X Rebirth

Sounds dumb right? Well that's because it is, the design of this game is severely lacking in player control and is extremely unintuitive. This is true for both the player Avatar and the NPC ships under your command this combined with horrid AI results in a lot of ships sitting idle while enemy ships blow them up. I feel it resulted this way because they anticipated the way players would want to play and went against it. Not as part of some inspired design but it feels more like they've ignored player feedback because, "It's their game and they'll make it how they want." Yeah, it has that kind of feel to it for me. I simply cannot begin to understand the design it fails in so many areas and offers no innovation. So, while they I see the effort and work that went into creating this game it is a absolute complete waste of said effort. The Ai is bad. Especially for your fighters, you'll have them then you won't and most times you don't get a alarm until they're losing hull which is fatal for fighters. Repairing, trading cargo and rearming is all very cumbersome and impacts the game in a very negative way but it's hardly all that's wrong with the game. While repairing Capitol ships is easy fly to a Shipyard speak to the Capital Ship Seller, repair fighters, a huge tactical asset is not. Most times they can't be repaired and when they can the price eclipses the ship cost and your of course better off buying a new ship instead. And you cannot assign a fighter to a Carrier or Capitol Ship have it dock into said ship and repair even though you supply crew and a engineer to the Capitol ship who can repair it. (Percentage repaired is based on the engineer skill.) It takes a long time to trade with stations and other ships you give the command and it takes a upwards of ten to twenty minutes to trade at times. Although, sometimes it goes right and only takes about five minutes which is the average for ship to ship trades. Given that you have to manage stations, fleets, mining fleet, trade lines and security it becomes a bit much your better off combining playing this game with some other activity. Let's say you play like a pirate wanting to capture enemy ships and you want the cargo off of the ship then to sell it. You can't so simply and the developer intends for it to be this way judging from comments I've read it's meant to limit the player. First off, each ship gets a board resistance to capture a ship your boarding party must have a boarding strength greater than the target ship's resistance. For you to board a ship you need a Marine officer, a boarding party you can have up to fifty and they gain experience after each successful raid. Ok you hired your officer, got your marines and have found your target? You need to understand one thing each shield, generator, gun and hull level adds to the Boarding resistance of the Ship you've targeted. As you destroy them the resistance drops then you start the boarding process it tells you to target the jump drive (or the ship can jump away which equals a automatic fail) and the engines so it can't run. Anyway, let's say it was successful. Now you have the ship how do you get the goods off? Well that's tricky, selling the ship is a simple as going to a ship vendor but getting the goods/fuel of is tricky. You have to set up a trade, to do that you need a captain on the ship and a engineer to repair the engines needed to maneuver into place. Repairing the ship nets you more money when you sell it but repairing it just to sell it is necessary to save yourself an hour of letting your engineer do it. Ok, ship's repaired. Ready to sell, oh no you just sold your crew with it. Wait, you can call the engineer back. Ok, reload your save which if your brave enough to purchase this game after this review I whole heartily recommend you do often. But trust me you'll think, "How do I..." "Why do it like this?" "Why can't I...???" "This is some BUL****!!!" "Man, if only they.." "This game would be great if..." So, while you can call back the engineer by talking to them on the comm or in person you captain is frigging stuck. You can only replace him/her with a (hopefully) worse Captain, so when capturing ships never send a Captain unless you plan to keep it. All other crew can be moved around. Drone bays carrying expensive drones count for high boarding resistance even on a mining ship with mining drones...?? The game wants you to destroy them or your marines get killed unless they're a high level.

I have only been playing perhaps 15 hours but Ill get the bad out of the way first then the good. I think the statements to wait until its on sale are spot on. This game is not worth 50 USD. I paid 59 USD for Skyrim on release and that game was polished and brain dead easy to pick up and play. This game is more like a 20-30 USD release. When I play this I cant help but think of Blade Runner. It feels just like that movie. The game has its issues and lacks polishing. It could have been 5 stars if it was polished or maybe 15-20 USD less. If you like this genre though I would strongly recommend this game. The bad: 1)Broken, non-existent or confusing tutorials. ie: I have millions of credits worth of silicon that must be on my freighter being flown around but when I try to sell it the system says my freighter "cannot transport this ware". 2)Default keyboard layout is a train wreck. If on kbd/mse you MUST change it to have effective play. 3)Constantly cant speak to npcs. Have to back off move around and find some magic way they suddenly can be targeted. Its really annoying spending 1-2 minutes just trying to speak with a vendor. On station environment overall feels "after-thoughtish". 4)Seemingly random entire stations will just start attacking you. Less than one hour into the game I had a station that I had been floating next to the last 5 minutes scream something out at me and next thing I know space was filled with gun fire and I imploded. 5)Game goes from challenging to epicly impossible in seconds in the stories, not talking missions. 6)REALLY scizo-stupid AI in your freight ship. I mean a potato could fly it better. Or maybe when it flies good its a person and when bad the potato is in charge? The good: 1)Amazing space graphics, just ok on station graphics. 2)Great stories. 3)In concept and largely implementation a great trade system. 4)Very diverse space areas and a lot of "ship options". 5)Great space combat. 6)Just an awesome sandbox.

As is with all the X titles, Egosoft keeps this franchise ticking, and quite well might I add. But it ALWAYS falls short on launch. One of the reasons this game is not uber successful is horrible release builds on launch. Ultra buggy and at times unplayable and unbalanced. X Rebirth came out of the gate a bit better than its predecessors, however as is with all X games you need patches. Lots of them. If you have never played an X game you're in for a ride. Great space combat. the strategic aspect of ship building, establishing trade routes, and buying and flying CAPITAL SHIPS should be enough to have a space sim fans heart skipping beats from joy. You can outfit capital ships with flyers too to cover you while flying so it makes it feel realistic. Graphics wise it improved on X3 by quite a bit. Musical score wise... I don't recall it making an impact on me like DA: Inquisition did (Oh the Dark Solas theme... <3). Controls: takes getting used to. You're going to use your entire keyboard. Print out the layout. Difficulty for those new to the X franchise: on a scale of 1-5 i would say 3. I recommend watching a few videos of gameplay to get accustomed and view tactics. Every action has consequences. Story: huh? System requirements: You don't need the newest rig to run this. Your 5 year old PC with a decent graphics card over 1GB, and 8-16 gb of memory will run this like a champ. As always check system reqs on this page to make sure you meet the requirements. Overall review: I give this 4/5 stars because of the fact that this game is going to require extensive patching before it's running smooth and with minimal to no glitches. Good difficulty and learning curve. Vast universe, different races, huge ship selection with varying classes. No forced requirements on your path as a pilot. I recommend buying this, but i also recommend the other titles int he X franchise too. Hope this helps!

Seriously the AI ruins most of the game. i was a long time fan of the x series, i also worked on the Xtended mod, this is ideally the best sequel of the series, too bad the bad AI and the broken mechanics ruins pretty much most of the campaign. i would understand that from a 6 months old game, but a 5 year old one....with also 2 dlcs..... Too bad egosoft...way too bad

Bad game play, very little systems to visit, Ugly NPCs and bad trading system. Just watch this video. He will explain everything https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LxUx96-6-dw