Let me say right off the bat, X: Rebirth looks gorgeous, but what was true in X3 series, still holds in Rebirth - beautiful from afar, less impressive up close (adjusted for release dates, of course - obviously, Rebirth is a huge improvement over X3 if compared to one another). The station interiors aren't too detailed (and really, i've only found three distinct station designs in the game so far, and all three are pretty boring) and the whole first-person experience is extremely rudimentary and feels like a tech demo for an indie game. The space environment, however, is simply magnificent. Much variety, very well executed. The stations are beautifully designed, the backdrops are stunning (i freakin' LOVE the DeVries star system!), the ships are very cool as well. Rebirth is very immersive. I can't count how many times i went "wow, this is cool!". You start a game, you fly around, you start docking at places - standard X3 stuff. After a while, when you're a bit more comfortable with the gameplay and the controls, you start to notice things you didn't notice at first. So you dock on a station, you walk around the same station over and over, then you dock on a capital ship. Oh, cool, a spacey backdrop - finally, some change. Oh, wait... That's not a spacey backdrop. It's the ship! You're ON the ship! And you can see what's going on there! You can see it flying, jumping, fighting! Keeeewl! And then some time later you happen to dock at a station again, and you hear strange noises. Noises vaguely resembling muffled... Hits? Wait, when you docked, there was a fight going on between the station and some pirates - so you're telling me that i can HEAR the fight going on outside while being on a station?! Keeeeeewl! When you hire people, they don't just appear in your ship - if you hired them while being in space, they literally fly out of the station and dock in your ship! Same with other wares (e.g. rockets) bought from stations while you're not docked - they fly into your ship on a cargo drone. In other words, Rebirth goes to great lengths to fix the "gamey-ness" and discontinuity X3 had: nothing happens instantly, and it no longer feels like when you dock at a station, the game just stops, even though you can see ships flying around and stuff. But i guess the graphics, while important, aren't what the review reader would be interested in, so let's discuss the actual game. Let's get the obvious out of the way first. Yes, you can only pilot one ship, even though you can upgrade it. It doesn't really bother me that much, as i dreaded the "which ship do i pick?!" aspect of X3 series anyway, and capships are boring to fly since they're agonizingly slow. I never played the 1.0 release, i started at 4.0, so i didn't have a famously disastrous first experience with the game. In my experience, while there are a few glitches and bugs here and there, they aren't really game breaking. On the contrary, X3TC campaign was much glitchier than Rebirth in its current state - so much that i rage quit the X3TC campaign and just played the sandbox. The game mechanics and gameplay are sometimes awkward, and while it's not a case of death by a thousand paper cuts, there are certainly a sizeable number of paper cuts in the game. There is a good few annoyances as well - needless cutscenes being the primary offender. So, with that said, is it, or is it not an X game? Well, it kinda is, but kinda isn't. X: Rebirth isn't really going for "better X3", it seems to be going for "more realistic X". X3 was very complex in its simplicity - you had to do a lot of micromanagement, and the mechanics were very rudimentary. This is not to disparage X3, it's just X3 felt more like a game and less like a simulator. The "simulator" part was the economy, while the rest was seemingly geared towards easy scripting. X: Rebirth, on the other hand, tries to make things make more sense within the game universe, which results in many things being done in an unobvious and unintuitive (at first) way. As an obvious example: want to repair a ship in X3? Fly to the nearest shipyard, pay for repairs. In Rebirth, it's not like that - for small ships, you have to find those who sell this kind of ships (so you can't use just ANY shipyard), and ask the ship salesman to repair it - and your ship will fly there and dock on its own. Capital ships you don't really repair - you hire an engineer who repairs it over time. There is no "autopilot" in the game - everything has to be controlled by humans. Want guns on your capship to fire? Hire a defence officer and put him on the ship. Want to board capships? Hire a marine officer, and a bunch of marines. Want to claim a ship? Carry a bunch of pilots with you. Want for these claimed ships to be of any use? Hire GOOD pilots (or train your existing ones). Similar with trade - previously, you had to fly around manually and look for wares in each