Fragile? That would be the multiplayer server.

Fragile Allegiance is like Marmite, you either love it or you hate it. However I like to pride myself on being different, so I think that it's great in one way but crap in others. (Now thats a vague first paragraph!)

For those 10% of you who decided to read on from that vague title that said nothing much I will now explain. Fragile Allegiance is basically a game where you see yourself as a mining colony leader of sorts working for a huge company called Tetra Corp. Boring you may say, what a crap plot, and if they'd left it like that I would agree with you. But they didn't. You are employed to run asteroid colonys, make money, mine ore, expand your asteroids. You also have about 10 other alien races who are competing with you, which means that you have to be diplomatic (with actual video pictures of the aliens when you talk or be talked to - which is well done), you also have to build weapons ranging from assualt fighters to giant battleships, from average missles to asteroid-destroyed-with-one-hit mega missles. You buy blueprints from a place called Sci-Tek, which you can but the extra cool things in the game to hurt people or make your colonies safer.

A great thing about Sci-Tek is the way that you can see the item, and they then run a video off to the side next to a description which shows you all the bits and pieces of what you'd be buying so you can see how it works, which is extra information which you can easlily take 1-2 hours looking at due to the amount of stuff you can get.

The major drawback you have to take into mind with Fragile Allegiance is that it's now a very old game, about 6-7 years old I think. However Fragile Allegiance's graphics are still pretty good, what I mean by that is you don't look at the screen and say 'oh god this is unplayable' or 'wow these graphics are crap' like when you play certain $5 RPGs. I'd say the graphics on the scale of 1-10 is in todays standards about a 5 or 6/10. THE GAME ALSO WON'T RUN ON NEWER PC'S (ABOVE A 600) WITHOUT A PATCH!!

There is also employed a 'realism' factor, such as you can fire 10-20 missles at someone, and only 6-12 will hit depending on how close you are, or whether you've purchased a missle guidence system from Sci-Tek, or even asteroid engines so you can move closer. The ships you have also have limited fuel, with battle ships having a huge range compared to an assault fighter. You can but illegal things from black market traders, or legal items from normal traders. You can employ agent to sabotage, destroy and spy on your opponents and you can hire colony supervisors so you can do other things than day to day runnings.

Overall there are lots of all the good things, tons of agents to chose from , all with their own background, sympathies to other races and tasks. The black market has hundreds of items to buy for the hell of it, from biological weapons to stolen works of art from alien worlds. You can mine about 20 ores, all of which are used in construction of weapons. Normal traders have medicine and foods, you can even gift items to other colony leaders.