X Rebirth

 PC
User Score
3.2

Generally unfavorable reviews- based on 1310 Ratings

User score distribution:
  1. Positive: 275 out of 1310
  2. Mixed: 111 out of 1310
  3. Negative: 924 out of 1310
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  1. Nasher
    Nov 16, 2013
    4
    The game is just lacking compared to the older ones. Theres also a lot of bugs, some gamebreaking (e.g. unable to progress with missions). The FPS content just seems pointless and cheaply done (theres about 3-4 different areas and character types that are re-used everywhere) theres only 1 flyable ship, the map makes no sense and the UI is awful, capships sometimes clip right throughThe game is just lacking compared to the older ones. Theres also a lot of bugs, some gamebreaking (e.g. unable to progress with missions). The FPS content just seems pointless and cheaply done (theres about 3-4 different areas and character types that are re-used everywhere) theres only 1 flyable ship, the map makes no sense and the UI is awful, capships sometimes clip right through stations instead of flying around, You don't seem to have much control over your fleet of NPC ships.

    If you want a good X game buy of of the previous ones. Even if this one gets fixed it's not great.    … Expand
  2. acroyer
    Nov 18, 2013
    4
    Good grief Egosoft! You definitely made a beautiful game but it's like looking at a nice toilet from the distance. Once you get up close you see the S*** stains and smell something really bad!

    We can only hope the modding community can make this game good!
  3. BBHill
    Nov 16, 2013
    4
    This game suffers from three things primarily: 1) Terrible Optimization, Performance, and general bugs 2) A staggering number of poor design decisions 3) Awful NPC modeling, interaction, and dialog/voice overs. Honestly if you had me play this and told me it was an alpha release I wouldn't argue with you.

    So let's start with number 1. This game appears to have never been tested to work    This game suffers from three things primarily: 1) Terrible Optimization, Performance, and general bugs 2) A staggering number of poor design decisions 3) Awful NPC modeling, interaction, and dialog/voice overs. Honestly if you had me play this and told me it was an alpha release I wouldn't argue with you.

    So let's start with number 1. This game appears to have never been tested to work by anyone. If the devs tested it they would have probably caught the fact that FPS drops don't just happen once in a while, they happen constantly to everyone. Doesn't matter if you have a $3000 state of the art PC or a six year old Dell you aren't going to have good FPS unless you get really lucky. One of the devs has admitted they never bothered to optimize for high end PCs on the Steam Game Forums. That tells you something right there about the state of this release. How do you not optimize a game before putting it out? That's like selling a brand new car where the engine has never been tuned to run properly, no one in their right mind does that. Add a mess of bugs that not only break the storyline but literally fling you millions of KM away from your destination or get your ship stuck inside of parts of the stations to that and you have the recipe right there for a massive failure of a game. That isn't all though.

    So number 2 is design. What do I mean by poor design decisions? I mean things like the fact that to interact with the game's NPCs and your own ship's systems and such you have to use a radial menu akin to the conversation wheel from Mass Effect. Yes a system designed entirely for a controller's ease of use on a modern day PC "exclusive." Which brings us to the fact that the mouse and keyboard are seemingly tacked on as an afterthought. Where most games use hotkeys for the keyboard this game basically gives you a handful, mostly for accessing maps and the radial menu and that is it. You can't just get to your inventory with I, no, you have to go through the radial menu. The mouse of course is hard to use due to the fact that all the icons are tiny and have to be double clicked if you intend to use it. Good luck. You can click at them several times before the game actually registers the double click.

    Now if you've finally managed to double click and get into dock you get to experience what might be the biggest failing of this game by far. The "Walking in Stations" feature. Coupled with the NPCs I will discuss in a second, you have roughly three layouts possible for interiors. Three. In 2013. In these stations you will find the vendors that let you sell the random crap you find in capsules that drop from popped ships and in the crates that are scattered throughout the station that no one seems to mind you stealing and also let you buy more random crap or upgrade your ship. You'll also find all your crew members in these stations. Mind you, you'll have to really hunt for them since each platform doesn't have each person and some of those people are not even available to hire despite being listed in the platform's little info window, who even knows why. Once you finally do hire one they go to your ship where you have to fly them to the ship you want them in, dock up, and go through the radial menu to tell them they work there now. Yes for every crew member and for every ship. Thank god you don't have to completely staff a cap ship will all the thousands of personnel it would probably require right?

    So one last design flaw before I move on to NPCs. Station outsides. They are big, they are beautiful, and they seem to be thriving with life from the outside. Yet their size combines with what has to be the most awful design idea ever to make them the most tedious part of the game. Seriously to dock up you have to find a platform designated by a symbol of what that platform supposedly is like a bar or something and get super close to it to even be able to interact with it to choose to dock. Same goes with scanning the station to get information, you have to get close to the little "i" bubbles or mission/trade icons to scan. This leads me to believe this system was designed solely to show off the pretty artwork and nothing else and makes using the stations take forever.

    So NPCs are downright just garbage. If you've played Everquest those NPCs are actually better than these and those things barely interacted at all and looked nothing like a human or whatever but at least they could move. These ones just stand still all the time and repeat the same terrible dialog over and over with what has to be the worst voice acting I've heard since the PS1. You'll hear your copilot repeat the same docking line every time you dock and your character will repeat "Show me your wares, please" every time you talk to a vendor. Yeah downright quality there.

    This all combines to make a game that is unimaginably horrid for 2013 or really even 2003. It is clearly meant for console porting and is nothing like the previous X games. Stay away.    … Expand
  4. Hardcard
    Nov 18, 2013
    4
    This is for Revolve, who has insulted all those who rated the game below 5 (as is my case).

    I'll start by describing the status of my last X3:TC saved game: 200 million credits (2 million credit profit every 5 minutes) Over a hundred factory complexes (over a thousand factories) Over 600 ships. Most plots finished. Maximum rank for all races. So no, dear Revolve, I'm not stupid    This is for Revolve, who has insulted all those who rated the game below 5 (as is my case).

    I'll start by describing the status of my last X3:TC saved game:
    200 million credits (2 million credit profit every 5 minutes)
    Over a hundred factory complexes (over a thousand factories)
    Over 600 ships.
    Most plots finished.
    Maximum rank for all races.

    So no, dear Revolve, I'm not stupid or a noob, and the savegame above proves I have patience and know my X3:TC pretty well.

    I find it funny that you delude yourself by thinking that peolple like me are posting biased reviews...
    I guess your statement "so please take these idiotic nerdrage reviews as the useless spur of the moment rage induced rubbish that they are, and read the 5 to 9 reviews for a more balanced viewpoint."
    isn't biased at all, right? You basically said this: If you fail X:Rebirth here, you are some nerdy idiot full of childish rage.
    LOL, I'm amazed that your review is still posted here...
    Do you know what I don't do? I don't usually reply to comments like yours, but I will make an exception this time, same as you seem to have done.

    I won't insult you just because you rated this a 9, you are entitled to your opinion, that's the point of this space. I could start trolling you about how could you rate a broken game that high, and so on, but I won't.
    I had to restart the campaign 3 times because, at some point, X:Rebirth decides to get stuck and not to activate the scripts that, theoretically, make the campaign advance, plus, savegames become corrupted pretty easily. I don't discard another campaign restart, by the way, because I think it got stuck again.
    But that's just me and thousands of others, don't worry, we are just idiots, right?
    So X:Rebirth runs fine in your rig? Congrats, there are plenty of people who aren't so lucky, it's not that they are what you called them, it's that X:Rebirth has many bugs and it crashes regularly, more easily than it should.
    Are you willing to rate this broken game a 9? Go for it, but don't insult me just because I'm not willing to pass a game that I can't play properly because it crashes and gets stuck at some point.
    I can't use my joystick, by the way...oh,but of course, as long as I can use keyboard+mouse, the game is absolutely great, right? The ship panel doesn't respond/disappears too often, the interface is limited, uncomfortable and it hides commands instead of presenting them in a clear way. Have you tried to trade? I've tried over 20 times during campaign play. When I do, the game gets stuck or crashes 80% of the times.
    An X game that doesn't allow you to trade and you expect me to pass it? Who the hell do you think you are? I really expect extensions will greatly improve UI, remote ship/factory management, etc. that's my hope, otherwise I'll be demanding a refund.
    Now let's talk about graphics. Exterior graphics are acceptable, but not great (most textures are average to low res and polygon count is too low in too many models). Environment models and textures are the best of the game from a visual standpoint, and yes, Egosoft made this one thing right.
    Interior and character textures/models, however, are a crime considering it's 2013...they were good in 2004, but that was long ago.
    What about performance? Do you even know what's my rig?
    Here you go:
    i7 2600k overclocked to 4.4Ghz
    gigabyte z68xp-ud4
    OCZ vector SSD 128gb (aligned,optimized, AHCI enabled)
    16gb ram
    gtx560ti 1gb

    I don't know about your rig, but mine runs pretty much any demanding game without incidents, it freaking flies.
    Well, X:Rebirth runs a little bit below par most of the time, but in hazy areas it starts lagging too much and, sometimes, it suddenly starts lagging for real (around 10 fps or even less) then it's time to relaunch the game. This is, clearly, some bug within X:Rebirth, for I've never experienced this kind of lag with any other demanding game...my rig has seen a lot of those and it always makes me proud.

    Is everything wrong in X:Rebirth? Thankfully no.
    -Ambience is, in my opinion, its top feature. Sector visuals are astonishing.
    -There is a high level of traffic in almost every sector and you have plenty of stations (station sections) to scan and explore also in 1st person (although interior graphics are bad and interaction is limited). I'm not sure it comes close to X3:TC/AP scale, though.
    -You can dock with your cap ships. You can watch the cap ship travel/fight from the dock while it gives you a ride to the desired sector. Also, now you can target/destroy/hack specific systems of cap ships, the same way you could do in the X-Wing sim saga.
    -While this is not necessarily a good thing, SETA has been replaced by powerful boost engines with limited duration. Now it takes much less time to cross a sector. Roads/highways have replaced jumgates, in case you like them.

    Regarless of these positive elements, I give it a 4. X:Rebirth has serious bugs that break the game and, for now, it doesn't deliver as promised.    … Expand
  5. Koreenium
    Nov 23, 2013
    4
    What can I say.... I am really disappointed in this game. :(
    Graphics are bad, the animations are bad, textures are made in a hurry or something because any beginner photoshop user could make textures like those or even better and the saddest part is that I am not kidding.
    Performance at the moment is terrible. I got like average 30 fps on med-high end PC. The story seems to be garbage.    What can I say.... I am really disappointed in this game. :(
    Graphics are bad, the animations are bad, textures are made in a hurry or something because any beginner photoshop user could make textures like those or even better and the saddest part is that I am not kidding.
    Performance at the moment is terrible. I got like average 30 fps on med-high end PC.
    The story seems to be garbage. Voice acting is not that great.
    I have not found anything positive worth mentioning     … Expand
  6. ProfessionalGuy
    Nov 15, 2013
    4
    kinda shocking how unfinished the game seems
    i got stuck twice in a station
    German voice act is for ****
    terrible interface
    no clue how to open the map with the game pad
    being locked to the one ship is a annoying
  7. DreadnoughtShan
    Nov 15, 2013
    4
    Very poor graphics, with high system requirements. Awkward control. Often crashes. No exploration. And it just boring.
    If you like X3 as i am you will be very disappointed.
  8. Zhorick
    Dec 9, 2013
    4
    I'm not an X series fan. I like it, played almost every game, but I don't have much time to dive deep in the universe. But I liked them. X series was a solid space sim. I think best in the genre. Until X Rebirth.
    I've waited it. They released it full of bugs. Ok, I can wait. I never blame any game for launch-time bugs. It happens, no big deal. So they fixed the majority of game-killing    I'm not an X series fan. I like it, played almost every game, but I don't have much time to dive deep in the universe. But I liked them. X series was a solid space sim. I think best in the genre. Until X Rebirth.
    I've waited it. They released it full of bugs. Ok, I can wait. I never blame any game for launch-time bugs. It happens, no big deal. So they fixed the majority of game-killing bugs and I started to play.
    And I got to say it's rather enjoyable. Beautiful space. Very detailed, nice graphics. Everything ends up in the first station. All interiors are awful. Very low detail, poor textures, character models from early 2000s. Why did they do that? Why they add this piece of ugliness in such a beautiful game? For what reason? And it would be ok if station walks were optional. But you have to dock to station to find job applicant or items trader. I guess in X Rebirth universe they forgot what internet is. Station walks is number one that makes this game bad. Looting the lockers? Is it a bad joke? I have my own spaceship and I need to run the station and crawl the vents to steal some credits or a space suit? Talking with people? Hmm, that makes sense. Until they repeat the same dialogue ten times.
    The second thing that kills the game is it's console origin. Every second you will realize that it's a badly ported console game. Controls, menus, interface, everything is for gamepad, not keyboard. I have more than a hundred keys and I still need to go to menu to switch HUD mode. And no free look. Of course, how can you implement free look on a gamepad? So you sit in your chair with lots of controls and screens in your spaceship and you can only look in front of you.
    Anyways, the game is fun if you will never visit stations. But you can't.
    I still think they can improve the game. If they only make station walks optional and make separate interface for console and PC versions the game will become playable and rather fun. Even with other minor issues like primitive combat or lack of interaction options with NPCs. I hope they make station walks optional and remake the interface. But I doubt they will. But until then it's a waste of money. Don't buy it.    … Expand
  9. T-1001
    Nov 25, 2013
    4
    Originally, I was going to write a lengthy review, but the best I can do without rambling is to give you 2 bullet-points and then summarize.

