X is very much a space sandbox. You can become a military pilot, civilian trader, a pirate, or any combination you want. The graphics are fantastic and run smooth, even on older systems. You can play with a joystick, or using the mouse and keyboard like Freelancer. For those unfamiliar with the M&K controls, you can lock the mouse to navigate the UI, or unlock to control the ship. More space sims should include these M&K controls. It's actually one of the few I can play on my laptop thanks to these controls, and I actually prefer them. The sound is as high quality as the graphics and the whole game just creates an incredible sense of immersion. The gameplay itself can be intimidating at first since there are so many different aspects to learn. You can obtain an entire fleet of ships, capital ships down to single-pilot fighters, and send them on various missions through commands. You can even obtain a space station and take over a sector. The universe is massive, it really would take hours to fly through every system. While It's mostly intended to be a sandbox, there are a few story modes. In these modes, you are playing a specific role and follow missions as part of the storyline. While you follow the missions for the storyline, you still can do whatever you want in between. The story mode is very similar to Freelancer, where you follow the story, but have freedom in between to choose what you want to do. What probably makes this game one of my favorite space sims is the mods. There is a mod for any sci fi theme you can think of and they're expertly done. If you're thinking about it, just search the forums for the couple of posts about the various mods. This is the link to the mod thread I created: https://www.gog.com/forum/x_series/x3_mods If you are a flight or space fan, I can't recommend this game highly enough!
I will first note my two issues with this game. First, the game can't display the UI properly on a native 4k resolution monitor, even if you lower the resolution settings. I'm sure there is a way to fix it, but nothing I tried worked so I just can't play this on my laptop with a 4k screen. My desktop monitor is not 4k and it runs perfectly. On the 4k monitor the UI is completely messed up. You can still play the game, but none of the text is actually on the buttons and the text covers the screen. My second issue is with the camera during the battles. It is a bit difficult to navigate and is very limited. It's not to the point that it ruins the experience, but it does get annoying at times. The game itself is great. It's very similar to Medieval Total War, but in a fantasy setting with spells. What it has that MTW doesn't have are quests and a text-based RPG aspect to it. Your decisions in the RPG portions affect your morality and your faith, which affects your abilities and the units you can recruit. There are multiple different outcomes for this to varying degrees: Moral leader with no faith, moral with Old Faith, moral with Christian faith, a tyrant with no faith, tyrant with Old faith, or tyrant with Christian faith. Throughout the campaign you form different alliances and recruit knights to your round table. You assign your knights fiefs and try to unite the kingdom under your rule. Just like in a Total War game, each units have various strengths and weaknesses. They also level up and you can assign points to various skills and abilities, so each unit can be customized. The battles are very fun and look great. The only graphical issue I encountered was the inability to properly render the UI on a native 4k monitor. The game is based on the legends of Arthur Pendragon and other European lore. It's a very popular setting, which doesn't get enough attention from good games, despite its popularity. Overall if you like TW style games, the King Arthur lore, or just good strategy and war games, I highly recommend this game. I personally like it even more than Warhammer Total War. For the price and the amount of content, I urge you to make the purchase and enjoy this underrated game!
I made my first review shortly after release in EA. I was hopeful for it... until the devs abandoned it with our money and left a demo of a game. Do not buy this garbage. My original review is below, which was assuming theyd at least release a patch or two beyond this and give us the basic game that was promised, even if unfinished. This is a short demo, which none of my original review applies knowing thats all you'll ever get. I will first state that this review is based on the In Dev title that only includes MP and basically skirmishes. There is a story or campaign mode button that says it is in development and won't let you select it. I also only played single player because I rarely play any type of multi and prefer to play solo. The first thing you notice about this game will be the incredible graphics, detailed characters, and sound. It looks and sounds as great as the photos and videos. While it is just basically characters on a board in game, the surrounding environments are incredibly detailed and lively. The attacks have great animation. Everything looks and sounds great. The gameplay itself is interesting between the harmony and dissonance, but it is very slow. It's not too slow that it's not fun, it's just that it feels like it does take away a little from the experience. Each character gets an attack phase and a defense phase. You can only move during an attack phase, and you can only use a special ability once during a round. So basically you can use it during the attack or during the defense, but not both. So if you use your ability during the defense phase you'll only have the basic either harmony or dissonance attack, and the same for defense. The tiles on the board can become harmony or dissonance, but I don't fully understand yet when that happens and what it means. I noticed I could still use harmony on a dissonance tile. The tiles closer to the enemy cause you to do higher damage, but lower defense, while the tiles further away have the opposite effect. While there are only a few abilities per character, it is much more complicated than it seems to be. It's definitely not something you want to play to unwind after a long day, it requires a lot of thinking and planning. I'll admit, I'm only part way through the tutorial, but I felt like I got enough out of what I played so far to write a review. If they could figure out a way to speed up the gameplay a bit, I would love to give it a five star rating. As it stands, it is well worth the cost. I can't wait to see the last game mode implemented and to see how this progresses.
