Recent reviews by sabotage

This game is such a travesty to the X franchise i had to write my first review (probably only).

If you are new to the X franchise you may actually find the game interesting for awhile before you find out just how shallow it really is. After the campaign there is NOTHING to do. And the campaign itselt is a bugridden nightmare of how not to create an interesting plot.

Lets go through its shortcomings:

1. The trade part of the game is, show stopping bugs aside, shallow. You, the player, are the only one who uses money for an example. Alot of the items being produced are for building ships. Which the shipyards will do regardless of if the NPC or the player orders any. It will simply churn ships out. If there was no need for it, the AI will take the ship out of sight and delete it from the game (literally). So there is no real "supply and demand" in function. If anything, its a plan economy which the soviet union demonstrated never worked. Yet they implement just that in X Rebirth - and oddly enough it doesnt work. How about that! Rating: 1/10

2. Fight... Well if you like fancy graphics and dont really care that your ship is superior in every way and can just "boost" (afterburn) its way out of any fight that starts to become challenging this game may be for you. Unless you play with a joystick - because they made an xbox controller the featured item for this game. (Yes this was supposed to have been an xbox release 3-4 years ago or so but obviously such a poor game that it was never allowed by MS to be released). You have no way of "tab targetting" as they apparantly think chasing icons on the edge of your field of vision is awesome - that apparantly is set to 60 degrees as well. If you are in a system with a red sun its almost impossible to keep track of said icons. You get the idea. And dont get me started on the whole drone thing. Terrible idea with a terrible implementation. Your so called "co-pilot" which was apparantly going to be piloting your ship while youre busy controlling a drone - doesnt. So you get your ass blown off. Brilliant. Rating: 2/10

3. Building stations was one of the interesting things in the past, as you could set up your own trade empire and compete over sectors if thats what you wanted. They have actually thought out of the box in a nice way this time, allowing you to make huge complexes. Great idea. But then they couldnt have you build your stations just anywhere. No there will be 2 maybe 3 slots where you can place it. So much for freedom. There is also the part about "why" you would want to build anything as you are the only one who needs money to fund stuff - and making money is extremely (too) easy. Rating: 3/10

4. Thinking about this game makes my heart hurt. I preordered this game because the X series had been a great experience for me in the past. It no longer is. The campaign is long and unrewarding. The economy is fake so there is no incentive to try and corner any part of the market or try to take a competing (enemy) corporation out. They have no money, they need no money, so they can never be "beaten". So what is there left to do? Nothing. Space combat boring and uninspiring. After a few boarding/captures of capital ships that gets boring too. The placefiller/timesink minigames makes you want to scream. About 1/3 of your time will be WASTED in the highways, in the past you could zoom past boring parts of the game with SETA which allowed you to increase time by factors up to 10 so you didnt have to sit and watch paint dry, sorry i mean wait patiently for your ship to arrive at the next destination so you can jump out of the highways. Rating: 2/10

Other parts of the game i will cover here:

Graphics: I will not lie, the new engine makes space look truly awesome. Stations, NPCs and the skunk itself is a whole other story. And you cant look around the cockpit nor look at your ship from the outside. So minus a few points there. It has a few issues (no doubt because it was programmed for the xbox360) where really high end machines run worse than medium/low end machine. But pretty thats for sure. put 1-2 points on when it gets bugfixed. Rating: 6/10

Music: Great as always, that is one of the parts of the game i always enjoyed. The beautiful score. Sound effects and the voice acting? Not so much, but i feel its adequate for this game. Rating: 7/10

Gameplay: It would probably be easier to say whats actually working for this game which is... nothing. Literally. I have sunk about 16 hours into this game and i havent felt like starting it up again for weeks. And i used to love the X series and have sunk hundreds of hours into them. This one was simply a money grab. That they burned any creditability they had with the X community, well thats just too bad. In Bernd Lehahn (owner of Egosoft) own words this was a "Huge success" on release. Yes indeed, saleswise it was. For 1 week. Then sales plummeted. Rating: 1/10

Overall: A very very bad excuse for an X franchise game. There is nothing to keep you playing like in previous installments. Its an empty, shallow excuse for a moneygrab. The only positive thing they can take from this is the new graphics engine - that even though its already aged - looks great (in space). The rest? A disaster. This game will quickly be forgotten - except for the bad memories it will bring back to the surface years into the future.

Rating: 2/10 - DO NOT BUY not even when its patched and put out on offer at 80% off. Buy X3:AP instead.