    1. Controls are too limited to make any sense. They seem to be designed for a console experience, but the game requires much more than what the control settings suggest, and besides, this is a PC exclusive. Why is this even a problem? 2. The UI    Originally, I was going to write a lengthy review, but the best I can do without rambling is to give you 2 bullet-points and then summarize.

    1. Controls are too limited to make any sense. They seem to be designed for a console experience, but the game requires much more than what the control settings suggest, and besides, this is a PC exclusive. Why is this even a problem?

    2. The UI is non-existent. None of the monitors have any necessary UI. How are you supposed to have a detailed space game without a comprehensive and intuitive UI? Well, Egosoft don't seem to know the answer either.

    So to summarize those 2 bullet-points: design.
    I'm guessing they wanted to make the game a bit friendlier to newcomers, which is a novel concept.
    In fact, I hate how un-friendly space games usually are, so this could have been my favorite of the whole genre.
    Of course, they f***ed up.

    So yeah, It's a VERY confused game. BIG disappointment.
    But I still have faith. I think they can retaliate with a massive patch. Or at the very least, with mods.
    Thankfully, there are several indie projects going on that might do a better job.    … Expand
  10. Pannon
    Dec 20, 2013
    4
    I reserved my review, until a throrough play-through of the game, trying to understand all the underlying mechanics and trying to understand how to play this game. I have finished the campaign (with the aid of mods) as well as I free-played for over 40hours to see how far I can take it and waited for the patches to fix the most crucial game-breaking bugs, that crippled the entire game andI reserved my review, until a throrough play-through of the game, trying to understand all the underlying mechanics and trying to understand how to play this game. I have finished the campaign (with the aid of mods) as well as I free-played for over 40hours to see how far I can take it and waited for the patches to fix the most crucial game-breaking bugs, that crippled the entire game and the plot.
    Unfortunately, even with my hardest of trying, I still can't give more than 4 out of 10, because it's not just the bugs. It's the design and features. I don't have to mention the taking up 1/3 of the entire screen with no display of useful info, beside my little HUD in the right corner, 80% of the time saying "no signal".
    There is no useful map of any sort, just sometimes the little HUD shows the zone map for a few seconds, when I click on a highway symbol or space station. Probably another feature, but bugged still. I'm no version 1.21, and while the performance improved and a bunch of bugs killed, the game is still a chore to play as well as the economy of the game dies off and ships will get stuck doing nothing if you let the game run for several hours. The core feature of the game supposed to be the economy, and yet it's dysfunctional to a point, that you soon will realize, that all the empire and space building you were planning all along (after the campaign or free play) may not going to work and you won't be able to pull it off, unless you constantly cheat with a save game editor. Regardless which sector or faction you are dealing with, you will run into a problem of the producing space stations starving of resources and refuse to sell their products, or perhaps their freighters will be stuck with a full load of products, that cannot be sold and they will be idling in space.
    Other times you come back to a favorite station to buy a product, only to realize, that the loading dock or whatever attached to the space station is halfway destroyed. Not by enemy vessels, but possibly just a ship getting stuck inside the station model and it desperately keeps ramming the station from the inside (of the 3D model) and the game registers the bumps as weapon hits. Another major crippling "design feature" is, when you visit stations and scan the space factory, the information regarding this factory and prices disappear after a few hours, while you are in another system. How am I supposed to play a trading game, if my contacts and product locations keep disappearing?
    See, I'm not even gonna get into the bugs and the performance problems and the highway nuisances. I'm just mentioning the "design choices", how they are alone making the game unplayable.
    I just can't play this like that. It's like playing a first person shooter game, where your allies shoot you dead before you begin the campaign. Or your gun fires backwards or you stuck in crouch mode in a place, where you supposed to be running. Or your top-view strategy game won't let you use a mouse.
    Whoever designed this game should really quit designing anything. His or her vision of what a playable game is just not sustainable and not desired by 99% of the people.    … Expand
  11. Wolverinemetacr
    Nov 15, 2013
    4
    Are these companies all going nuts. Sim City, Rome now this I swear after this year no one will preorder again. Before you release a game to us the consumer finish it. Ok review it is buggy the graphics are poor and I just cant get into it. Maybe down the road when they clean all this up. Nothing game breakingly bad just chill and wait till they get this squared away.
  12. Synd
    Nov 16, 2013
    4
    In short, if you are a true fan of the X series, don't bother with this game.

    To the developers: if you want to rely on the modders to fix your game, you should give them the tools quickly.

    Unoptimized
    No Joystick support (seriously, on a space sim)
    Hand-holding everywhere

    I hope I will revise my judgement in the next few months.
  13. StartRunning
    Nov 16, 2013
    4
    This is a beautiful game, filled to the brim with exploration and possibilities. It's a total shame, however, that a huge number of bugs are preventing me from enjoying it. It's clear that there's a game in there somewhere, and I realize people have been saying that the developers are good at patching and stuff, but it's really hard to recommend this game in this state.
    I am hopeful that    This is a beautiful game, filled to the brim with exploration and possibilities. It's a total shame, however, that a huge number of bugs are preventing me from enjoying it. It's clear that there's a game in there somewhere, and I realize people have been saying that the developers are good at patching and stuff, but it's really hard to recommend this game in this state.
    I am hopeful that with the right number of tweaks from the devs and modding community, I will get enjoyment out of this sapcesim, but now is not the time to try it. Very sorry.    … Expand
  14. Xuro
    Nov 15, 2013
    4
    I have higher FPS on Valley ultra HD and X Rebirth that alone says enough. this is like Black Prophecy release only this game isn't supposed to have server lag, this is not like any other X game at all.
  15. Nestea
    Nov 15, 2013
    4
    I love the X games. But X Rebirth is a huge step backwards compared to the previous titles. It has great potential but is very poorly executed. I hope the developers fix those bug and improve the performance or this was the last X game I ever bought.
  16. knitetemplar
    Nov 15, 2013
    4
    I thought the game would be more polished on launch for the amount of media hype associated with the game.

    1) Poor FPS and resource optimization compared to other more recent titles (albeit there appears to be more objects in view at any given time than most games) 2) UI is simple, but simply tedious. 3) Voice acting and dialogue is an embarrassment. Dialogue often seems more    I thought the game would be more polished on launch for the amount of media hype associated with the game.

    1) Poor FPS and resource optimization compared to other more recent titles (albeit there appears to be more objects in view at any given time than most games)

    2) UI is simple, but simply tedious.
    3) Voice acting and dialogue is an embarrassment. Dialogue often seems more like filler between the rare occasions when what the NPC's have to say actually matters. Ironically, my co-pilot telling the computer to shut-up is more grating than the ships computer speaking in the first place, a failed attempt at self-deprecating humor on the part of Egosoft, who seem to be acknowledging the short comings of past title's dialogue.

    4) Game systems like trading may be simpler in theory, but turns out to be more cumbersome in practice. This is probably exasperated by the "NPC" menu system which isn't any less confusing than previous title's menu systems, andisn't made any easier by the built in short-cuts and nested menu's.

    5) No targeting keyboard controls? Really? (I was really surprised by this one) Target foe, target friend, squad-mates, etc? Seems basic for a space sim.
    6) Game crashes. This, believe it or not is less of an issue for me, since it is purely a technical issue to overcome, rather than an issue of misaligned vision or foresight.

    I have more concerns, but those are my primary issues.

    Why did I give it a 4 instead of lower score? Because I believe in the heart of the game, which at its core, captures the imagination of those who want a living, breathing world, where your imagination is the limitation of your game experience. Perhaps as some of these issues get addressed, I would give X Rebirth a higher score.

    I really like this series, I am hoping future patches and improvements improve the game play. I think Egosoft fell victim to the whining of the casual player who's needs and interests are very different than those willing to dig into the nitty-gritty details of a simulation. Unfortunately there are more of the former than the latter...    … Expand
  17. Zworykin
    Nov 15, 2013
    4
    Game has a huge technical issues. Main one being low frame rates. You can spend an hour adjusting settings but most people will not go above 15 FPS when flying close to stations even with pretty decent PCs. It is like the developers did not take time to install to game to a test computer and checked how it would be running.
  18. Glamredhel
    Nov 15, 2013
    4
    This game is broken and is an insult to the simulation genre.

    It's an arcade game posing as a simulator. Your ship has 0 functions. You just fly through space and shoot stuff if it appears in front of you. You have no radar, no ability to lock onto anything without manually clicking on it, no cycling targets, etc. You have no way to know if an enemy ship in combat is coming up behind    This game is broken and is an insult to the simulation genre.

    It's an arcade game posing as a simulator. Your ship has 0 functions. You just fly through space and shoot stuff if it appears in front of you. You have no radar, no ability to lock onto anything without manually clicking on it, no cycling targets, etc. You have no way to know if an enemy ship in combat is coming up behind you unless it starts shooting at you. There is zero situational awareness.

    And on top of that there was obviously no quality control because half the missions in the game are broken and require reloading and trying over and over again to get them to luckily continue. The first hour of the game took me about 3 hours to get past due to constantly relaoding upon hitting mission breaking bugs.

    Don't waste your money.    … Expand
  19. Altrue
    Nov 16, 2013
    4
    After three hours of gameplay, including a crash that made me loose the first hour (yes, 60 minutes lost) by making me start the campaign again, I can certainly say that the game doesn't lack potential but was released in an unfinished state. It's buggy, missions and tutoriels are sometimes unintuitive, the AI flying the other ships of your squad is 80% of the time not working...

    Apart    After three hours of gameplay, including a crash that made me loose the first hour (yes, 60 minutes lost) by making me start the campaign again, I can certainly say that the game doesn't lack potential but was released in an unfinished state. It's buggy, missions and tutoriels are sometimes unintuitive, the AI flying the other ships of your squad is 80% of the time not working...

    Apart from all the things that might have been fixed with more development time, I have to say that the game currently also have poor game design decisions. The whole 1st person thing, the inability to be able to fly other ships, poor overall ergonomy of the interface, poor overall usability of trade interfaces.

    Also, in my opinions the graphics haven't progressed from the previous iteration of the X series, they are dull, they lack colors and overall they are just not pretty. Poor FX, poor backgrounds...

    The game is still "fun" to discover when its not bugging, but only because good space operas are lacking currently, and it certainly does not deserve more than a 4/10. Not at this price.    … Expand
  20. Edstalker
    Nov 16, 2013
    4
    I love space sim games, I was really waiting for this game but its a disappointment. Performance issues for me considering I have gtx770 and i74770k, game runs badly, dog fights are hard bc the whole vision just somehow blurs when maneuvering the ship, hard to keep track of whats going on. Didnt like the whole fast travel thingy, just jump gate over jump gate, they over done it, comparedI love space sim games, I was really waiting for this game but its a disappointment. Performance issues for me considering I have gtx770 and i74770k, game runs badly, dog fights are hard bc the whole vision just somehow blurs when maneuvering the ship, hard to keep track of whats going on. Didnt like the whole fast travel thingy, just jump gate over jump gate, they over done it, compared to X3, that encouraged exploration, I loved the long distance flying, it added to the game.
    Game feels like a mess, clunky tutorial easy to miss lots of important tips and parts, horrible NPC's look like bad voice acting, waste of time walking the ships, pointless really, it takes time I dont wanna lose doing useless stuff, Traveling the station "stealing" loot and crawling vents didnt make sense to me, stupid AI, the UI is behh, the side screen where u check information and such gives me a headache, each time u want to check something, the players checks it on the side screen, should have left it on the main front screen in my opinion. So ofc there are bugs and its reasonable but all those things together just ruin the experience I wanted to get, Ill be wating for updates, as for now Im not interested in the game, played for 2 hours and Im disappointed. I did tried to enjoy it, but so far Im not impressed.    … Expand
  21. X3R1
    Nov 16, 2013
    4
    I played for about 3 hours, got through two combat scenarios as well as fiddled with the maps, the trade interface, and pretty much every feature I could get my hands on in the first section of the game.

    Graphics are quite bad. The backdrops and some of the artistic aspects are done nicely, however poor lighting effects and textures that came out of someone's rear end really dampen the    I played for about 3 hours, got through two combat scenarios as well as fiddled with the maps, the trade interface, and pretty much every feature I could get my hands on in the first section of the game.

    Graphics are quite bad. The backdrops and some of the artistic aspects are done nicely, however poor lighting effects and textures that came out of someone's rear end really dampen the experience. The graphics while docked in station or large ship are simply unacceptable.

    In terms of your actual ship control it is quite enjoyable. The ship reacts well to joystick inputs and shooting is similar fun to previous titles.

    Targets... oh boy. You can no longer cycle through targets, select only enemy targets, or shoot at other ships while keeping target elsewhere. In it's current state you feel quite lost in space and navigating or fighting a swarm of enemies does not feel as immersive as a result. You would have to have played previous X games to realize just how important target management is. We'll see in time how it plays out, as of now I do suspect it will be a major problem.

    The interface is perhaps what could become the ultimate gamebreaker here. They have basically reduced functionality by a large margin all while making the interface more clunky and bonky than before. Where as before we had grid-like interfaces with many options available, what we are left with now is a very dumbed-down, overly flashy, unintuitive mess. The maps are borderline unusable, providing a fraction of the function the previous maps did. Ship commands, fleet commands, trading, bartering and such used to be a simple matter of a few clicks or a hotkey, but now involve pointless waiting and navigating through tedious menu options.
    The real kicker: They've stripped away the vast majority of the hotkeys from previous titles and removed the ability to assign more than 1 key to a function.

    Ability to progress time has been removed it seems. I did enjoy simply progressing time quicker for game environment purposes. Stargates have been changed with a super highway. It's a nice way to travel between zones, you can slipstream and even shoot ships on the highway.