I wrote a long review for Halcyon 6, but when it went to Lightspeed Edition, they removed the original game's page and the reviews with it. I just felt like it's fair to add my review again and wish GoG would import the reviews from the original game's page so this game gets a fair rating. What it basically boils down to is this is a great mix of RPG, strategy, and base managing. You command a starbase, fleets, and the personnel to operate them. You choose what facilities, where, and when to build them in your base very similar to the X-Com series. You have fleets explore the galaxy and complete quests. There are encounters with alien species and pirates. The combat is turn-based, with each ship or person having a couple abilities to choose from and their own traditional class (healer, tank, dps). I removed one star for the graphics. They are spot-on for what they are attempting to accomplish, but I'm just sick of the number of 2D, 16-bit graphic games coming out. It's cool to play a new game that has retro style graphics now and then, but I feel like it's a cheap way out for developers to create an easier game. I know production costs and time go up with an actual modern 3D game, but it's 2018, that should be the standard. It's not "retro" if every game is in that style, it's just the standard for games to not have evolved graphically with the powerful modern machines. I feel like I have a valid opinion on this since I've been gaming since the early 80s. Overall I recommend it to anyone that enjoys this sort of game. I highly recommend it to any sci-fi fans since it really makes you feel like Captain Sisqo!
I was hoping for much more out of this game, but I found it to be pretty lacking. You fly through level after level while being attacked by many fighters. You never dock at a station, or really anything else. You just fly to the exit point and wait until you can jump out to the next stage. There is really no point to it all. Even if you destroy a wing of enemies, more just show up until you jump out. The entire experience was very shallow. I felt like it was more of an old arcade shooter than anything else. The graphics and sound were great. Everything looked beautiful. Again, it just isn't my type of game. I can usually get on board with any space game, even those of a genre I'm not particularly interested in, but this game was just way too shallow.
I, like everyone else, was very excited for this game's release. There was a lot of information out about it, but it seems much of it was misleading. They showed massive space battles with capital ships, but this never actually happens. I think it was the way it was marketed that made people infer what they thought was going to be in it and then were disappointed, at least that's what happened to me. There was a lot of misleading marketing as well. As far as the actual game, it's not horrible. It's definitely not worth $60, but it's not a complete loss. Your main objective is to reach the center of the universe and do what you want along the way. There is a lot of grinding rocks... literally just walking around a planet and firing your mining laser at rocks and plants to collect resources. Any time you use your ship, or even just walk around, you have to use resources that need to be replenished. The planets are very barren except for some monuments that are uninspiring and some small bases. You'll usually never see more than one npc anywhere you go, and they're statically stuck in place. You can talk to them, but that's the only interaction you have. You collect pieces of language, but there are no factions to join or any alliances. Really it's just you traveling around. The planets themselves are pretty for the first couple of hours, but after a while they all look relatively the same with slight differences. There's basically lush green planets, rocky planets, desert planets, and icy planets. The one variation was a planet where the enforcer drones were nuts and constantly attacking me, this was actually more annoying than anything and I ended up just almost immediately abandoning the planet rather than exploring it. Some of the wildlife is interesting on planets that have it, and it can be fun to go around discovering new things, but after a while you've seen every animal and plant there is to see. You wouldn't expect two planets from very different star systems to have the same wildlife and plants, but they just change small details about them and call it a new plant or animal. Flying through space is pretty fun for a bit, but there's not much to it. It feels big, like you're actually in space, but it's just boring. You can again mine rocks, but you sometimes get attacked by some sort of pirates. They're just random npcs that go aggro and shoot you down if you have some cargo of value. When you shoot another ship down, they drop their cargo. You will either defeat the three ships that attack you, escape, or die and just respawn in the last station you were in. There are three or four freighters near every planet that is near a space station. They just sit there... I tried to attack one at one point, but it was just too powerful. There's a space station that you can dock on and speak to the one person occupying it, which is basically just a vendor. If you sit in the docking bay, you will see other ships coming through. The ships are a limited type of ships, that are all piloted by the same npc, even if there are two of the same ship docked at the same time which happens often. Many others complained of the performance, but I had no issues with this. The game