Just make sure you wash your hands... :P

I just played X Rebirth for 3 hours.
Mouse works OK, but I guess some joystick or controller is probably more enjoyable.
The first person running around on stations feels rather awkward.

It's hard to get into.The tutorial in the campaign explains stuff badly and between stretches of nothing you get bombarded with multiple pieces of info at once.
It took me half an hour to dock. The auto pilot does super-weird stuff.
I also encountered way more bugs than I should have given the age of the game (Crash when I first launched the campaign and skipped the intro, a merchant suddenly didn't have his 300k energy cells available).

It might be a good game once you are further in, but I am pretty new to this and it was far from a smooth ride.

Thanks for the review. I will take it into consideration before I decide whether to buy or not.

What do you mean by "as GOG continued to relax their principles"?

I'm open-minded about game genres right now because I have only recently decided to take a serious interest in gaming, and I am occasionally finding games I absolutely LOVE that I never thought I would like at first glance. For example, I generally don't like RPG's, but I have tried a few I really dislike as expected, and I tried a few I really enjoyed. Furthermore, some of my favorite games from the past turned out be RPG's that weren't labeled as RPG's.

I have noticed I like simple games a lot more than I expected. FTL is my favorite game from GOG so far. Maybe it's because of the perfect balance that's achievable when a game is simple. My favorite board game is Monopoly, which is also simple, but it yields a notoriously large amount of play time.

I used to really enjoy high-end FPS games like Quake 2 + Lithium mod, and I got the Crysis games from GOG recently too. I have enjoyed Assassin's Creed 4 Black Flag, which is a genre or style I have never played before, nor even looked closely at.

I have noticed that some of my interests are sophisticated and demanding like what you would expect from a specialist connoisseur, while other interests tend to be very basic and forgiving of imperfections. For example, I'm a coin connoisseur that obsesses over the most minute imperfections that most normal people don't care about, and might not even be able to see even when it's pointed out to them with magnification.

On the other hand, sometimes I will watch a movie that gets lackluster or negative reviews, and disappoints a lot of people, but I end up enjoying it so much it becomes one of my favorites. I'm not 100% sure about why that is, but I think the key might be expectations. When I have few or no expectations, other than being entertained for a while, then I am much more likely to be pleased with the experience. I do tend to like highly-rated things (games, movies, Amazon products, etc) more often than not, so the oddball outliers are less common, as you would expect.

I tend to not like RPG's, platformers, side-scrollers, fantasy genres, and low-rated games, but I'm still serious about being open-minded in seeing lists of people's favorite games. I just want explore and try a variety of things without a lot of preconceived expectations.

So have they added Track IR capability yet?

Please don't consider this a proper review. 3 hours only allows to scratch the surface of a game like this and I also only listed problems I had, none of the positives. The game can be quite beautiful, it's a huge and busy universe, the scale is quite impressive and it works without loading screens (save for the initial one). It can also be quite funny (unintentionally), check out these two clips one of my viewers made:
https://clips.twitch.tv/UglyTalentedOkapiPJSugar
https://clips.twitch.tv/OnerousConcernedWormM4xHeh

If you want to see what a 'cold start' looks like, you can watch the VOD (Twitch removes those after a while, unfortunately): https://www.twitch.tv/videos/209007214
There are in-game tutorials for specific topics that I haven't tried and they might be good, but I have a feeling it's best to watch some tutorial videos to get started with this game.

Hope that helps.

I think there is nothing wrong if they wanted to create a game that was not so heavy on economics as the previous games, with a simpler economy system. Whether they succeeded I do not know.

Listed as supported in this newest update.

*EDIT* Actually looks like it was added in the last big 4.0 update.

Great stuff. Purchased. And thankyou.

GOG originally was against DLC you have to pay for separately... now look at how much there is of it.

GOG originally was against regional pricing... now look at how much there is of it.

GOG originally was against in-game purchases... now look at Gwent.

