Graphically, X2 is already looking sweet even in this alpha stage. The developers at Egosoft have stated that the game engine takes advantage of DirectX8 features like bump-mapping and shadows and it showed while we were playing the preview build. The ships are highly detailed and the universe of X2 itself is a colorful one with bright nebula clouds and impressive looking weapon effects. The game itself was still a little bit choppy in terms of frame rate for our 3 Ghz Pentium IV with a 64 meg ATI Radeon 9000 card but we think that there will be optimizations for the game before its release to stores. On another note, the game’s user interface could also use a bit of work as we think it's not terribly intuitive at this stage.