simply wouldn't work prior to the first emergency patch they put out. One thing I did enjoy were the graphics, the sound, and the performance was great on my five year old Alienware desktop. I ran the game on an Alienware Aurora R4, with an i7-3820 @ 3.6ghz, 8gb RAM, and Windows 7 64. I played the game for around 12 hours, bought a few different ships, upgraded the stuffing out of my backpack, and explored some systems. The one thing that annoyed me is that there was no way to trace the path I took through the galaxy. There's a 3D map you can look at and find every star, but I could not find the stars on it that I previously visited. This really annoyed me because it doesn't make sense, but I also missed a part of the story in the first system and wanted to go back to do the story. Honestly I was hoping some bit of a story path would make it more interesting. What I was looking for was a game that I could feel like I was in space and exploring a galaxy, but I was hoping an inhabited galaxy with interaction. It's not bad if you enjoy survival games because each planet has different levels of environmental hazards and different types of hazards, so you have to find ways of improving your suit to survive longer. There's not much more to it. I was hoping for more action, factions through the galaxy, or even just planets with cities and inhabitants. To be fair, I haven't played it since the first major content update. I was just not inspired. I really hoped after all the public backlash, they would really add the content they promised and make it closer to something I would really enjoy. When I get bored of what I'm currently playing I may go back to it at some point and see how it is with the updated content. I may even edit this review if it's warranted. It's not horrible, it's just not all that interesting or fun.
This is THE pirate game and that's pretty much it. There's not much more I can say that hasn't already been said in reviews, except that you need to get the mods for this. Specifically the 3.2 combined mod. Just check out Piratesahoy! and you'll find them.
I typically don't enjoy 2D graphics that mimic the old consoles, but I decided to check this game out because of what it is. You are the commander of a starbase out in the galaxy basically cut off from the rest of the federation. You are in charge of clearing the rooms of the starbase, which was an abandon alien base from an ancient race. As you clear the base you build different rooms with different functions much like in X-Com. You have to manage a few different resources to ensure you have enough crew, make new ships and fleets, train officers, and to basically continue to function in the galaxy. There is also a research tree, which is pretty simple but in-depth enough to make it fun. Meanwhile, you have to manage your fleets, explore new planets and stations, protect your starbase, protect your other assets such as colonies and mining facilities, and deal with various threats from other alien races and pirates. The exploring consists of sending your fleet to a location and you will receive a notice based on what is found there, you then have the option to colonize or mine or just leave it. The space combat, as others have already stated, is very much a turn-based RPG style. Each ship has three or four abilities that you choose each round. The abilities either do damage, protect a friendly, or heal a friendly unit, and have different stats that affect how much it will do. Some abilities cause a status affect, while other abilities will exploit the status for a bonus to the damage or healing. There are three different classes: tactical, engineer, and science, which are basically DPS, tank, and healer. Some classes of ships may take more or less damage from a different class. The ground combat is the same, just with your officers. I've only played for a few hours so far, but it seems the maximum number of enemy or friendly units in a battle are three for each side. The game so far seems to be sufficiently challenging and fairly balanced. I've been playing on a difficulty right in the middle and it seems to be exactly where it should be. While there is a lot of stuff to learn, it doesn't seem overwhelming and I think even a casual gamer would be able to get into it fairly quickly. To be honest, the game reminds me a lot of the Star Trek series, right down to the random visits from other alien races to either taunt you or just share some information. I think any fan of science fiction would appreciate it. While I still prefer a fully 3D world, I would definitely recommend this game based on the gameplay, complexity, and just overall fun of playing it, especially if you're into RPGs, base building and managing, and science fiction.
The original Tie Fighter on floppy discs was my first space sim game and one of my first few PC games. This game captured the feeling of flying a Tie Fighter for the empire in deep space. It made me go through each mission uncovering the secret objectives to please the emporer and killing every rebel scum I could find! Get a joystick and this will provide hours of Tie Fighter greatness. It is a solid space sim game and, needless to say, gets Star Wars right. There are missions to search and destroy a squad of enemy fighters, defend another ship, defend a capital, attack a capital... it really never gets old.
This game continues the epic series and improves in every way. The graphics still hold up today and the gameplay is legendary. This is well worth the price for any action or shooter fan, and is mandatory for any Star Wars fan!