Given how hard they're pushing GOG Galaxy, I'm starting to wonder whether I should just make more copies of my offline backups for my digital downloads and consider my thousands of games (digital and physical media combined) as "enough for the rest of my life".

I loved FTL too. While not a PC game, another one you might enjoy is Advance Wars for the Gameboy Advance. (It's a turn-based tactics game that exercises similar skills to FTL.)

On the PC, the Hexcells series (DRM-free on Humble Store) is another one that I get a lot of satisfaction and replay out of.

(It's basically Minesweeper on steroids with a guarantee that every puzzle is solvable.)

How broad do you want when you say "favourite"?

Do you want just free favourites or should I also mention favourites that cost money? Just PC games or should I include games for consoles like SNES and the original Playstation? Are you OK with classics for Windows 3.1 that need to run on top of a VirtualBox+Linux+Wine stack if you don't still have a PC with 32-bit Windows kicking around?

These are the links I tried to include above:

* https://www.virtualbox.org
* http://www.osboxes.org/lubuntu
* https://www.playonlinux.com/en

How strictly do you want me to define favourite? Replayed? Played to the end and remember fondly? Enjoy but haven't yet completed? (Possibly because I just found one of my other hobbies, like reading or computer programming, to be more interesting than gaming of any kind for a while.) Recommendations by people I trust which I haven't yet tried personally?

I think the game was actually made to play with a mouse and keyboard, joysticks were an after thought. It works with a regular joystick but it was a huge pain to get things mapped right. I had to unplug the throttle and pedals from my HOTAS or weird things would happen if I breathed on the wrong axis. There are lots of bugs and not really any useful tutorials or answers from the community boards.

Ideally you would put all your knowledge into a sorted list with the best ones at the top. Then I can stop reading wherever I want. But, to be practical, you could make a top 5 list, a top 10, top 20, or top 100, or whatever. Then, you could add a few honorable mentions if you think something doesn't quite fit, but still is worth sharing. I'm only interested in PC games, and I run Windows 7 64-bit. Both free and paid are OK.

I hope with time GOG continues to package complete sets of games (or a series of games) with all DLC's, expansions, and extras for 1 price. it's convenient, and I think when a game is old enough, that's the right way to sell it to me and a lot of other people who will definitely buy if the deal is sweet enough.

Totally agree with you here. Not to mention the default controls make absolutely no sense. A bit of time need to be spent redefining the controls to something more sensible.

I also had issues with docking. When docking in my own freighter and head back into the Skunk, the Skunk bounces around the interior like a ping pong ball until the controls behave well enough to get out.

I'm also having trouble using the kb/mouse/joy combo. When piloting the ship use the mouse then try and use the joystick, there's a delay until the ship actually moves. I also have problems with the mouse automatically returning to the center of the targeting retical. This is doing mouse stuff while moving somewhat annoying

Also, is there a way to simply delete control bindings in the controls menu? I want to disable my joystick axes while in first person mode as moving around with still receiving input from the joystick is really annoying

And what the hell is with the annoying auto-leveling? I can't find an any option to turn the auto-leveling off.

Thank you, and thanks everyone answering. I was fearing something along these lines.

Great as sticks are, for everything from TIE Fighter sequels to the I-War series, Freespace 2 and whatnot, Freelancer never wanted a joystick, and newer games such as Strike Suit Zero make their stick support appear perfunctory at best, and seem to have been really thought out to be played with a mouse and keyboard, or maybe with a controller.

So, yes, sadly this has become a valid question, that can be rephrased as "Is it worth playing with a stick?" or "Can it really handle a stick?". Both of which ought to be taken terribly out of context, if only to shame lazy developers, or developers of dogfighting games that do not believe in sticks anymore, even as a valid alternative. I mean, planes and helos and actual spaceships do not handle with mice in manual flight, right? Maybe for some reason?

But better mouse-handled fun space games than none at all.

Sorry for taking so long to get back to you. I had a very busy day.

Sounds like a good idea. I'll get back to you once it's ready.

I'll probably also include sections for other platforms so I can put it together once and just link people to it if I need it again.