sector, check prices etc. Now, you have a complete picture of what to buy where, but you also don't really "buy" anything as such - you place an order, and your cargo ship (if you have one, if you don't - you can't trade) arrives and takes the cargo. What happened in X3 series, never happens in Rebirth - you can't really "be late" with your sale, the order is reserved for you and isn't given to anyone else. Many players dread this aspect as it makes things "easier" (and we all know hardcore gamers love complexity!), but i believe it is kinda sorta what happens in real life: you make a contract, you deliver stuff, and there's no way you deliver the goods and be told "sorry, someone else beat you to it". Fighting... It's a mixed bag. On one hand, in Rebirth, you actually stand a chance against a capital ship now. You don't have to blow out the shield anymore, you can now target important parts of the ship - engines, turrets, etc. On the other: maybe it's the difficulty level that i'm playing, but it's almost too easy now. Stations are rarely attacked (except if you place yourself in a hostile sector), pirate raiding parties don't stand a chance against a well armed player, and neither do capships, nor do they really use much rockets. So if you like dogfighting and constant danger of having your engines blown off, this isn't really a game for you. Station building is again made to be more complex (they aren't built instantly, like in X3, and you need an architect, and a few other things), and to be honest i haven't really figured out this aspect of the game yet, i'm still stuck at building a URV wharf in DeVries, and trying to figure out what is it that the station actually wants from me that prevents it from building. There's also a strange limitation on what can be built where, i.e. you seemingly can't build a PMC building in DeVries, only in Albion. But, as i said, this is a process that you have to go through to figure out pretty much any aspect of the game - standard "gamey" assumptions do not work here, because the game strives to not be so obviously gamelike as X3 was. I can't really comment on the depth of the economic model either, as i have just started to dabble in it, but i can see stuff fluctuating in price and having shortages. There's lots of mechanics to it, as well - sabotaging stations, raiding cargo ships therefore creating gridlocks (and therefore profit opportunities). I can say though that, like in (vanilla) X3, there isn't much you can change in the game world - you can, of course, become enemies with factions (in Rebirth, you deal with factions, not races), but it doesn't go much beyond that, it's not like you can start a war, or wipe a faction off the face of the galaxy, or take over its assets. You pretty much just make money and, well, that's it, i guess. For all the famed depth of X3, this aspect of it has always been pretty shallow, and it's a shame that Rebirth didn't change any of that. A huge question that i had in my head whenever i saw the announcement for Home of Light was, three new systems, and that *doubles* the amount of systems in Rebirth? So, like, the total number of systems in the original, was *three*? At first i was a bit wary of that, because X3TC had freaking 230 of them! But while playing the game, i realized that while technically, number of sectors (in X3TC sense) was indeed quite low by X3 standards (Albion, Omicron Lyrae, DeVries, one new sector in Teladi Outpost, and three new sectors in Home of Light), the sectors (called "systems" now) are much bigger, because each system now has many sectors (connected by "superhighways"), with each sector also having several zones (connected by "highways"). So really, you can think of Rebirth's "systems" as similar to what Terran space looked like in X3 - one solar system with a jump gate entry point, connected together by series of trans-orbital accelerators. In fact, according to game's lore, highways and super highways essentially *are* trans-orbital accelerators from X3TC, so yeah, Terran space in X3TC is in fact a perfect illustration of what a "system" is in Rebirth sense. So if you count *that* as one system, well, then 7 systems doesn't sound like a tiny game universe any more! So, would i recommend the game? I have no idea. I love the game. And while i would certainly appreciate a marriage of X3 with X Rebirth (and a few mods as well), Rebirth *for me* certainly stands on its own and is very enjoyable in its own right. If you like what i have described so far, buy the game. If you don't, well, i don't fault you for it. Many people seem to have a love/hate relationship with Egosoft - they are known to release half-finished products (that was the case with X3 series as well, not only Rebirth), but they are also known to work tirelessly on the game post-release and eventually fix most issues. I believe that deserves my support as well.