    I have not checked out much about the trading mechanics so can't speak too much to that. However having to walk around pathetically textured, identical stations and interact with poorly voiced, HL2-esque NPC models does not seem like something enjoyable in the long run no matter how fascinating the trade mechanics may be. Leaving my ship honestly makes me want to pluck my eyes out; interacting with the NPCs makes me want to pull out a gun and end it all.

    Inability to use more than the one ship you start with is a big let down, I prefer the slower boats that handle more poorly and for a game that is primarily, for many players, about enjoying the engine in combat, a true sandbox game in 2013 would offer the ability to use different ship types as X2/X3 did.

    Overall it feels like many of the core features particularly in how they present themselves via the interface have been dumbed-down with functionality reduced or removed entirely.
    I do believe there is a solid underlying game here. Whether or not the ridiculously awful interface, targeting system, and other setbacks can/will be fixed will likely decide how playable the game is in the long run. I will be giving it another chance tomorrow and we'll see how it goes!    … Expand
  22. StraightsJacket
    Nov 16, 2013
    4
    At their core X games have always been rather difficult games to learn and to master. X Rebirth is EGOSOFTS attempt to create a more friendly experience for new players. While they meet that expectation in some areas, they sacrifice much of the immersion from their previous games.
    For one EGOSOFT did a big space/flight game no-no by focusing more on control-pad based interactions.    At their core X games have always been rather difficult games to learn and to master. X Rebirth is EGOSOFTS attempt to create a more friendly experience for new players. While they meet that expectation in some areas, they sacrifice much of the immersion from their previous games.
    For one EGOSOFT did a big space/flight game no-no by focusing more on control-pad based interactions. Navigating the UI feels rather slow and clunky using a keyboard/mouse and joystick setup. Many of the game choices and menus are navigable through XBOX like circular menus. Their settings->controls menu is very unintuitive making it rather difficult to map hot keys.
    In previous games a simple hot key could get you to any screen you wanted to get to quite easily. In X Rebirth, however, you must navigate through their circular menus multiple times to get to many of the options.
    Gone are the days of setting up a ship course and auto piloting to your destination while you keep a sector map up to look out for hostiles. Any menu actions you take from navigating to trading causes your character to swivel in his seat and focus on a small panel to the right.
    Graphics are a huge improvement over the other games, a lot more detail was placed in creating the over world. However when you actually dock at a couple stations you'll find they are just cookie-cutters of each other. Item placement, NPCS, consoles are all often in the exact same places. NPCs themselves are static, they stand in one place like a mannequin. Their dialog is awkward, short and choppy, and asking them questions will often net you an insult. I would say this is an improvement over other NPCs interactions in the previous games, however it is just so.
    The plot itself is rather uninteresting and your side character is a rather cliche female companion. If you choose the campaign option, you are locked into the plot so don't expect to go empire building just yet.

    Overall the X Rebirth should have just stayed in the womb.
    Luckily EGOSOFT has a good reputation in continually supporting their games so hopefully we will see some changes. The X modding community is second to none and I expect a lot of improvements to the whole game to come from that community. But as a base game I can only give X-R a 4.    … Expand
  23. metnavman
    Nov 16, 2013
    4
    In a space simulation series where the best parts have been how awe-inspiring and powerful you can make your ships and your empire, X Rebirth leaves you simply feeling like a mediocre cog in a machine that's been hacked together using spare parts. Beautiful backdrops and a strong soundtrack will not save this watered-down attempt at a console game, which appears to have been back-pedaledIn a space simulation series where the best parts have been how awe-inspiring and powerful you can make your ships and your empire, X Rebirth leaves you simply feeling like a mediocre cog in a machine that's been hacked together using spare parts. Beautiful backdrops and a strong soundtrack will not save this watered-down attempt at a console game, which appears to have been back-pedaled into a PC game over a 7+ year development cycle.… Expand
  24. runtime13
    Nov 17, 2013
    4
    After i played this title, I have some questions: Why I bought this game? Why EGOSOFT has created a game so outrageous? This software is not up to other space games. X3AP is better than this game. Even Evochron is better than this title. My only regret is the fact that the game is on STEAM, otherwise it would sell right away. DON'T BUY. For italian player: NON COMPRATELO!!! NON VALE IAfter i played this title, I have some questions: Why I bought this game? Why EGOSOFT has created a game so outrageous? This software is not up to other space games. X3AP is better than this game. Even Evochron is better than this title. My only regret is the fact that the game is on STEAM, otherwise it would sell right away. DON'T BUY. For italian player: NON COMPRATELO!!! NON VALE I SOLDI CHE COSTA!… Expand
  25. SjadoHawk
    Nov 17, 2013
    4
    There are a lot of mixed emotions about this game. Based entirely on it's own, this is a nice looking game with many problems that will be addressed in patches over the 3 to 6 months I would expect.

    However a lot of the frustration that is showing comes from the fact that most of these gamers have waited years for a game that EgoSoft kept delaying stating that they wanted to make sure    There are a lot of mixed emotions about this game. Based entirely on it's own, this is a nice looking game with many problems that will be addressed in patches over the 3 to 6 months I would expect.

    However a lot of the frustration that is showing comes from the fact that most of these gamers have waited years for a game that EgoSoft kept delaying stating that they wanted to make sure they released a polished product. For those gamers, this product fell well below the standards they were expecting from EgoSoft after playing other X series games.

    I won't give it a 0 but 4 is fairly accurate in it's current state in my opinion of course.    … Expand
  26. krikkeljan
    Nov 18, 2013
    4
    It would've been better if they stuck to some of the old and trusted ways of doing things, but they're trying something new and are obviously a smaller team of developers and thus things don't always work out. They decided to listen to feedback from the previous games, and a lot of that feedback has found its way into this game.

    The things that bother me the most at the moment after 5    It would've been better if they stuck to some of the old and trusted ways of doing things, but they're trying something new and are obviously a smaller team of developers and thus things don't always work out. They decided to listen to feedback from the previous games, and a lot of that feedback has found its way into this game.

    The things that bother me the most at the moment after 5 hours of playing are the UI and walking around on stations. The latter is a nice feature that a lot of people wanted, but it's not implemented well. Plus the interactions only get better the more you drink... beverages of an alcoholic nature .
    And returning to your ship, I don't understand the constant need of your co-pilot to show off her cleavage.

    The UI is just disgraceful, but again a lot of feedback regarding the earlier complexity moved the developers towards a silly console like approach. This is sad... as well as the already mentioned lack of keyboard shortcuts and what not. Getting around in the game at the moment is still very frustrating.

    As of yet I don't have the X feeling with this game. I find it to be a different game. It's not horrible but it certainly isn't good.... yet. The developers will fix things with time, but as the team is small it will take a bit of time.    … Expand
  27. TheMeph
    Nov 18, 2013
    4
    12 hours in and most of that was spent trying to get the ship AI to do their jobs. Miners wont mine, traders won't trade, nobody will do anything unless you find some complicated workaround. Completely broken and unplayable. There is no way to proceed unless all you want to do is shoot your 1 gun.
  28. Vanadyel
    Nov 20, 2013
    4
    Never played any X games, did not check the news and I like the genre (loved Freelancer) so there is no "fanboy" factor in my opinion.
    Graphics are unoptimised, my rather good computer has constant 10fps near busy space stations no matter if I set the graphics to minimum. Ther UI is one of the worst I've ever used: slow, messy, counter-intuitive. Crashes regularly, even after the hotfix.    Never played any X games, did not check the news and I like the genre (loved Freelancer) so there is no "fanboy" factor in my opinion.
    Graphics are unoptimised, my rather good computer has constant 10fps near busy space stations no matter if I set the graphics to minimum. Ther UI is one of the worst I've ever used: slow, messy, counter-intuitive. Crashes regularly, even after the hotfix.
    It is very sad since this game has a great potential: a very immersive universe and a rather good soundtrack. You can visit your ship that has 1 room. You can talk to and hire a lot of different characters... but a lot of them have the same voice and lines (oh jeez I wanna kill the copilot who says always the same thing when you're docking).

    Welcome to X Rebarf.    … Expand
  29. fullmetaltojo
    Nov 20, 2013
    4
    Where to start with this game. Is it broken? Yes. Does it feel unfinished? Mostly certainly. Does it have problems? Without a doubt. Is it worth buying in it's current state? No. But that's not to say that it doesn't have it's good points. It doesn't currently have many, the one's it does are buried under layers of poor design choices and if not game-breaking bugs,Where to start with this game. Is it broken? Yes. Does it feel unfinished? Mostly certainly. Does it have problems? Without a doubt. Is it worth buying in it's current state? No. But that's not to say that it doesn't have it's good points. It doesn't currently have many, the one's it does are buried under layers of poor design choices and if not game-breaking bugs, having-to-find-a-way-to-make-this-work ones.

    As mentioned in most other reviews, the ability to walk around space stations is a novel idea, it's just horribly implemented here. The NPCs are ugly, the corridors are repetitive, the general thievery allowed is baffling and the textures are low-res.

    Outside the stations the vista's are much improved, if not a bit cluttered. This is space where no-one allowed for the fact that space is HUGE by shoving everything into a tiny area and linking things by gaudy highways. Despite only using DX9 the environments can be strikingly beautiful, when the textures aren't tearing. And travelling between sectors is fun, the highway mini-game is a nice idea, again an idea that doesn't quite work because your beautiful view is taken up with a badly textures ship in front, sometimes that you are half-way clipped into.

    Combat is fun, if not extremely hampered by the massive restriction in POV, no way to lock onto nearest targets and lack of radar. Yes it's a space game. With no radar. Another baffling design choice. Also when being attacked outside of space stations your are punished for self defense as if you were the original aggressor. Frustrating!

    Trade is. Well I'll let you know if I can get it to work. Currently I'm hampered by the fact that my ships keep disappearing from my owned ships list. It's hard to trade when you are lacking a means to do so.

    Egosoft seem to be patching things up at a nice pace, even if the patches don't seem to be addressing, in my mind, the biggest flaws in the game. It's currently a 4 in my book, has the potential to improve. But it has a long, long gaudy yellow highway ahead of it.    … Expand
  30. steelgrey75
    Dec 16, 2013
    4
    Well I personally have been massively disappointed with this game. I can accept that they wanted to make the game a little more action orientated, and that they thought streamlining it would make the game playable to more users, but I can't accept the end product.
    I have played for 60 hours, free play, I stopped campaign after about 2 hours of play due to bugs and the storyline is boring    Well I personally have been massively disappointed with this game. I can accept that they wanted to make the game a little more action orientated, and that they thought streamlining it would make the game playable to more users, but I can't accept the end product.
    I have played for 60 hours, free play, I stopped campaign after about 2 hours of play due to bugs and the storyline is boring and uninspiring. In those 60 hours I tried to establish a trade empire, just as I used to in the other X games, and build up a fleet. The trading is tedious, having to constantly fly around looking for offers that expire after an hour or so and need to be done again. The money earned from trading is insignificant to boarding and selling captured ships, even long range scanning earns you more money than trading does, so whats the point in it?
    Fleets are useless, with no offensive commands or navigational orders. The ships just follow you along through enemy sectors getting blow up by fighters.
    Boarding has been made easier to the point that is no challenge. There is not an enemy in the game that makes me afraid, not one. Boarding used to be about careful planning and detail, gathering ships together, massing the ships at as et point and then executing your boarding. It was hard, it was dangerous, but it was fantastic when you pulled off a good one. I don't get any feeling of satisfaction from boarding in Rebirth, its mindlessly simplistic.
    The UI is horrific, even with a 360 pad, with multiple layers in radial menus. They said they made it this way because the old UI was bad, it was a hundred times better than what it is in this game, it couldnt have been done any worse.
    Station interiors. Well the idea sounds good, and done right it could be amazing. What we ended up with was a load of cut and paste nasty looking station interiors, populated by static NPC's that look like they come from the PS1. Conversation mini games, crawling through air ducts to open red boxes, pointlessly silly things that simply do not belong in a space sim.
    Space. Well its pretty enough, its not amazing but it is certainly good. The stations look good. Combat seems great at first, more like an ace combat style. Soon though it becomes apparent that your never going to have to face that many enemies at once, just small groups, mostly single fighters spaced far apart. They also are very easy and you kill them with no harm to yourself. Not having any control over targeting is bad too as you frequently lose the lock on the target you want and often then lose track of it completely. If you attacked from anywhere other than directly in front of you you'll never know its coming until you are hit.
    The skunk. One ship need not be that bad if done properly, with a large array of upgrades and weapons to choose from it can be very good actually. Yet we ended up with hardly none of that. The choice of upgrades and weapons is pathetic. The is welcome back, but in doing so all other views have been dumped and you can only look straight ahead which kills the immersion and makes awareness impossible, you dont even know whats behind you. Of course I have to mention the "copilot" whose only piloting abilities are to dock the ship. Mindless lines of drivel spouting out of her mouth, an irritating and pointless distraction.
    Exploration is made all that much harder with the new map that is very difficult to read and is not interactive, not even allowing you to select a target which in busy systems is sorely missed as finding some ships can be a nightmare.
    There are those that say in months to come it will be better, and a lot of bugs ironed out and improvements made. However I'm reviewing the game today, not in the future, and today I think its worth no more than 4/10.    … Expand
  31. AdrianChiru
    Dec 23, 2013
    4
    What should have been a revolution turned into a devolution. Egosoft promises of a living world that moves and changes with you still remain promises under a million of bugs. The game has received a lot of patches and will receive a lot more but I fear this will not fix the bad design decisions already made.
  32. islesofurth
    Nov 19, 2013
    3
    The beautiful trailer and dynamic promises this game has to offer is nothing compared to the actual game-play that a player experiences when they enter the world that is X Rebirth.
    There is no tutorials or advise on how to get started aside from the quest objectives and popups that either don't stay long enough to read or stay to long and obstruct your vision.
    This game had alot of    The beautiful trailer and dynamic promises this game has to offer is nothing compared to the actual game-play that a player experiences when they enter the world that is X Rebirth.
    There is no tutorials or advise on how to get started aside from the quest objectives and popups that either don't stay long enough to read or stay to long and obstruct your vision.

