . you start as a lone trader making your way in the universe and trade to finance better weapons and better ships to fly . Build space stations to make more money so as to build other stations to make missiles and guns so as to arm your growing fleet of spaceships to help you fight against your enemies which can range from a single pirate to the artificial machines who have become sentient or if your feeling a bit evil anything that takes your fancy there are five other races you can be friends or foes to . your choice! This would have to be one of the most versatile games I have come across and if you get too good for this there are bigger and more complex versions available but this is I feel the best balance to start with so as to learn all the different functions and keys you need to fly and fight . Warning, once you get the hang of this you might not want to stop ! It takes a bit to get into {all really good games do} but once you get the hang of it your hooked

Breathtaking. A real space odyssey.
Interesting to see that most of the good things of the X2 and X3 universe were made here already. Including the ambiance music. Everything is big and mature in this game.

There's no story though, it's an expansion to X: Beyond the Frontier, with additional features including changing your ship, for the first time in X universe.
The joystick or at least the gamepad is recommended. KB+M controls are quite clunky and you can't change the mappings.

I was pwnt by pirates when I was a kid. It's good to finally understand how to play this game :)

kubuntu linux 20.04 amg apu produced close to 2010, using proton experimental. Flying normal.

Some videos/textures is broken on my linux , f.e. when you communicate with other object, there was some animated face, i remembered it was on win close to 2005, but now it just popup rectangle on right down screen side, filled using pixel garbage.

Navigation, gui, and station cameras work normal.
Before first run i switched all settings to 32 bit, finally window mode not supported (popup message it with only 16 bit device support window mode)

I'll have to be honest about this. The game itself is fun to play, but Egosoft needs their knuckles rapped for the pathetic story line (if you can even call it that). One should expect to see continuity between XBTF and X:Tension, but X:tension simply doesn't provide it. Hey, remember me? I'm Kyle Brennan, the Hero of Argon and loved by all of the races for my part in the Xenon War. So then why does no one even know me now, plus the Split and Piranad are downright hostile? I was in a sector called Brennan's Triumph, and the Split told me to sod off. What happened to my trading empire and my million plus credits I usually carried with me? Egosoft no doubt spent quite a bit of money developing that video with the kid telling us about Captain Brennan. Unfortunately, the video does nothing to explain what happened to Brennan's mines and fabs, or why the prices of almost everything have skyrocketed. Would it have been so hard to find a reason? Of course not. I took a few minutes and came up with this: After the Xenon's mother ship was destroyed, Ban Danna gave Brennan those fantastic 125mw shields, which he promptly used to wipe out the Xenon ships and bases in all of their sectors. In retaliation, the Xenon staged a major attack that destroyed all of Brennan's possessions and caused prices to skyrocket among all of the races. The Xenon also put a large bounty on Brennan's life, causing Ban Danna to advise him to go incognito for a while. Danna gave him an Argon buster and a few thousand credits to start out on his own. (Brennan couldn't draw on his own account, since that would reveal where he was.) And then the game could proceed as it does, but at least there would be a reason for Brennan's sudden poverty and unpopularity. Surely their professional writers could have done even better. Having said that, I do like the way the game is put together and recommend it for many hours of fun. Still, Egosoft really dropped the ball when it came to setting the stage for Brennan's new adventures.

I played the original X Beyond the Frontier in October of 1999, took some time off from a stressful job. I had fired up the game and loved the music, but didn't have time to invest. So, given some time, I decided on a staycation and invested my time in X-BTF. It was well worth it. I finished the game by the following weekend and outside of some performance issues in the final battle. X-Tension came out in 2001 or 2, and I got into the open universe. I got really good at it, built quite an empire. Lost those savegames. I knew all the keyboard shortcuts and quite literally could play the game with just those. It was fun.

I can't give this game a review because I can't figure out how to play it. There is no players guide that came with the download. I don't even know how to make my ship move once I start a game. I am starting out with the first X-TENSION game because I have never played it before, so I want to learn from the beginning, but I need help. I am a 56 yr. old retired military and not a Gamer. Just looking for a good game that will help me pass the time since I am 100% disabled Veteran and don't get out much. Can anyone help???

Tags: 6DOF - Flight & Space Pilot
Additional Tags: Delete Local Content & Remove from Library

TLDR: Plays windowed and without FX sounds in-game. Engine is faster and more responsive controls than original but still lackluster compared to sequels.

It is a generally accepted consensus to start the franchise at X2 since this is when most of the core features that are liked by the community established themselves. There is no point in trying to troubleshoot the issues given that the experience would always be redundant and inferior regardless.
https://store.steampowered.com/app/2800/X2_The_Threat/

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.

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.

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.

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.

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!