X Rebirth: Home of Light Complete Edition

X3 player point of view: PROS -Visuals. The game has nice graphics and detailed ship/station models. Stations are much bigger now. -Production. You actually build staions this time, not just spawn them out of thin air. Supply chains are pretty long, so you have a lot of things to do in this part of the game. -Zone damage. You can destroy enemy turrets, shileds, engines and jumpdrive(yay!). CONS -One ship. Yep, thats is. You can pilot ONE ship... -Static world. Can't destroy stations(they regenerate after some time), NPC stations are not constructed/decontructed based on supply/demand ratio, NPC ships spawning out of nowhere by scripts. -Predefined loadouts. The only thing you can change is the amount of weapons. Can't put specific weapon on specific slot, can't set target priority, can't do a damn thing. -Boarding mechanics. There are no marine stats and trainings anymore. The process is VERY cheap and easy, you can board a capital ship on your own. -Combat AI. The orders you can give are very limited, so AI decides what to do and you cant do anything about it. It can jump away, boost in random location, fly to awkward position and so on. -Station sections. Bad models, bad animations, horrible dialogs. MISC Trade. The main change here are Trade Agents. Trade Agent is just some station NPC that supplies you with latest trade offers of that station. How does random NPC turns into your trade agent? You have to trigger a smalltalk event and win a minigame. This process can become very repetitive. Decent game on its onw, horrible X game. It is still big, complex and beautiful with a lot of things to do. I enjoyed production and exploration aspects. So... I recommend you to buy it with both DLCs(the universe is too small without them) when some sale hits.

The game has steep learning curve, many basic to veteran skills. Once to you learn the basics, it's a great space adventure. I didn't finish the main mission. What I did play was very challenging. I plan to come back later. Playing the free trader starts, I played it until I built three stations and huge fleet of ships. After this learning experience, I started over. Playing another free trade start, I now have a huge trading fleet, 5+ warships, and fighter squadrons. I just finished my second space station. Note, you can automate most of running a station. You have a lot of freedom to do any missions and trading offers. You can destroy or capture ships. The battles can range from epic to mundane. You have to learn different tactics for different ships. Capturing a ship requires different tactics from just destroying it. Different ships require different tactics. You have wide variety of different weapons on your own ship. If you have warships following you, you will need to use different tactics. If you going against more than one ship at time and/or fighters, it gets even more complex. YOU WILL get blown up many times over in the learning process. When you get to a personal master skill level, you will be able to take on two warships with beam weapons at once. I've taken on two Olmekron warships with two warships supporting me. I destroyed all their weapons, engines, and jump drive. Then proceeded to capture one ship then the other. Relevant maybe cheat mod: "black market seminars". Other mods fix some the games problems. The game requires a high level of tactical skills. Using your own weapons and commanding a fleet of ships, you will learn complex tactics. It takes time to learn them, be patient. Positive: The gameplay is superior. The fighter AI makes dogfights hard, Warship AI pushes your tactical skill to the limit. The combined system very hard to beat. The stations are fun to explore and using galaxy - sector - zone is a lot of fun. The official mods add some new galaxies and more space to the game. The trading aspects give a different level of gameplay. Building stations is slow, but a lot of fun. You need to actually get all the components to build a space station or large ship. The shipyard must have all the components to build it. You sometimes need to do trades for it in order to build your ships. Negative: The AI for ships has a major flaw. Ships will take very dangerous routes. Often passing too close to hostile stations or weapons platforms. The menu system is very awkward and clunky. It takes too many keys to do anything. The menu system needs a complete overhaul. The menu code can be fixed by EGOSOFT, add your name to the game wish. Modders have some fixes to the menu, but there are too many problems. Two missions are given that have the same reward. When you attack enemies, the station reward video play an average of 5 times -> 16 times per session. It really breaks the flow of combat, and yes is very annoying! There are many mods that fix aspects of the game. Two menu mods help. 'Showskills' helps. Black market seminars helps, but it's too cheat heavy. The reward mod works for fixing the above annoyance. There The overall game is worth $20, despite it's various flaws. It looses 2 stars, because of poor menu structure and sometimes bad AI design. If all the small flaws are fixed, this is a five star game. Add your name to create modding forums and sub-forums on GOG for "X Rebirth".

The campaign is not as bad as some people make out. Its "average". It serves as the gateway into the X series, which was important for me after failing to get into X3. The story is like slow burning tutorial on each of the game's elements with some voice acting and guidance for those of us who need it. I really appreciate it despite the negative comments which follow. The campaign was smooth sailing for the first 20 hours (longer than many other games) until the mission to create a station (which was holding up the entire campaign). Then things took a turn for the worst. I was forced to understand the economy and in doing so discovered a lot of what X fans have been complaining about. The economy is broken and filled with annoying gameplay decisions. When creating the station I ordered the architect to buy all the resources needed herself. I was not notified by the game that apparently she could not travel to the next system to get the final resources needed. I had to do it myself. So where are they? The trade computer does not show you out of stock resources (but is happy to show you ones available at hostile stations?) I spent over 6 hours flying through Albion getting attacked by PMC fighters while trying to get past them to the few neutral stations that would still sell to me. Then you need to find NPCs on the station who cannot be hired (don't ask) wait for them to randomly speak and start a repetitive talking mini game. When you win you can ask the NPC for "trade updates" on that station. Does the station have it in stock? Nope. Does it produce the resource? No idea. On to the next one while I wait for it to randomly show up on the trade computer. Station after station for 6 or so hours. There are things to love about this game. The sound track, the atmosphere, the dog fighting, the majority of the campaign and the graphics. It's just that the game has some gaping flaws. After completing the campaign I plan to fix the game with mods or give X3 another try.

To be fair to X: Rebirth, as its title would suggest, this is a game series looking to head in a new direction. I have played and thoroughly enjoyed the previous X games, and this isn't another whine about this new game not being more of the same, as seems to be apparent in many of the reviews that are scathing for that reason. The fact is, I do like the vision and direction the developers evidently have regarding how they want to take the series forward. That said, I think it's also fair to say that this game itself is arguably nowhere near the ambitious visions they evidently have. Right now, everything just feels a little off and that, for me, detracts from enjoying the game as much as I'd like to. For example, it's great that players can finally board stations and wander around them, but they mostly look the same inside apart from some props located in different places, and are otherwise quite bland. I can see they want to add a greater sense of interaction with NPCs, but to be quite frank, the NPC models and animations (or lack thereof) are still awful, whilst the narratives remain poor at best. Try to imagine something that's not even anywhere near as good or detailed as the first Mass Effect, a game that came out just over ten years ago. It's difficult not to have the impression that perhaps Egosoft are trying to bite off more than they can chew, taking the X series in a direction that's certainly praiseworthy, but one they're not capable of delivering effectively enough to match the vision they have. It also feels like they've focused more time on the weakest aspects of previous games, but without making enough strides forward to merit the effort doing so, rather than keep improving the strengths of previous titles. The short and tall of my experience with X:Rebirth is that I wanted to love the new approach, but just didn't find it engaging enough. It's the first X game I got tired of playing rather quickly and didn't feel compelled to continue.

Intuitive UI? No Good Tutorials? No Glitchy flight/ui interaction? Yes Multiple flyable ships? NO Pushed out of map by random robot on a station? Yes Random CTD? Yes I'd ***much*** rather be playing Freelancer than this...