    This game had alot of potential in the making however alike many games that could have been great it was simply released to soon.    … Expand
  33. Rucyn
    Nov 25, 2013
    3
    Played for around 7 hours, mainly playing the story. When I wasn't crashing or the AI being unresponsive it was mediocre. No where near what the other X games were. The 3 I give it is only for Graphics (Not Character Models) and Sound, they're okay. They should have stuck with what their fan-base wanted.
  34. CalUKGR
    Nov 15, 2013
    3
    This is a huge disappointment: the game is janked. I have a PC that can comfortably run just about anything, including all the most recent triple-A titles with ease. Rebirth has serious problems keeping frame rates above 20, sometimes dipping well below. Incredibly (as if to add insult to injury), there are NO external camera views this is a baffling omission in a space sim, did theThis is a huge disappointment: the game is janked. I have a PC that can comfortably run just about anything, including all the most recent triple-A titles with ease. Rebirth has serious problems keeping frame rates above 20, sometimes dipping well below. Incredibly (as if to add insult to injury), there are NO external camera views this is a baffling omission in a space sim, did the developers forget or just not bother?

    Absolutely dreadful if the developers are prepared to patch this game it MAY survive this launch debacle, but as things stand there are many, many angry gamers flaming the Steam forum right now and with very good reason.

    Egosoft need to up their game and put in some serious effort to rescue Rebirth from an early death.    … Expand
  35. kotekzot
    Mar 14, 2015
    3
    Despite having been released over a year ago and receiving many patches, the game still severely underperforms on high-end hardware and does not have compelling gameplay. Expect to spend 80% of your play time flying back and forth through transparent space tubes, 10% flying around space stations within 10 meters of the hull to scan information points and giving trade orders to your ships,Despite having been released over a year ago and receiving many patches, the game still severely underperforms on high-end hardware and does not have compelling gameplay. Expect to spend 80% of your play time flying back and forth through transparent space tubes, 10% flying around space stations within 10 meters of the hull to scan information points and giving trade orders to your ships, and the last 10% pew-pewing spaceships with one weapon at a time.

    Here are some of the game's shortcomings:

    * Boring gameplay consisting mostly of flying through space tubes, as if you're playing some sort of public transit passenger simulator rather than a space game.
    * Vastly fewer weapon options with no ability to fire multiple weapons simulatenously.
    * You can only pilot one ship unlike previous games, where you had hundreds of choices in many ship categories, from scouts to carriers to freighters.
    * All objects in space are inexplicably surrounded by protective bubbles that absorb all damage from collisions, making the few precious moments spent outside space tubes even less exciting.
    * A lot of tasks needlessly require the player's presence, such as chauffeuring ship officers from stations to the ships where they are to work.
    * When talking to NPCs, you must wait for them to finish talking before your commands take effect, given the fact that a particular zone may have dozens of NPCs of the same type offering their services, this makes finding specific goods very annoying.
    * You are forced to use a cockpit, wasting 30% of your screen on what is essentially a static model with some flashing lights here and there. A discreet HUD overlaid on an unobstructed view of space would be vastly superior for many players.
    * The draw distance is depressing, with objects conspicuously popping in as you travel inside space tubes.
    * The 4 different sectors are basically palette swaps of each other with a few cosmetic differences (a cracked planet here, some space debris there, etc).
    * The script and voiceovers quite obviously weren't done by native speakers, resulting in strange and immersion-breaking dialogue and pronunciation.
    * Character models and station interiors are very low-quality.
    * The Teladi look like E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial. This would be funny if it weren't so tragic.
    * Your co-pilot's jumpsuit has an embarrassing boob window that betrays a lack of respect for the playerbase.

    The game does feature a few improvements, however they hardly justify all its shortcomings:

    * Capital ship components can be damaged individually, adding depth to capital ship combat.
    * More piracy options, now you can not only extort and salvage enemy ships, but also hack them to release cargo.
    * Station complexes now exist as superstructures rather than individual stations connected by spaghetti strands.    … Expand
  36. bboydp
    Nov 15, 2013
    3
    First off, the graphics are nice when running smoothly, but that is about as far as this game goes on the PC, the voice acting is like a terrible joke, the controls are half-assed, and the UI is disorganized. The game looks like it could be beautiful and the controls could be fixed, but unless that happens, this game is not worth your time or money. This game needs to have an overhaul,First off, the graphics are nice when running smoothly, but that is about as far as this game goes on the PC, the voice acting is like a terrible joke, the controls are half-assed, and the UI is disorganized. The game looks like it could be beautiful and the controls could be fixed, but unless that happens, this game is not worth your time or money. This game needs to have an overhaul, then lets reconsider.… Expand
  37. Mortensus
    Nov 16, 2013
    3
    It's not the perfect game i hoped, at least not right now, but it's good nevertheless.

    I know they will listen to their customers, and i also put faith in the modding community so i can accommodate this game to my personal taste, put so far it's "good". The thing that is bugging me a little is that they insisted very much in the "immersion" but that part, the crew management, walking    It's not the perfect game i hoped, at least not right now, but it's good nevertheless.

    I know they will listen to their customers, and i also put faith in the modding community so i can accommodate this game to my personal taste, put so far it's "good".

    The thing that is bugging me a little is that they insisted very much in the "immersion" but that part, the crew management, walking in the stations, talking with pnj, that part was really poorly executed boring for me, way too repetitive, and the voice actor...

    The flying part is very enjoyable.

    I can't recommend to buy this game full price if you are not a "fan", but i don't feel robbed so far because after some hours, i know i have only scratched the surface.    … Expand
  38. TheAtomicOption
    Dec 29, 2013
    3
    This game has some incredibly fun moments that are absolutely ruined by the ridiculous number of bugs, terrible UI, and lack of information about how the UI works.

    This game has some moments that reminded me of the great classic Freelancer. The graphics are decent. You can trade stuff between zones to make money. You use highways and gates and it takes time to get around which makes    This game has some incredibly fun moments that are absolutely ruined by the ridiculous number of bugs, terrible UI, and lack of information about how the UI works.

    This game has some moments that reminded me of the great classic Freelancer. The graphics are decent. You can trade stuff between zones to make money. You use highways and gates and it takes time to get around which makes the universe feel big.

    But you can't trade, cause your freighter won't follow orders, and your computer only remembers available trades for an hour. There are some important orders for crew and captains that just plain aren't there (like hold position or goto zone X without me). Some main plot missions can't be finished without editing your save file manually, and the game occasionally hangs or crashes straight to the desktop.

    The combat is probably the best part. Fly around like in freelancer and shoot stuff. But boarding capital ships is pretty broken. Often your marines will all die while you're following the instructions perfectly with no explanation.

    Bottom line: this game has the potential to be great, but it needs another year of quality development time before it'll be worth the money.    … Expand
  39. Xehlwan
    Nov 15, 2013
    3
    The game has huge potential, and has everything you love from the previous X games.
    Unfortunately, the experience is marred by terrible performance, blatantly bad graphics for anything that isn't a spaceship or backdrop, and a UI that is even worse than the dated one used in previous games.
    Add the frequent crashes, and other numerous odd design decisions, and this game is sadly best    The game has huge potential, and has everything you love from the previous X games.
    Unfortunately, the experience is marred by terrible performance, blatantly bad graphics for anything that isn't a spaceship or backdrop, and a UI that is even worse than the dated one used in previous games.
    Add the frequent crashes, and other numerous odd design decisions, and this game is sadly best avoided for the time being.    … Expand
  40. Squicker
    Nov 15, 2013
    3
    Game is not ready for release. It is bug riddled, performance is atrocious even on Core i7 GTX780 and there is no proper joystick support, only gamepad! The graphics are dated, I'd place this game somewhere about 5 years ago, and the character models are awkward. The dialog is stilted and delivered by very poor voice actors.

    There is a tutorial but it is unintuitive. It is great    Game is not ready for release. It is bug riddled, performance is atrocious even on Core i7 GTX780 and there is no proper joystick support, only gamepad! The graphics are dated, I'd place this game somewhere about 5 years ago, and the character models are awkward. The dialog is stilted and delivered by very poor voice actors.

    There is a tutorial but it is unintuitive.

    It is great there are so many buildings with different modules to inspect etc, and the game is clearly brave in terms of scope, but the implementation is very weak indeed.

    I've actually asked for a refund for my game as this is not the game that Egosoft are advertising.    … Expand
  41. Ottomic
    Nov 18, 2013
    3
    Steam shows my game time as 4 hours. I must have advanced 20 minutes at most on the campaign. The other 3 hours and 40 minutes have been spent trying to make the game playable with a joystick, and failing.
    - Awful human models.
    - Terrible textures - Unbindable controls - Joystick support sketchy at best (can't configure my HOTAS X) - Stupid in-station segments. - Obnoxious menu    Steam shows my game time as 4 hours. I must have advanced 20 minutes at most on the campaign. The other 3 hours and 40 minutes have been spent trying to make the game playable with a joystick, and failing.
    - Awful human models.
    - Terrible textures
    - Unbindable controls
    - Joystick support sketchy at best (can't configure my HOTAS X)
    - Stupid in-station segments.
    - Obnoxious menu system.
    - One flyable ship.
    - No mouselook in no external views.
    - Objects in space are static. No more 'match speed'.
    - Shaders look terrible.
    - Keyboard control over-sensitive.
    - Game-breaking bugs.

    Those are a lot of deal-breakers. Unlike X3, it is not an incomplete game with gaps the community can fill in. It is a game full of WRONG design choices that will require an amount of dedication from the community unseen of this side of MERP to fix. It's cool that you have an excellent modding community Egosoft, but it looks like it'd have been better for you to just straight outsource them during development.

    I would give this game a 4, because despite it being broken and unpleasant to the point of unplayability (especially when compared to the rest of the saga) it's got some interesting ideas and the developer has been pretty honest up until Rebirth, but Egosoft's attitude of what looks like not only over-optimistic previews, but also little pre-release information, what 3 days later looks like a full-on review embargo until they have some stuff sorted out, and not even preparing their forum from what they knew would be an onsaught of unsatisfied customers earns it a 3.

    X: Rebirth is a 3/10 game. This is shameful.

    DO NOT BUY until some of the more glaring stuff has been fixed. If that.    … Expand
  42. JerryYeh
    Nov 18, 2013
    3
    Expecting Freelancer, instead got Duke Nukem in Space

    Okay, if anyone who hates Duke Nukem Forever or Aliens Colonial Marine, you can understand the feeling I have with X-Rebirth. I was expecting a AAA experience with a easier learning curve, which is what's been keeping me from getting into the X series in the past, instead I got a half-baked game with crappy performance issue, ugly    Expecting Freelancer, instead got Duke Nukem in Space

    Okay, if anyone who hates Duke Nukem Forever or Aliens Colonial Marine, you can understand the feeling I have with X-Rebirth. I was expecting a AAA experience with a easier learning curve, which is what's been keeping me from getting into the X series in the past, instead I got a half-baked game with crappy performance issue, ugly textures and low poly character model.

    I mean I can point you to various game from LAST-GEN has better aesthetic than this game, the Character Models for example What is this? Does it has less polygon than a teapot? How could it possibly looks so ugly anyway? And even if you bump all the effects to maximum it still looks like crap. The only good looking thing is SPACE, and SHIPS (from a distance.).Now the performance is horrendous as well, I can run Battlefield 4, Crysis 3 and Far Cry 3 with medium heigh settings at 30~40 fps, for this game I can't get 30 fps even if I put all the settings to lowest level. It's obvious this game is rushed or poorly designed.

    All the above mention is enough to stop me from playing, I'm not someone who judge a game SOLELY by it's graphics, but all these crap breaks the immersion. When a game with so much promise ended up like this.... it's just a total let down and unacceptable.    … Expand
  43. TheReject
    Nov 18, 2013
    3
    I am 11 hours into the game, an unfortunately there are many glaring flaws in this game. I believe most of the technical issues will eventually be resolved, but there are some serious design issues which really drag this game down.

    I have long been a fan of the X series and I have been looking forward to this game for months, so my experience might be colored somewhat by my    I am 11 hours into the game, an unfortunately there are many glaring flaws in this game. I believe most of the technical issues will eventually be resolved, but there are some serious design issues which really drag this game down.

    I have long been a fan of the X series and I have been looking forward to this game for months, so my experience might be colored somewhat by my disappointment. I have been plagued with poor performance, constant game crashes which sometimes require a reboot to get out of, and numerous glitches in the trading system and missions that make advancement impossible.

    Again, the technical issues will be resolved via patching. What may not be resolved are the design choices that depart from previous X games. To list:
    1. You can no longer hop from ship to ship. You can own multiple ships and you can issue them limited orders, but your starting ship will be your ending ship and it will be the only one you pilot.
    2. The trading network has been neutered. You can only issue trade commands for your freighters to sell or purchase goods in their system only. You can't set up the elaborate chains that were possible in X:TC.
    3. Voice acting: You are chained to another character that has some of the worst voice acting I've heard since Final Fantasy X.
    4. Menus, sub menus, sub-sub-menus: You can't just buy a gun or missile while floating in space. You need to dock your ship, walk to the individual merchant, open a conversation, request to see their goods, request to see their missiles, then request to buy them, then tell them how many you want. Seriously, restocking missiles is a 5-minute ordeal after every fight.

