When reading about this game, you will undoubtedly encounter n large amount of negative reviews, which you should not take too seriously, and here's my take on why:
When playing space sims, people are used to being able to choose from multiple ships they can pilot. One day you feel like a nimble frigate, and the next you may want to fly a bulky capital. Unfortunately, this game only allows you to fly one ship, and a large number of the bad reviews are because of that.
That does not make the game bad.
Many of those bad reviews are also very outdated. The game has been well polished, and while it is not 100/% bug free, it is fully playable and I have not experienced any game-breaking bugs, however, my ship just gets very excited when I board it, and starts jumping up and down. Might be a bug, might just be a sentient ship, who knows...
If however, you are a fan of the concepts used in the X universe games (Space empire management, rather than just ship piloting sim) then you will find all those features in X Rebirth too.
While YOU can only pilot one ship, the game still has other ships for various tasks. These will be accessible to you for your own fleets, but not for you to pilot. It is a bit of a boo factor, but still, this game is great for me.
Also, you get a lot of upgrades for your ship, which helps add diversity.
I got X3:TC and was wowed, but being an old game, it does not utilize all CPU cores and will lag when your universe becomes very complex and densely populated, even on modern machines, and so, I looked at an alternative. I read that the successor to X3 was X4, and that X rebirth was bad, so I got X4.
X4 performs poorly in densely populated areas while not even loading my CPU or GPU to their max. I believe that is just a huge lack of optimization, and until it gets fixed or improved, I did not want to keep playing it, even though the gameplay itself was brilliant, so I looked at the other options again, and there weren't many, except for X Rebirth, which everyone said was bad, but I though, hey, people often have biased opinions based on irrelevant or outdated info, so lets just give it a shot and I'll see for myself.
I was not disappointed. I liked the graphics, the game runs smooth (like a baby's butt, if you're into that stuff)
and the Albion Skunk (the only ship you fly) is a pretty good ship even when you just start the game and have done 0 upgrades on it.
I can however say that the characters in the game are ugly AF. I mean, if you give me a female co-pilot, at least give me some eye-candy. And why is she so rude to the ships AI? All sentient life should be treated equally right?
EDIT: There are space highways, space traffic, and space tailgating too...
Anyway TL;DR - The game is good, don't take the negative reviews too seriously. The only major drawbacks are; the fact that you can pilot just one ship, and the fact that your co-pilot is not Sarah Kerrigan.
