Very early on there's a guy telling us "We're not here to have fun". He wasn't wrong. Timelines throws you into various situations. Some people are gonna like it, I'm not one of them.
The timeline missions are very enjoyable to play, even if you don't have much time. It's really fun to try out so many different play styles that you might never have tried otherwise.
I know the story of the X-Universe relatively well, but it's still very interesting to play it and read more about it.
The soundtrack is very good.
The dubbing is (as always) terrible, they really need to do something about it.
Just finished the entirety of the Timelines.
PROs:
+ some new missions to do
+ some unlockable ships for the sandbox, but You then need to find them in the sandbox universe each one in a particular sector (that is understandable, since it would probably ruin some starting scenarios by having a small fleet)
CONs:
- the missions are practically completely separated and they might as well be in separate universes
- there are various characters on the "space station" that You can talk to and it could have provided some continuity between missions with some character development, but it seems it was rushed by the authors
- I definitely do not recommend it to new players after the Basic Tutorial as the game tries to suggest, the missions do get hard and sometimes frustrating by design, not just bugs
If You want an economy sandbox play - X4 Foundations. If You want a story of a space pilot play - Endless Sky or even better X-Wing Alliance with some mods that upgrade it in every aspect.
It just left me with a feeling that the work spent on making this could have been better spent on a bunch of new assets and sandbox missions.
The timelines missions themselves are good for the most part, but some I found exasperating, annoying and obtuse. I laughed when I met the 'mission director' - I never expected to meet the guy who cost me so much time in the past when I tried making mods for x3.
What timelines does though more than anything for me is highlight X4's basic problems. Targetting being for me the worst problem that X4 has; if it worked as it did in the likes of X3 I'd be happy, but in X4 targettnig is jittery - skipping to useless targets - and often unhelpful when it refuses to target what I want. Then there is the problem of being forced to use weapons and ships I don't enjoy.
I don't think timelines is very new player friendly either - a lot of the timelines missions are quite advanced.
The story for timelines is as janky as previous x games, but I enjoyed it nontheless - it reminded me of a dead is dead playthrough I did on the egosoft forums many years ago. Some lore buffs I think will enjoy this DLC as there is some exansion of the x lore.
So timelines is a mixed bag - for some there won't be enough added to the sandbox to make this DLC worth it.
I bought the DLC to find out that there is no download for Linux yet. Also, I could not find a release date for Linux anywhere which is frustrating. I do not mind a preliminary release date being postponed when problems occur but not giving any information at all is not what I deem acceptable.