    I think I see where they wanted to go with this game. They wanted to make it more appealing to the masses that were previously turned off by the massive learning curve the series holds. Unfortunately, instead of streamlining the game mechanics they just hid them behind a poorly-designed and time-consuming interface which is somehow more painful to deal with than the spreadsheets of the older games.

    I want to like this game so much, but there are just too many glaring flaws to get much actual enjoyment.    … Expand
  44. Animorganimate
    Nov 20, 2013
    3
    Bugs aside this review is based off the gameplay and design choices alone. Rebirth really shouldn't be considered an 'X' game. If Rebirth had been a new, independent franchise looking for a home on consoles, it would be a mediocre game at best (that's why I gave it a 3). But by slapping the letter 'X' on the box, Deep Silver has essentially suckered its fanbase in buying a bad game. IBugs aside this review is based off the gameplay and design choices alone. Rebirth really shouldn't be considered an 'X' game. If Rebirth had been a new, independent franchise looking for a home on consoles, it would be a mediocre game at best (that's why I gave it a 3). But by slapping the letter 'X' on the box, Deep Silver has essentially suckered its fanbase in buying a bad game. I have a hard time believing this game was initially designed to be an 'X' game in the first place. I feel like Rebirth was being designed for a different purpose and only later did it become Egosoft's problem. I look forward to a few years from now when this whole thing is forgotten about and a proper X4 is delivered to us.… Expand
  45. Darkmater
    Nov 15, 2013
    3
    On a good note, they finally released the game, on a bad note its is shambles
    -- No Joystick support
    -- No head tracking support

    Didn't move the franchise forward, except make it maybe portable to a console in the future. Thanks for abandoning all things pc users want in a space sim.
  46. Gezzer
    Nov 15, 2013
    3
    So this was in development for 7 years right? Why?
    I've never played any of the other X games so I don't know how this compares. But taken on it's own it seems like it's someone's "grand vision", that got hit with major feature creep and finally had to ship or it would never ship at all.
    I've only played up to the point where I have to deliver the captain to my trade ship (I think it    So this was in development for 7 years right? Why?
    I've never played any of the other X games so I don't know how this compares. But taken on it's own it seems like it's someone's "grand vision", that got hit with major feature creep and finally had to ship or it would never ship at all.
    I've only played up to the point where I have to deliver the captain to my trade ship (I think it is). I actually had to save and go online to figure out how to deliver her. It's not that there's a lot of actions that the UI needs to account for, it's the fact that it's so fcking unintuitive it fights you at every turn. So how do I deliver my captain. Well there's this tiny little green icon that when I double click it I'll get the docking menu. Again, why? They could of either had double clicking the entire ship when in range opened the dialog, or have an obvious docking platform to click on, but a small green icon in the captains HUD?
    So far the whole UI seems to be designed so that the developers can say, "It's a complicated game folks, see all the different UI elements we had to use!". You can have a complicated game with a simple and intuitive UI, it's not that hard to do.
    I also find that so far the surrounding in space is crowded to the point where it's claustrophobic. Well it's nice that space is populated so there's something to interact with it just doesn't feel like space. Add to that the fact that everything has information attached to it and it's really easy to be hit with information overload. The first battle with the 2 drones was like that.
    Which brings me to the only space station I've been on when I hired my captain. Small, but with no one on it except for traders and other essential NPCs. It just doesn't feel alive, no ones walking around. You have a really weird conversation system that has no underlying logic to it. And the worst thing? You have to maneuver yourself so that the NPCs are facing you or they won't talk to you. You can't click on them and have them turn around to face you? Nope. They ignore you and your conversation jumps to the next NPC facing you. As for the stealing system, it again feels incomplete. You open lockers right beside the guard with no reaction at all.
    Then there's the graphics. they're so hit or miss it actually makes the bad ones seem worse. For example there's a panel on the ship that the texture is so low rez that you can actually see the stair step effect on the letters. And this isn't up close either, it's at a normal viewing distance.
    I could go on, and on, but the truth is this looks like a game that could of been good, even great, but poor design decisions jump out at you at every turn. I'm almost put in mind of DukeNukeEm forever. It's like it was a labour of love and everything was sacrosanct to the developers so nothing could be reavaluated to see if it was working or not in regards to the overall game. So they struggled to get everything that they wanted into the game and more importantly get all the design elements to come together and work as a whole. And finally just started running out of resources and had to quickly slap a coat of paint on the thing and get it out the door.
    Sigh, like so many others before it I just have to wonder what could of been. As it stands now even with alot of patching to fix the normal and not so normal launch day bugs/issues I don't know if there's any way that the developers can fix the underlying problems of simply just a poorly executed design. Maybe like CD Projekt RED did with the first Witcher game they'll polish and refine all the glaring problems till they have a much better game. Then both issue a patch to current owners and a new improved release version. Then again those Witcher guys are a one in a million so I wouldn't hold my breath.    … Expand
  47. Chaz0r
    Nov 18, 2013
    3
    There is an absolutely great game under this mountain of problems. Don't buy it yet! Follow the development of the game and see if and when they fix these problems. If they do and the game runs smoother, has less bugs and is more comfortable, then really, really buy it! But not now!
  48. sergeplay
    Nov 15, 2013
    3
    X-universe is totally ruined. Never imagined that Egosoft can release a game of such quality. Menu controls are unusable, graphics totally outdated.
    I can barely imagine that patches can make this product playable.
    No more pre-orders for their releases.
  49. Louskrad
    Nov 18, 2013
    3
    I'm writing this review with 1.12 patch. I am sad to say that this game is broken, full of bugs; so much so that you can't even continue the main storyline if you're not lucky enough.

    What is more disturbing is the flaws in game design. Map systems don't make sense, menus and UI need serious revamps, etc. I'll provide a pro-con list below, but make sure you check steam forums before    I'm writing this review with 1.12 patch. I am sad to say that this game is broken, full of bugs; so much so that you can't even continue the main storyline if you're not lucky enough.

    What is more disturbing is the flaws in game design. Map systems don't make sense, menus and UI need serious revamps, etc. I'll provide a pro-con list below, but make sure you check steam forums before buying, where you'll see every single forum thread about disappointment.

    Cons:
    - Extremely bad performance. The game seems not tested and even the high end PCs don't get good graphic performance. 5-10 FPS in some areas.
    - Bugs "Oh my deus, it's full of st.." ehem, "bugs."
    - Terrible UI.
    - Keyboard shortcuts (previously the heart of X games) missing and not possible to configure.
    - ONE ship. Yes, you can ride just one don't think you'll sit in the bridge of your destroyer.
    - No direct trade: gone are the days that you can dock a station and trade directly. You need to have a buggy AI do it for you. (Not kidding, you need to edit your savegame in an editor to correct AI problems most of the time you trade)
    - Awful NPC graphics and not the best voice acting.
    - Voice acting not finished in some languages.
    - No autopilot.
    - Stations can be built on pre-determined spots.
    - In short: even if the game is fully debugged in a series of future patches, this is not the X-Universe game you're looking for.

    Pros:
    - The new travel system (higways) seem kind of fun.
    - potential. since the game is open to modding, it is possible for the community to fix this game up at some point.    … Expand
  50. DemiGoth
    Nov 22, 2013
    3
    Game LOOKS good, but that's about the only positive thing I can say about it. The problem with this game lies in the performance that most players (me included) have. Decent systems that give 45FPS or more in other games give only 15FPS in X Rebirth. And it's just that why I give this game a 3 the performance is so low that it's UNPLAYABLE.

    On the good side though, EGOsoft is busy    Game LOOKS good, but that's about the only positive thing I can say about it. The problem with this game lies in the performance that most players (me included) have. Decent systems that give 45FPS or more in other games give only 15FPS in X Rebirth. And it's just that why I give this game a 3 the performance is so low that it's UNPLAYABLE.

    On the good side though, EGOsoft is busy patching, they did find the bug causing most of the performance issues (my bet it's mostly architecture of older Intel and all AMD CPUs). But a week down the road and a daily patch (yes, a new patch every day EGOsoft does really work on it!) still didn't give the performance every other game gives.

    So for now a 3. Perhaps I'll re-review it when the performance bug has been squashed and I can actually comment on the game itself    … Expand
  51. utkez
    Nov 18, 2013
    3
    Totally unplayable for now. While this game shows some potential, it has significant technical problems. Campaign has some bugged scripts and overall performance is awful even on fast computers. Poorly implemented user interface doesn't help too. Wait for several months before trying this one.
  52. Arminius
    Jan 6, 2014
    3
    After I bought "Schicksalsklinge HD" in summer, I thought there will never be a game again that is that much flawed, bugged and unfinished at the time of release.
    Here I stand corrected.
    This wasn´t even a feature-completed Alpha when shipped, and it will take at least one more year of heavy patching to finish it. Sadly, I don´t believe it will live up to the expectations even when it´s done.
  53. pirikuras
    Nov 16, 2013
    3
    Good game for plenty of content and what to do,normal graphics. All very negative coments is from that kind of people who say heroes of might and magic 3 is beter then any other version ,but look into whose people who play homm 3 in 2013 :D their opinion just doesnt matter for normal people :D
  54. MevriS
    Nov 19, 2013
    3
    As I am about 15 hours into the game I am now able to give a short review about it.
    It is playable if you have a powerful gaming computer and as there are very few graphic options in the menu you won't be able to adjust performance according to your hardware as freely as pc games would normally allow you. Not to mention the serious optimization issues and frequent framerate drops that    As I am about 15 hours into the game I am now able to give a short review about it.
    It is playable if you have a powerful gaming computer and as there are very few graphic options in the menu you won't be able to adjust performance according to your hardware as freely as pc games would normally allow you. Not to mention the serious optimization issues and frequent framerate drops that occur even if you run it on an high end pc. It has a fairly impressive sound options menu though.
    Controls are smooth and mostly intuitive but compared to previous X titles it seems way to 'consoly' in my opinion even though they are still too clunky for me playing with a controller. Mouse and keyboard are working good but players with multibutton gaming mouses won't be able to take full advantage of their hardware as mouse controls aren't rebindable.
    Even in the current build 1.14 the game still suffers from frequent crashes and as it has no autosave you'll find yourself constantly mashing the quicksave button.

    With the mere technical apsect covered only story and gameplay remain.
    As for the story it is fairly engaging. Nothing too special, at least during the first few hours but definitely more immersive as most previous X Games. The fact that you only have direct control over one single ship this time somewhat limits your gameplay experience but helps identifying yourself with your ship and the protagonist on the other hand. I cant say that this i generally a bad design decision, it's just different. In fact the game is full of interesting ideas. The new Trade System is innovative but navigating and "finding" offers and sales can get really tedious. It seems like searching for collectables sometimes which artificially lengthens the game in a very annoying way.The Highways are a great idea as well but as poorly designed as the trade system to a grade it becomes simply illogical. Why am I moving faster if I put myself behind other ships on a lane? How do they build up speed in the first place because they don't seem to be bound to the same rule as me. It's ridiciously stupid, simply said. And now my major bugbear: the campaign bugged out. At some point you have to deliver a number of food provisions to a station but the game took away my cargo ship or "forgot" to give it back to me when it was supposed to do. And as your only way to trade goods, with exception of a small selection, is to ship it with large freighters (as far as I know the game does a terrible job at telling you things) I find myself completely unable to progress.
    There are some other minor and major bugs: ships disappearing from your Properties-Screen even though you can still see them on the map and even give them orders. trade commands that won't be executed correctly. The aiming assistance is irritating at best so far I haven't found out where to put my cursor if the target moves.. which most of them targets do,.. naturally. It's definitly not where the game suggests me to put it. The list goes on and on and on.

    All things considered, I believe I had about 6 hours of fun and 9 hours of frustration which leads me to my final conclusion:
    Do! not! buy! this! game! in it's current state. It has massive potential given enough time to be polished. As it is now, it's great ideas and innovations are plagued by bad conversion and legions of bugs.

    3/10 (2/10 if I weren't a fan of the X-Universe)    … Expand
  55. MadVandal
    Nov 18, 2013
    3
    After over 20 hours of play I can pretty much sum this up as a huge letdown. I can live with poor looking interiors, NPCs, dialog, etc.. but the core components of what made an X game have been stripped down or removed.

    X has always been a deeply complex game of economic space trading an empire building/management. That is gone, along with a number of other basic features. No gravidar    After over 20 hours of play I can pretty much sum this up as a huge letdown. I can live with poor looking interiors, NPCs, dialog, etc.. but the core components of what made an X game have been stripped down or removed.

    X has always been a deeply complex game of economic space trading an empire building/management. That is gone, along with a number of other basic features. No gravidar (radar), no targeting/cycling system, no move to position/stop/attack commands to ship, no naming ships, no way to cancel pending trade orders, no way to stop ships from following you, no autopilot, no jump drive, no flying other ships, no universal traders, no parking of large ships at stations. The list goes on an on.

    The incredible array of ships in X3, consisting of dozens of different sizes and designs, weapon types and load-out options, software components (wares), upgrades, etc. are all gone in Rebirth. Rebirth gives you only a small handful of preset ship types, with only a couple of options. The incredible array of factories and stations that made all kinds different intermediate and end products has been cut down to a third of before. Placement and design of complex factories is gone, Rebirth only allows building of pre-made designs at fixed locations. The entire economic flow of goods appears to be gone...replaced with simplified artificial system.

    In terms of the universe, while X3 did have issues with large areas of space the was sometimes boring to navigate, the alternative in Rebirth isn't worth the trade off. Sectors have been reduced to 3-6 packed "zones" connected by magical highways (no real technical explanation for how humans pull these off). Unlike X3 where non-civilian ships flew with a destination and purpose, the ships in Rebirth are mostly eye-candy phantoms. Highway travel is an annoying and unnecessary mini-game with an engine sound effect so jarringly loud I end up just not bothering with the speed boosting mini-game to avoid the awful sound.

