X Rebirth

I don't usually leave reviews, but I had to this time. WTF happened here? I was playing the campaign, and didn't like the fact that you could only fly a single ship in it. Alright, time to go to free mode and see the other ships! Oops, there is only the skunk... You can't fly another ship in this game... only the skunk and some stupid drones. Please, give us a real X game next time.

X-Rebirth is atmospheric and personal - stations are unique and some are “world wonder” gorgeous in detail and scale, playership is versatile swiss knife of options, and combat & boarding is most satisfying and visceral in all of X games. For some QoL issues, mods are a must (easy to install via steam, and doesn’t affect achievements), and map and station building menus are mediocre at best. If coming from other X games, note the personal and smaller scale design: each station matters. Equipping crew, capturing ships, fleets, and station management all work great if you have only a few. With many, it’s too tedious, but then, that’s not where this game excels. My best game had 12 ships and 12 stations, max, over many hours assembled in background. It’s a shame reviews say “mixed” - I avoided X: Rebirth until 2022, when I finally got over learning cliff and realized it’s, hands down, one of my favorite X games, and I’m still baffled how much awesomeness didn’t carry over to X4 even if it’s same engine & sometimes even assets. X4 has great economy simulator, but X:R has a soul (although X4’s latest DLC: Tides of Avarice, gets back somewhat into personal feel of X rebirth)

This game is not X4. This game is a spinoff of the x series. It's clear to me now that egosoft released this game as a testing ground for X4. They were working on a new engine and discovered it was eating too many of their resources. So they needed to release a game in order to keep working on their new engine. Hence, X: Rebirth. A game they made in order to see what their engine was capable of. They then took everything they learned from making this game and made a better one: X4! Don't get me wrong, this game is good. It's not as bad as all the negative reviews are saying. Those people are just overreacting. Saying that though, this game has just been made redundant now X4 is released. Buy this game if you want to play the campaign or want to play every x game. But X4 is vastly superior. If you are only going to buy one x game: buy X4.

Game is still a piece of wank. Bought it when it came out in 2013. Tried playing it three times now, always still a buggy mess. Got stuck in the main quest hiring an engineer, after hiring one, game never recognised it. Also every time I undocked from my other ship, my smaller ship would glitch into its hanger bay and constantly bounce around bugging out for a few minutes until I glitched outside of it. The game is trash.

Nowhere near as bad as people want you to believe... I came back to X:R because X4's still horrible performance. The universe in X:R looks amazing, I also do like the station and ship designs and the economy actually works. The NPCs and station interiors are horrible, the minigames are total useless s#*!, hiring trade agents is a real PITA and the hidden lockboxes are a chore to find and yet I still recommend the game even in 2021. And that's because of the workshop mods. Use 'Trade Agents forever', all the 'Fly by ' mods, 'better highways', 'call crew in space', 'faster boarding', 'learning all the things' and 'player engineer' and you will have an excellent space sim experience......

First-person RPG with spaceships. You have found and are rebuilding a historically significant spaceship for use in trade, combat and exploration. Do trade or combat missions, interact with space stations and/or build your own, establish relations with multiple races, set up trade and shipping routes, get rich and famous. Own, rule, conquer, defend, exploit. Be all you care to be. Need to point out upfront that the text in this game is tiny, with no way to enlarge it. I spent half the time I played the game at a third of the distance from the screen that I normally use my computer at, trying to read subtitles, menu information, trade information, ship status and names of ships out in space. There were some status screens I flat-out couldn't read, I think having to do with materials I'd acquired. I don't know if this game is supposed to be an immediate sequel to the previous X game. If so, the previous X game left the universe very dusty. There's a dinginess to space, a grittiness depicted very clearly with high-rez graphics that serve to obstruct one's view while flying. The dust also picks up stellar glare, so that sometimes all you can see in front of you is a backlit ochre-colored cloud. The portal network, a staple of at least the first three X games, is gone, presumably destroyed. What's in place now are "highways", which apparently are tubes of warped space that can be flown through. The tubes gently undulate, and if you fail to manoeuver with them (perhaps because your vision is blinded by space grit catching glare) you get dumped out of the tube. You can re-enter the tube, but at least in the beginning it took me five tries to ride a tube out of a given system. Unlike X123, this is not just a spaceship game. You can dock at stations or large-enough ships and go run around in them, interacting with NPCs, who can be talked to, hired or traded with. The quality of the graphics in the stations and of the people in the stations is pretty good, but what it's depicting so well is generally grimy settings occupied by rather plastic people. The voice acting in the game doesn't overcome this; at least for me, the plasticky feel of the people made me think the voices were generated rather than performed. Interacting with NPCs isn't just a thing you can do; it's pretty much a requirement. In X123, you dock at a station with a repair facility and just get repairs, whether from a station menu or going to a particular place. In X Rebirth you need to find the Engineer...as in, the NPC that's qualified to do engineering. He might be anywhere. He might be in the cocktail lounge. He might be sitting on his bunk. He might be in jail. Wherever he is, you need to go to him and talk to him about fixing your ship. All told, if I want to introduce someone to the X games, I think it would be X3 rather than this. I'm sure the developers put a lot of work into this game...just not the work they needed to. Between not being able to read the screen and not being able to see past the well-rendered dust, I think this game is more trouble than it's worth. As an X successor it's disappointing; as a game in general it's annoying.

That's the first X game after X Beyond the frontier where I spent more than just a few hours. Many people say it's nothing like X3 or X4, and I think that's actually the great thing about it. It is simpler. To the point is actually playable with a controller and that's exactly the way I play it. Moreover, I play it on my Android phone (OnePlus 13) via Proton and box64 and get 20-30 fps just fine. Perfect couch gaming to relax. So far the story is engaging enough, and the gameplay is smooth and enjoyable. If you're looking for a Freelancer-like experience (and not for a spreadsheet simulator your typical X game is), give it a try.