Flight sims in the ’90s had better cockpit controls - at least give me a key to press to look out the side windows. You also can’t freely look around the cockpit, meaning you have to turn the ship if you want to see what’s around you. While flying your ship half the screen is obscured by the ship’s consoles, which have very little useful information on them. Even selecting menu items requires a double-click most of the time, which is really cumbersome. The interface is a complete mess, and doing anything requires a lot of unnecessary steps. When you talk to them they usually contort their necks into an uncomfortable position and stare at you with empty eyes that are fixated on something that isn’t you. There are only a dozen or so different character models, and they are repeated over and over again, and they usually have a voice coming out of them that doesn’t match the face. They look like humanoid robots that were rejected because they scared away children with their twitching and inhuman motions. While everything in space looks nice, once you see another character or walk inside a station, you’re met with horrible graphics and some bizarre design choices, like having your sidekick’s armor have a window for her cleavage, and almost every station has a strip club with freakish looking holo-dancers and posters of crudely-drawn butts.Īll the characters in the game are poorly animated with bad textures. I had this amazing moment where I docked my ship in a larger ship during a battle to try to repair my guns, and when I stepped off my ship I could still see the battle happening around me when I looked up. Flying near a capital ship to destroy its engines reveals how detailed all of the ships are up close, and it’s always nice looking when the ships explode into giant balls of fire. The ship designs are fantastic, and the station exteriors are highly detailed. It looks good, and everything is highly detailed, but there is nothing going on to warrant the appalling frame rates. Since it runs so poorly, you would think that this is a graphically impressive game with cutting-edge technology and effects, but it’s not. On top of bad frame rates, there is constant pausing and stuttering when you leave your ship, enter a highway, or just randomly because the game hates you. At best I would get 20 FPS, and that didn’t happen very often. My machine is decent, despite being a bit dated, and I was constantly dropping down into single-digit frames per second. Egosoft has come out in the forums saying it didn’t really test the game for high-end systems. And the hilarious thing is that the better your machine is, the worse it could run. The first thing you will notice, is that this game runs like a one-legged horse trying to win the Kentucky Derby. There are already mods out from fans to remove most of these features, or overhaul them completely, so that tells you how the changes went over with fans. X Rebirth was hoping to provide a good starting point for newcomers to the series by adding in station interiors, new trade systems, better ways to quickly move around space, and a handful of other features that no one really seemed to want. The newest games are difficult to get into, and they have a very steep learning curve. It has long been known to be an amazing sandbox series, which usually contains flaws that the community later fixes with mods. It’s a follow-up to the classic X series, which begin in 1999 with X: Beyond the Frontier. X Rebirth is an open-ended space exploration game, where you can trade, build stations, command a fleet, engage in dogfights, and become a space-faring mogul who rules over the galaxy. Instead, we have a game that scares away newcomers and upsets fans of the series. X Rebirth was supposed to be a new starting point for the series, a game to bring in new players while keeping the old spirit alive. There is some good stuff in here, but anything worth playing in X Rebirth was done better by X3: Terran Conflict. The menu systems are hard to navigate, it’s hard to know what you should be doing or what you can do, doing a simple task is an exercise in patience, and I always felt like I was fighting the game’s mechanics to get anything done. It’s more than just a few weird glitches or flaws - nothing in X Rebirth feels ready to be played.īeyond just being glitchy, the core gameplay mechanics are flawed. Egosoft has been releasing a lot of patches, but the game is still borderline unplayable. The X series is known for being a little rough out of the gate, so when X Rebirth came out with some major bugs, no one was really surprised.
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