    In X3 you simply hit one key and get a view of all property, where is was, and what it was doing. Another key would give you a view of your credits and reputation. Those are gone, replaced by an ugly drill-though UI screen with a font 3-4x larger than needed that takes numerous key presses or clicks. It is impossible to play Rebirth using only the keyboard like in the past, you have to awkwardly switch back and forth between keyboard and mouse while in battle just to target ships or dock.

    The ship pathing AI, a function many fans asked for more polish after X3, is a absolutely terrible. Fighter ships attacking stations or large ships will ram into them and get stuck trying to turn around. Ships get caught in narrow spaces of large ship hangers or parts of stations bouncing back and forth between solid points. In past X games the act of flying a small ship into the solid wall of a station is almost certain death, as it should be. In Rebirth collision damage has been almost entirely removed to compensate for the poor AI. Collisions between capital ships and stations has been disabled allowing capital ships to actually fly through stations and each other. This opens an awful exploit where you can pilot you ship into the hanger bay of a capital ship and sit there safe from harm firing and damaging it underneath its shields, while on the outside fighters attempting to shoot you end up pound the large ship with friendly fire.

    There is speculation and some evidence that an attempt was made the bring Rebirth to the Xbox and something went wrong along the way. The communication/radial menu, and ship command UI appear to be three separate designs stitched together and don't flow well, a byproduct seen before when software development projects take drastic changes of design direction. In term of immersion and visual the game is an amalgam of ideas borrowed from Mass Effect, Blade Runner, and parts of past X games with mixed results. Topping all of this off are numerous game breaking bugs that clearly indicate that the final build was not tested. Many game play bugs are far too obvious to have been missed by testing. There are several ways to cause the campaign to get hung up with no notice. For example, if you loose a special one of a kind constructor ship given to you in the campaign it makes it impossible to a perform a building task given hours later bring the entire campaign to a halt with no warning or notice.

    Once of the biggest aspects of X3 was the many (often hundreds) of hours of sandbox style play and the use of mods. With Rebirth, once the campaign is complete, assuming you make it that far, there appears to little else to do with the game with so much stripped out.

    Fans waited seven long years for this and somewhere under all this mess may be a salvage X game engine, if and how long it might take to fix remains to be seen.    … Expand
  56. Guilherme_PoA
    Nov 18, 2013
    3
    This game is garbage...a lot of bugs...you can't finish missions...random crashes to the desktop...I can't even believe egosoft felt down so low on quality...their other games were buggy...but playable...none of them was like this...this game is really crap...it blow away all gaming experience with bad cut scenes, terrible voicing actors, extreme performance issues...terrible stations andThis game is garbage...a lot of bugs...you can't finish missions...random crashes to the desktop...I can't even believe egosoft felt down so low on quality...their other games were buggy...but playable...none of them was like this...this game is really crap...it blow away all gaming experience with bad cut scenes, terrible voicing actors, extreme performance issues...terrible stations and NPCs texture, ridiculous bugs on IA, economy, trading and overall missions...don't buy it, unless you wanna pay to be a alpha tester, if you're masochist or if you enjoy headaches.… Expand
  57. Scott44
    Nov 15, 2013
    3
    I have played the X games for years and spent a lot of time in them, wonderful, immersive games.

    This is not X I dont know what it is but it's awful. I am bitterly disappointed. Terrible voice acting, terrible graphics (mainly inside stations), no camera views, silly minigames . There is no immersion for me here whatsoever. I can only assume the people giving it a 10 are    I have played the X games for years and spent a lot of time in them, wonderful, immersive games.

    This is not X I dont know what it is but it's awful.

    I am bitterly disappointed.

    Terrible voice acting, terrible graphics (mainly inside stations), no camera views, silly minigames .

    There is no immersion for me here whatsoever.

    I can only assume the people giving it a 10 are somehow linked with the company because it is nowhere near a 10 my 3 rating is an honest rating I tried to find some good points, but there are few.    … Expand
  58. kaffefeels
    Nov 17, 2013
    3
    Do NOT buy this game. The game is broken, mechanics flawed, main quests can't be finished as several of them are broken. The freedom aspect of this game is ruined, no matter how the beautiful the universe is. The economy is a lie. Everything they promised are either underdelivered or non existent.
    This is a broken console port of a game, that should never have been released at all.
    It    Do NOT buy this game. The game is broken, mechanics flawed, main quests can't be finished as several of them are broken. The freedom aspect of this game is ruined, no matter how the beautiful the universe is. The economy is a lie. Everything they promised are either underdelivered or non existent.
    This is a broken console port of a game, that should never have been released at all.
    It will take a very long time with patches and mods before this becomes playable. Those who bought it can only hope EGOSOFT continues with patches and fixes.

    Coming from X3 series, I regret buying this I feel robbed and lied to.

    I repeat: DO NOT BUY.    … Expand
  59. nothingfaced
    Nov 15, 2013
    3
    Be honest. The game was made for a console but they clearly couldn't sell it so, thus stuffed out to PC customers with marketing how 'fun' it is to no longer own strategy, fleet and resource management in favour of sitting in one ship with awkward UX and outdated, last gen gamepad based gameplay.

    No support for your PC peripherals? Check. No resource management? Check. Piss poor attempt    Be honest. The game was made for a console but they clearly couldn't sell it so, thus stuffed out to PC customers with marketing how 'fun' it is to no longer own strategy, fleet and resource management in favour of sitting in one ship with awkward UX and outdated, last gen gamepad based gameplay.

    No support for your PC peripherals? Check. No resource management? Check. Piss poor attempt to get all Mass Effect? Check.

    Its bad.    … Expand
  60. generalzee
    Nov 16, 2013
    3
    This game is in beta right now, despite the claim that it is in v 1.12. Large ships have immense problems navigating stations, often moving directly through them, or simply spinning in circles aimlessly. Missions cannot be completed because AI bugs out and can't find its destination (in Trade or in Escort missions).

    Of course, these things can be fixed as the game continues, but what    This game is in beta right now, despite the claim that it is in v 1.12. Large ships have immense problems navigating stations, often moving directly through them, or simply spinning in circles aimlessly. Missions cannot be completed because AI bugs out and can't find its destination (in Trade or in Escort missions).

    Of course, these things can be fixed as the game continues, but what probably won't be fixed is the terrible voice acting. Not since the 1990's influx of hastily-translated Japanese games have I heard voice acting so poor. Your co-pilot seems to be voiced by a woman who simply read each word in the dictionary once (which the editors cobbled together to vaguely form sentences).

    There's a lot of potential here, the stations are intricate and interesting, the graphics are beautiful, transportation is actually interesting for once, and the battles can be epic and fun, but the major bugs, and poor voice acting make the game in its current state unplayable.    … Expand
  61. DanishNinja
    Nov 16, 2013
    3
    his game is just I've now spent 5 hours on this, and i really regret it.
    The game is full of bugs and is optimized so bad that i get 35-10 fps on my gtx 660.
    I am an x3 veteran and this game is the crappiest game of them all. I regret having spend so much money on it. The x3 series was BY FAR better than this... It fails at such a basic level. Fx all the small menus, the character    his game is just I've now spent 5 hours on this, and i really regret it.
    The game is full of bugs and is optimized so bad that i get 35-10 fps on my gtx 660.
    I am an x3 veteran and this game is the crappiest game of them all. I regret having spend so much money on it. The x3 series was BY FAR better than this... It fails at such a basic level. Fx all the small menus, the character interaction and the frustrating fleet control! I'ts especially bad when you are going to use your trading ship since the maps requires a degree in f**king map reading to understand...    … Expand
  62. Bloodhawk
    Nov 16, 2013
    3
    The X series is known for its cruel learning curves and some what daunting scale, It's lure of big ships and tycoon station building, It's wow graphics and even its un-forgiveness. However, If these are the things you love about the series, its time to mourn in the wake of the newly released X:rebirth.

    Its flawed yet stunning graphics keep you captivated as you negate smashed planets,    The X series is known for its cruel learning curves and some what daunting scale, It's lure of big ships and tycoon station building, It's wow graphics and even its un-forgiveness. However, If these are the things you love about the series, its time to mourn in the wake of the newly released X:rebirth.

    Its flawed yet stunning graphics keep you captivated as you negate smashed planets, debris and beautiful super space cities. The much improved ship physics and travel make space battles more invigorating, even jump gates seem to make so much more sense as you look back a million miles away from where you just came. But as you play more, the games seems just that extra light year away.

    Us PC gamers are hardened to bugs, glitches and crashes, But sadly X: Rebirth almost drowns you in them. Your only allowed to fly the one ship your given, and buying a new ship feels like getting a new Lamborghini and then only being allowed to watch your friend race it around the block. characters are repetitive and creepy looking, however its forgivable seeing as its a space sim and not a FPS. Ship traffic shows a dynamic living world, however stalking them for good trade routes reveal that they are lost or just enjoy going in circles. walking around on stations just feel unproductive and unnecessary. The game barely keeps my attention for more then 4 hours and didn't ruin my social life as i hoped for in the next 2 weeks.

    Sadly Egosoft have become very much like that dad who is trying to fit in with the younger generation with its new looks and faster pace, but it try's so hard that it trips on its own complexity.

    Im going to crack out X:3 and help remind my self why I love Egosoft.    … Expand
  63. Tarskin
    Nov 17, 2013
    3
    I have played all the X2 and X3 games prior to this and was really hyped and looking forward to this game but... it just doesn't deliver anything compared to it's predecessors. The entire mini-game idea (finding boxes, trying to get close behind other ships in highways, hacking) is just beyond silly and kills immersion. The amount of game breaking bugs is just appaling, I have playedI have played all the X2 and X3 games prior to this and was really hyped and looking forward to this game but... it just doesn't deliver anything compared to it's predecessors. The entire mini-game idea (finding boxes, trying to get close behind other ships in highways, hacking) is just beyond silly and kills immersion. The amount of game breaking bugs is just appaling, I have played roughly 15 hours so far and of those 15 hours at least 10 were spent trying to get past a certain bug and the current bug that's got me stuck caused me to decide to just un-install this game, wait a few months and maybe try again. I find it much more likely that i'll just go play X3:TC instead which is superior in every way.… Expand
  64. myx23
    Nov 17, 2013
    3
    after a few hours of suffering through this mess i will de-install the game and forget about it and egosoft. they are clearly on a path i don't want to follow as a longtime gamer. x rebirth shall mark the release in time when i finally stopped pre-ordering titles.
  65. Arcatir
    Nov 17, 2013
    3
    There is nothing new in this review except a way of looking at the game and how i expected it to turn out.

    Graphics: I like the outdoor graphics, they aren't pristine and the bad programming doesn't allow it to run smooth on even the toughest pc's. But they are nice to look at. I don't really care for the interior graphics because for one thing this is a space simulation. I really    There is nothing new in this review except a way of looking at the game and how i expected it to turn out.

    Graphics:
    I like the outdoor graphics, they aren't pristine and the bad programming doesn't allow it to run smooth on even the toughest pc's. But they are nice to look at. I don't really care for the interior graphics because for one thing this is a space simulation. I really don't mind that the models look stiff and are basically just copy/pasted versions of one another. The thing that annoys me is that you aren't able to call them while being in space. This is really tedious. But for the graphical part, i have not too much negative to say.

    One ship only policy:
    Granted, after having the immense freedom of virtually piloting/commanding every damn ship you saw in X2 and X3 is a major set back. But the series started as a one-ship only show and thus i wasn't too sad when they announced that we're back to one ship which you can customize heavily. The issue i have here is that this ship is literaly a piece of junk. It looks bad and i feel like buying a sportsbra as soon as i enter that ship. You cannot really change any major structures on your ship except make it look "whole" again. The drones are a nice gimmick, but thats all. I dont want to have the illusion of being able to pilot multiple vessels, when all i can do is fly those little buggers around my big pile of space-trash called "Albion Skunk" ...even the name is bad.

    I'm just extremely disappointed in the way the designed that ship, i can't get over it. They announced it with such a big enthusiasm and "how immersive" it is. Yet all you can do is push one damn button to get onto the bridge (note: the button didn't even work every time i used it).

    Controls:
    X1 X3 had some great ways of using your joystick. Assigning keys, making your own settings and saving them under different names, for every situation a perfect setup. That was perfect. When i wanted to play X3TC on my laptop and didn't have my joystick around, i just switched the settings with a few clicks to play via mouse and keyboard. No such thing here as you can't even get most of the mainstream joysticks to even accept your keybindings. Hell, i have this generic microsoft "X-Box" gamepad for my computer and can't even bind the missile-launch key to any of the buttons on my controller.

    Before i end up rambling i just want to say this: Yes, i had low expectations for this game. I was assuming that it was bugged to a big extent (which has to be expected by an Egosoft game). I assumed that controls and the universe itself may be a bit clunky and not really well programmed. But you know, i was thinking that, aside all these things, it's still playable and enjoyable. But it is not. This has been so far below my already bottom dwelling expecations that i'm completely baffled. Now i'm no programmer but what in the name of Nathan R. Gunne did they do in the last 7 years?

    To be frank: I don't give a rats ass about the story, i play this game to imagine being the ruler of my own sectors. Crush anyone in my path after raising a gigantic empire. Build secret bases, undermine other species. Or just trade, or being a pirate or a damn space-truck driver. This is supposed to be MY universe, where i can do whatever i want. Now i'm totally restricted, left with a lot less freedom.

    Now don't get me wrong, i do believe that they will deliver a fair amount of patches and do a lot to improve it. But to be honest, i paid 45€ so i could play the game on 15th of November, the release day. Not sometime in January or even later, when the game itself is on steam sale for 30 bucks or something like that. They should have done an early access sale if they were on the brink of running out of fundings. But selling a full price game that doesn't even live up the lowest of expectations is an outrage.

