Sound. It's there. I mean the game has it; spoken words, music, ambient background sounds, and not to mention the battle sounds. The question should not be how much sound or how well acted the chatter is, the question should be 'Is it put together well?' Does it make sense?

To answer those questions I would have to say no and no. Let me explain. For instance when you get close to a space station and you come in close to dock you will hear random chatter on your message screen. Some of the messages may say "Inspecting cargo; don't move" or "You are blocking the docking lane - move" or "You are not cleared to dock at this moment" or several others.

All those messages are irrelevant. Once you get close enough to the station as long as you have a good enough diplomacy rating you can dock with the station regardless of the message received. Same goes for combat messages. Half the time I can't tell if and who is attacking me from the sound aspect of the game. The messages are just off.

The best aspect about the music is that is relaxing and sleepy - goes good on all them long journeys between the jump gate and the space station. Some of them drives can take even more then 5 minutes, so if the soothing music changes to something fast it's a good chance that pirates are moving in on you. Time to pause that movie and head back to your computer - now you finally got something to do.

SpaceForce: Rouge Universe has decent graphics by today's standards. The player models (in this case the spaceships) are done well, the environment is detailed; the backgrounds such as stars, planets, nebulas, etc. are just amazing.

The way the lighting is done is also impressive. It's got anything from lens flares to space fog, weird-looking anomalies, meteor showers, nebulas and jump gates. The one visual aspect of the game that is lacking is the way the particles react.

What I mean by that is the combat particle effects. The visual on those just plainly suck. Yeah, I know that this is more of an RPG then a flight sim, but come on, give me something pretty to look at when I shoot my opponents.

And the explosions and fire effects, that's a joke even by yesterday's standards. Maybe I'm just expecting too much, but after seeing the world that Provox Games was able to create, I was expecting the same high standards in the particle effects of combat sequences.

In general the graphics are more than tolerable. Where the particle effects from combat and the explosions are its weakest element, SpaceForce: Rogue Universe make up for that element with an extremely beautifully rendered universe. The planets, stars, anomalies, the lens-flare effects, along with the asteroid fields and meteor shower make this latest space release full of eye-candy.

Speaking of the sound, yeah, it is out of sync most of the time, but it's a space game. Messages are few in between and if you're like me you ignore them anyhow and just do what you want to in the first place.