    I do really hope Egosoft is improving this broken game asap. I mean they should, because the amount of money they made out of the first three days is huge. Top sales on steam, thats juicy.

    So what i reckon? Don't buy the game now, wait a couple of months and don't waste your money on a broken, unfinished full price game.

    ps: Remember that scene right in the beginning where your lovely co-pilot Yisha almost suffocated because of the damage to her ship and threw her helmet into your ship? The one thing that made me actually chuckle was the fact that even though she had a helmet, her chest was completely unprotected from the vacuum.    … Expand
  66. MicroBot
    Nov 17, 2013
    3
    I have bought this game at release day, paying hefty 65 for Collectors Edition, because I wanted to support the developer. After all, they made the X series which I enjoyed from the very beginning. After playing X Rebirth for 5 hours I have un-installed it. I won't go into all the things that are wrong with XR, others reviewed it already on Steam Forums, Youtube and here. Instead I'll tryI have bought this game at release day, paying hefty 65 for Collectors Edition, because I wanted to support the developer. After all, they made the X series which I enjoyed from the very beginning. After playing X Rebirth for 5 hours I have un-installed it. I won't go into all the things that are wrong with XR, others reviewed it already on Steam Forums, Youtube and here. Instead I'll try to summarize it in one phrase...

    X-Rebirth is to X-series what Dust 514 is to EVE...only much worse.    … Expand
  67. Mahalito
    Nov 17, 2013
    3
    As an iteration of an otherwise decent series, X Rebirth is devoid of the fun, immersion, and exploration its predecessors provided. There are bugs. Progression killing, game crashing bugs... but I'll leave those alone, since those can be patched away. My issue with this game is its measurable lack of good design vetting and failure to adhere to principles the X license had established.As an iteration of an otherwise decent series, X Rebirth is devoid of the fun, immersion, and exploration its predecessors provided. There are bugs. Progression killing, game crashing bugs... but I'll leave those alone, since those can be patched away. My issue with this game is its measurable lack of good design vetting and failure to adhere to principles the X license had established.

    User interface is disjointed... requiring mouse or keyboard clicks in some parts, radial menus in others, but all carrying a theme of trying to compress a lot of options in a tiny interface. It is painful to navigate. Many parts feel like differing developers contributed to varying aspects of the interface without clear direction, decisive design, or team coordination. Maps and spatial navigation are painful to use. Property management and wingman control are also painful to navigate.

    Voice acting is detrimental to the immersion. Many of the quips NPCs repeat are juvenile and usually jarring in context. "Nice conversation, Not!". Well... I'm glad I didn't hire that NPC as a manager for my economic empire.

    This title is plagued with incongruous design elements that seem like overall management and design of the game had no clear vision. Game-play is a mix of space simulation and arcade mini-games that, again, indicate a grab-bag development approach that lacked singular design vision or focus. Space flight feels somewhat true to the series. Approaching jump gates and intersecting with space lanes feels suitably majestic, then wham... you enter and traffic in the "highways" miraculously appears to facilitate a "drafting" mini-game that feels like a console arcade throwback. I was half expecting acceleration pads and banana canons.

    You are deprived of exploring and piloting the myriad of alien ships that were so prevalent in prior titles. You now have a single ship with only a handful of upgrades and options. There are no point-of-view options.

    Situation Awareness during dogfights took a significant dive. There is no radar, maps are useless, and target locking requires clicking with the mouse. If your mouse lacks extra buttons, you need to fire missiles via keyboard or a joystick bind.

    Control customization is lacking. You cannot change mouse binds. There is no multi-controller support, so HOTAS fans that have discrete controllers will be unable to configure a suitable setup. I gave up and went with throttle-and-mouse. Many ship features, such as sensor settings, cannot be bound and have to be triggered through the convoluted menu system.

    I have a monster of a PC, so I cannot make any statements about hardware scaling, but there were times the game would slow. In my mind, this is acceptable, since this allows scaling up the options as hardware performance improves.

    Overall, wait for community to make something of this sow's ear. 3/10    … Expand
  68. Dominus87
    Nov 17, 2013
    3
    I SO wanted this game to be good. The character models are very dated, which wouldn't be so but if the voice acting was good, which it isn't. Conversations with traders frequently end in "Good talk NOT!" I mean, come on. The graphics in space are pretty and they did a great job on the visual effects for stations and ships, but graphics alone don't make a game.

    The UI was horrible and    I SO wanted this game to be good. The character models are very dated, which wouldn't be so but if the voice acting was good, which it isn't. Conversations with traders frequently end in "Good talk NOT!" I mean, come on. The graphics in space are pretty and they did a great job on the visual effects for stations and ships, but graphics alone don't make a game.

    The UI was horrible and clumsy. The only thing that worked, albeit at a mediocre level, was a console controller. The menu system was tedious and not intuitive in the least.

    The worst part was the frequent crashing, game breaking bugs, and constant glitches. Over the 8 hours of my gameplay, the game crashed 4 times, I've had to restart from a previous save because of game-breaking bugs 6 times, and I can't even count the amount of small glitches that crept into the game. That and the scene load times, even on a high-end machine, were awful. It took maybe 10-15 seconds for an area to load up (particularly bad when docking).

    Over-all, I give this a 3/10. It still has promise if they polish it up and maybe add some features that remove the clunky feeling (auto-pilot anybody?).    … Expand
  69. Poly
    Nov 18, 2013
    3
    The graphics are gorgeous and i like the IDEA of playing with a controller. But these already are the good points. The main game itself is nearly unplayable at the current state and is NOT worth the 50€!
  70. xenolf
    Nov 18, 2013
    3
    10 hours in and it has been an awful experience.
    Out of the 10 hours I've been playing I've spent 70% of the time working around bugs and fiddling around the abyssmal joke of a console ported ui.
    Graphics are ok, but this does not give you anything if the game just doesn't work. In my opinion, the bugs are patchable but not the failure they call "game design". Let's see what you get    10 hours in and it has been an awful experience.
    Out of the 10 hours I've been playing I've spent 70% of the time working around bugs and fiddling around the abyssmal joke of a console ported ui.
    Graphics are ok, but this does not give you anything if the game just doesn't work.
    In my opinion, the bugs are patchable but not the failure they call "game design".

    Let's see what you get for your 50 bucks:
    Abyssmal UI that makes you want to bite into your keyboard? Check!
    Having to wait hours for your ships to do literally anything? Check!
    Not being able to do anything else while waiting for a ship because you have to babysit them? Check!
    Having coding skills for savegame edit's to work around bugs? Check!
    Voice acting that makes you shudder? Check!
    Character models that let Half Life 1 look good again? Check!
    A story my 4 year old brother could have written? Check!
    Minigames that make you want to uninstall the game after being forced to do them over and over? Check!
    SNES type "search all 'treasure boxes' in static stations? Check!
    Generic NPC clone army? Check!

    And to be honest, who thought it was a good idea to have the player dock every time he want's to use a station's service needs to get fired.

    I have waited a long time for this game and after all they've promised us, it's been an utter disappointment.    … Expand
  71. Mahovolich
    Nov 19, 2013
    3
    The engine has been poorly optimized and fps are unchanged across all settings and resolutions. In an attempt to streamline the horrible menu system of previous titles and make it more user friendly they have torn the heart out of the game, dumbing it down. The animations of characters once outside the ship are laughable even for a budget title and the voice acting could have been doneThe engine has been poorly optimized and fps are unchanged across all settings and resolutions. In an attempt to streamline the horrible menu system of previous titles and make it more user friendly they have torn the heart out of the game, dumbing it down. The animations of characters once outside the ship are laughable even for a budget title and the voice acting could have been done exponentially better by your local high school drama club. The is just for show and is a nonfunctional overlay/border with blinking lights. Avoid at all costs until patched.… Expand
  72. SQLOwns
    Nov 20, 2013
    3
    Days after "release" and nothing has been fixed/added. By the developers own admission this game is unfinished. Shame on them for passing it off as finished on the Store Page. And shame on Valve for allowing them to do so. Very unethical and illegal in certain parts of the world.
  73. vargata
    Mar 17, 2015
    3
    I loved X games always so I've pre-ordered it. The disappointment was so big i was fighting steam and ego to give back my money. finally the did. now, after one and a half year of patching Egosoft decided to give a free weekend so i thought to give them an other chance. played 17 hours in 2 days. Some would say it already worth £10 as entertainment but it was more of just suffering. itsI loved X games always so I've pre-ordered it. The disappointment was so big i was fighting steam and ego to give back my money. finally the did. now, after one and a half year of patching Egosoft decided to give a free weekend so i thought to give them an other chance. played 17 hours in 2 days. Some would say it already worth £10 as entertainment but it was more of just suffering. its not entertaining visually and not entertaining as a game. The game is still ugly, the grannies are still haunting it, the shiny surfaces are still all around, everything has the very same color. the AI is still crap, the new autopilot is useless, the gravidar was better while we missed it, at least it want annoying... it seems they just cant make anything right. i cant believe its made by the same company who has 25 years of experience in making X games... Avoid it in any cost.… Expand
  74. BMBender
    Nov 24, 2013
    3
    dis-regarding bugs witch can be fixed there are "issues" with this game that's supposedly a space SIMULATOR
    no radar
    No freelook No targeting commands Poor JStick/HOTAS support no effective wingaman commands No effective fleet commands Most ships are placeholders flying in one big infinite loop interacting with nothing. No true player ship customization No true dynamic    dis-regarding bugs witch can be fixed there are "issues" with this game that's supposedly a space SIMULATOR
    no radar
    No freelook
    No targeting commands
    Poor JStick/HOTAS support
    no effective wingaman commands
    No effective fleet commands
    Most ships are placeholders flying in one big infinite loop interacting with nothing.
    No true player ship customization
    No true dynamic economy(contrary to what is stated in PR pieces)

    If your looking for a space sim or an X-game look elsewhere it aint here    … Expand
  75. Verbias
    Nov 25, 2013
    3
    Gameplay Time: 2 days, 15 hours
    Version: 1.12-1.16
    Last played: 25-Nov-13 This game is both amazing and a complete disaster at the same time, if you're fortunate enough to have the game run at a decent FPS, it's an incredibly beautiful scene filled with an amazing buzz of life, lights and sounds. If you're like the other 90% of us well tough you get your 20fps and you live with it    Gameplay Time: 2 days, 15 hours
    Version: 1.12-1.16
    Last played: 25-Nov-13

    This game is both amazing and a complete disaster at the same time, if you're fortunate enough to have the game run at a decent FPS, it's an incredibly beautiful scene filled with an amazing buzz of life, lights and sounds. If you're like the other 90% of us well tough you get your 20fps and you live with it sadly.

    The gameplay itself feels like a Beta, the game is not nearly finished, the main story line has been for me more about bug fixing then actual gameplay. Using the save files as workarounds for a lot of the current bugs I find myself spending more time on Google looking for answers then I do in game, sadly with the amount of replies I find, I doubt im the only one facing the same issue.

    At every angle this game feels like something a university student would have made the night before, it's thrown together with bits that have been copy/paste-ed from around the universe within the game, all the station internals are identical, the character animations are bugged, and very robotic, the UI is rubbish and a complete disaster to use, most of the container graphics i swear have been copied from Borderlands 2, the drone system is slow and broken, and worst of all you can never, ever, ever fly another ship...There is no doubt this game needs a lot more work, and the premature release may in fact see what could have been a great game, simply pushed into the "DO NOT WANT" heap.

    Well what about getting around you ask, exploration has been a massive feature in the X series, and has always been a lot of fun, well may as well get on with it; the highway system is frankly rubbish and buggy, often ending up inside other ships that you're supposed to "slipstream" behind, graphics rendering of objects at a distance is horrendous, lighting and shaders of other ship models at Medium-High settings are straight out of the 90's, and to add insult to injury; trade is completely broken, not being able to control the actual ships doing the trades is incredibly frustrating as you watch them do nothing with your orders.

    So you may ask at this point; why buy it at all then? Well luckily there is a ray of light in this seemingly bleak and gloomy world, the game is a spectacular piece of action, art, story and euphoria when it works, when it all comes together after hours of troubleshooting, you get that glimmer of what this game could really be as you're instantly re-immersed into the game's world, with amazingly easy to use combat mechanics, beautiful visual effects and a backdrop that will render you awe struck the game really does deliver on the core stuff...eventually.

    The sad fact is its all there, everything that EGOSOFT need to make an amazing game, but sadly they've come up short.    … Expand
  76. xReBirther
    Dec 6, 2013
    3
    This review contains spoilers, click expand to view. 10 for the beautiful artwork and space environment, 0 for game play and interiors.
    Overall 3 from me. I just like to fly around the outside of the stations and enjoy the artwork but the rest has been neglected. I get the impression that the budget ran out on creating different stations with diversity. Has potential if opened to a mod creation kit.

    The navigation map GUI is poor, very disappointed. If they had done something like the EVE 3d star maps would have been awesome.

    All the stations are nearly identical, even when you travel to the area that has been isolated for a generation, the bars have the same horrible music loop that has to be muted, at that point the Sci fi story completely looses credibility.

    I bought the enhanced version with extra artwork and encyclopedia and is very good.
    But the "extra" music is a ripoff, cant tell the difference, kind of a scam IMO.    … Expand
  77. Dramadon
    Dec 8, 2013
    3
    I played this game for a few hours until I got to a quest that seemed to be broken. At least, I'd do the step, start to move to the next step only to have the quest flip back to the step I just finished. I tried resetting multiple times but it kept doing this. This, among the dozens of times in the few hours I played the game locked up or crashed made me feel like I'd been swindled by aI played this game for a few hours until I got to a quest that seemed to be broken. At least, I'd do the step, start to move to the next step only to have the quest flip back to the step I just finished. I tried resetting multiple times but it kept doing this. This, among the dozens of times in the few hours I played the game locked up or crashed made me feel like I'd been swindled by a snake oil salesman. The game is pretty and there is some potential, I guess, but honestly, crashes and this bug prevented me from getting far enough into the game to give an educated review about anything else. The game is simply broken.… Expand
  78. Vergeh
    Dec 11, 2013
    3
    Oh, Egosoft.

    I really, really wanted to like this game. I am a big fan of the X series, and I've been looking forward to this title... but really, Egosoft. This game is a perfect example of good intentions with bad execution. They set out to make the space trader sim more immersive and less... flowcharty. Where do I begin? I guess I'll cover the things that CAN'T be fixed with a patch.    Oh, Egosoft.

    I really, really wanted to like this game. I am a big fan of the X series, and I've been looking forward to this title... but really, Egosoft. This game is a perfect example of good intentions with bad execution. They set out to make the space trader sim more immersive and less... flowcharty. Where do I begin? I guess I'll cover the things that CAN'T be fixed with a patch.

    - The space stations are really, really samey. Like, I think that there are three station maps total for the hundreds of ingame stations. Should have been procedurally generated, or cut entirely. I think the idea of disembarking your ship to do station/planet missions is a brilliant idea for a space sim, but this is truly terrible execution. Going on the SAME stations every twenty minutes to do basic maintenance and resupply is grindy and terrible. Also enjoy the "where the hell is the vendor type I want" mambo.

    - They claim to have made the interface easier, but have made so many confusing unexplained oversights that I can't call the interface anything but regressive. If there hadn't been a mission to guide you exactly through freighter trading, I never would have figured it out. And I still don't know if there's even an inventory screen for the items you pick up while wandering around stations.

    - The station design is truly baffling. Was it really necessary to have six docking points on the same station, each with a different array of vendors? How about one docking point, with a menu of items for sale, with the option, not the necessity, of leaving your ship? I find it hard to believe that an advanced spacefaring culture doesn't have online storefronts.

    - Finding and equipping weapons in X was always a huge pain, but they've gone and oversimplified it the other way. I really don't mind stock layout in paid 'tiers' of upgrades for the ships I'm never gonna fly, but really, five weapons for the main ship?

    The sound is gorgeous, the universe feels a lot more colourful, diverse and expansive, and the ship models are attractive, but that is not enough to save this game. I cannot recommend this game to anyone, and it really bothers me because I know one truly bad game can sink a company, and a franchise.

    So everyone go buy X3. Much better game, and maybe it'll convince Egosoft to take smaller, less ambitious steps in the future.    … Expand
  79. RedRhoc
    Jan 11, 2014
    3
    I really want to like this game.... but it's awful. The graphics are decent, the UI is hard to navigate, story is below average, performance is bad, gameplay is... not good and the voice acting is horrible. The pretty screenshots look tempting - but avoid buying this game.
  80. tillhopesdies
    Jul 17, 2014
    3
    ok soooooooooooooo, I was expecting like (sins of a solar empire , meets x universe) with better graphics -- meaning , I invest into my empire , I care for my ships and am attached to them , but have capital ship battles that are epic and more enjoyable than the previouse x games then also incorporate a character system like the new shadow of mordor , where you hunt down a capital shipok soooooooooooooo, I was expecting like (sins of a solar empire , meets x universe) with better graphics -- meaning , I invest into my empire , I care for my ships and am attached to them , but have capital ship battles that are epic and more enjoyable than the previouse x games then also incorporate a character system like the new shadow of mordor , where you hunt down a capital ship because he laughed at your weakness in the early stage of your empires begging's and the traits of that character are different from another enemy capital. ii wanted to see like a fable system where your actions created your own character , effecting everything from trade to ship purchases... HOW ABOUT DESIGHING YOUR OWN CAPITAL new race , .... but was left with a first person shooter , boring and long , not much challenge .. I feel like I was just cheated on by my husband of 20 years and told it was for my own good.… Expand
  81. Bawlrytupad
    Oct 1, 2014
    3
    Rebirth is still a dull, shallow and lobotomized sequel to the X series. Ongoing bug fixing still hasn't changed the fundamental reasons why this isn't a good game. Egosoft will not be addressing the terribly poor core game-play, but instead will continue bug-fixing and adding new features and DLC.

    This game (as at 2.5 beta) still appears to have been cribbed by a third-rate company    Rebirth is still a dull, shallow and lobotomized sequel to the X series. Ongoing bug fixing still hasn't changed the fundamental reasons why this isn't a good game. Egosoft will not be addressing the terribly poor core game-play, but instead will continue bug-fixing and adding new features and DLC.

    This game (as at 2.5 beta) still appears to have been cribbed by a third-rate company from a competent developer, nearly a year after release. Buyer beware.    … Expand
  82. Morphine_Child
    Feb 2, 2020
    3
    The game was released as unfinished half product, overly complicated, super demanding and buggy, it got forgotten as fast as it deserved. I would rather go all the way back and play X2 again.
  83. vanzi
    Nov 17, 2013
    2
    Unfinished game, initially designed and developed for consoles, but for some reason they changed their mind somewhere halfway through the development and decided to make a PC game.

    Literally every aspect of the game is dumbed down or simply cut out from the X3 series. There are a lot of plot-breaking bugs. The interface is terrible and even some extremely basic features are missing    Unfinished game, initially designed and developed for consoles, but for some reason they changed their mind somewhere halfway through the development and decided to make a PC game.

    Literally every aspect of the game is dumbed down or simply cut out from the X3 series. There are a lot of plot-breaking bugs. The interface is terrible and even some extremely basic features are missing (fleet command being dumbed down to "follow me" command that cannot be even undone). The entire walking in stations part looks as if it was made in 2000 and it's not only ugly, but also makes a lot of simple tasks a chore.

    The two positive things about the game as it stands now are the graphics (as long as you don't leave your ship) and space combat. That is, assuming you can actually enjoy this part which is pretty random with the nonexistent optimizations and generally a lot of people reporting 10-20 fps on fairly high end machines (or at least, way above what the developers recommended, think of i7 GTX780).

    Generally, while the plot-breaking bugs can (and most likely will) be solved, I'm afraid that the number of horrible design choices cannot be recovered from in predictable future.

    X3 fans should really stick with X3TC/AP. It would take years for XR to come anywhere near the complexity of modded X3TC (eg. xTended). In its current state it's hard to recommend this game to anyone, at least wait until they fix the plot-breaking bugs and the price drops to $20.    … Expand
  84. darkcerb
    Nov 15, 2013
    2
    An alpha or beta game at best, your ship has been stripped of almost all it's former features and I hope you like the ship you start with...because that's it it's all you're going to fly.

    All the more strategic elements of the x universe are now nested behind unhelpful and repetitive menus. Highly disappointing please I urge you reader not to reward this kind of release, don't buy    An alpha or beta game at best, your ship has been stripped of almost all it's former features and I hope you like the ship you start with...because that's it it's all you're going to fly.

    All the more strategic elements of the x universe are now nested behind unhelpful and repetitive menus.

    Highly disappointing please I urge you reader not to reward this kind of release, don't buy until it's on sale if you can wait...If not at least give it a few weeks to see if any real support will be given.    … Expand
  85. Masterhummel
    Nov 15, 2013
    2
    I would love to give the game a higher score. But some of the design choices just don't manage to grab me. For example: Stations are plastered with npcs. But they look really awkward and sometimes miss animations. Also some look like they're supposed to be holding something but dont. It would be a minor complaint if they werent EVERYWHERE completly runiing the atmosphere. Another point ofI would love to give the game a higher score. But some of the design choices just don't manage to grab me. For example: Stations are plastered with npcs. But they look really awkward and sometimes miss animations. Also some look like they're supposed to be holding something but dont. It would be a minor complaint if they werent EVERYWHERE completly runiing the atmosphere. Another point of critique is the very bad performance. I have a rather decent pc and even for me the framerate jitters a lot, depending on the direction i currently look at. Very annoying in combat. The campaign as far as i plaid it is not very good. More like a tutorial coming directly from the developers instead from an story writer. It's mostly really awkward and somehwat childish. But well, i didnt buy X for the campaign so forget it. Overall, it's still a good X game but by far not the "rebirth" i was hoping for. It mostly seems like the budget was going into make things fancy then really thining things trough and maybe find new approaches. The new approaches they did like the higway minigames just don't seem very well-tought. I dunno... i just can't get warm with X: Rebirth. Still a O.K. game.… Expand
  86. Agarwel
    Nov 16, 2013
    2
    Fistly: im not the "its bad because they changed it" kind of fan. I was really looking forward to this game because I liked the changes they planned (faster game focused on new players. More accessible but still complex). So far Im very dissapointed. Controls are not intuitive and very slow (most of the stuff is done by talking to npcs. This will get old very quickly. And then looking forFistly: im not the "its bad because they changed it" kind of fan. I was really looking forward to this game because I liked the changes they planned (faster game focused on new players. More accessible but still complex). So far Im very dissapointed. Controls are not intuitive and very slow (most of the stuff is done by talking to npcs. This will get old very quickly. And then looking for new captain will just slow you down). And the game is buggy too much. Keeps crashing (great combination with no autosave). And there are mission breaking bugs. Me with many other players am not able to finish even the tutorial. Stuck on energy cells mission. Until there is some serious patch or two, avoid this game. It is Simcity all over againn… Expand
  87. kaalbut
    Nov 21, 2013
    2
    this game is a joke and should have been named X3: vaselina.

    its 100 miles way from what the X series was before
    if you're looking for a REAL space sim then just go for one of the previous episodes like X3: TC or AP
  88. ParGellen
    Nov 17, 2013
    2
    I had to change my review now that I've played the game a bit more. I was originally optimistic and thought I could see around some of the problems and give the developers the benefit of the doubt. Unfortunately I have now come to realize now that this game is a complete disaster. Avoid at all costs.
  89. Fletcherea
    Nov 30, 2013
    2
    Bad UI, confusing game mechanics, terrible performance with random fps spikes and drops.
    I would like to take this a bit further, great NPC conversations and dialogue, NOT!

    Fun sandbox, EVE single player like concept, terrible execution.
  90. Ayreos
    Nov 16, 2013
    2
    Whether you approach the game as a veteran X player or a new space sim enthusiast, you'll be sorely disappointed. The game's positives are massively overshadowed by countless throwbacks to an ancient generation of computer gaming, bugs and misguided attempts to emulate recent commercial successes. If you are ready to stomach 2004-level animations and frustrating design choices just to getWhether you approach the game as a veteran X player or a new space sim enthusiast, you'll be sorely disappointed. The game's positives are massively overshadowed by countless throwbacks to an ancient generation of computer gaming, bugs and misguided attempts to emulate recent commercial successes. If you are ready to stomach 2004-level animations and frustrating design choices just to get your hands on a twitch-based space sim, you'll be much better off with an actual 2004 game.… Expand
  91. Johnman
    Nov 16, 2013
    2
    I have been in the franchise since The Threat, and while it is true the old games could be a little daunting for new players, this time around they have gone too far simplifying it. How are you supposed to "manage an empire" with an Xbox controller? The thing is, you can't, even with a keyboard, because it's all marketing lines. The game has very little content and very littleI have been in the franchise since The Threat, and while it is true the old games could be a little daunting for new players, this time around they have gone too far simplifying it. How are you supposed to "manage an empire" with an Xbox controller? The thing is, you can't, even with a keyboard, because it's all marketing lines. The game has very little content and very little possibilities. There is so much to say about the flaws in this game I'd rather direct you to the Egosoft forums. Try to ignore the hate and you will find explained many of the design flaws X Rebirth suffers.

    I don't care for graphics. But let me say my computer shouldn't be able to run it (Phenom II X4, HD 6670, 4GB) but it does (everything at minimum, slightly OC graphics card).    … Expand
  92. rizzo212
    Nov 15, 2013
    2
    A console port in the making. Way to support the PC demographic that has supported and fixed your games for 15 yrs, Egosoft. this game should be refunded to people who pre-ordered, and it should be sold at $30 for full price. This is a complete joke on the fanbase.
  93. WingedAnomaly
    Dec 12, 2013
    2
    Hey, it's more accessible than earlier X titles!
    ...which would be nice if it ran at more than ten frames per second on high end systems.
    The performance is a bloody atrocity. A machine that can giggle its way through Assassin's Creed IV should NOT be showstopped by this game. It's pretty, but it's not THAT pretty, particularly at minimum bloody settings.
  94. Nogard123
    Nov 15, 2013
    2
    7years and they come with this?
    This game isn't even worth a in depth review,i played they other x3 series wich are far better than this piece of.....
  95. churl
    Nov 18, 2013
    2
    A botched addition to the X series of empire building/trading games that have built a devoted fan following because of the rich complexity of the games. X-Rebirth throws all that depth and complexity away in favor of a console experience that gets so many things wrong it's hard to conceive of how Egosoft thought this would work. Don't waste your money on this game until substantial patchesA botched addition to the X series of empire building/trading games that have built a devoted fan following because of the rich complexity of the games. X-Rebirth throws all that depth and complexity away in favor of a console experience that gets so many things wrong it's hard to conceive of how Egosoft thought this would work. Don't waste your money on this game until substantial patches have fixed the glaring problems.… Expand
  96. sintri
    Nov 16, 2013
    2
    Buggy and filled with performance issues upon release, but that's not really the worst part. While I do appreciate the revamping of caps and trying to add further immersion, the base concept is flawed. For one, if you're going to make stations, least do them proper, create decent models for npcs and actually give them useful dialogue otherwise you're just creating a terrible feature thatBuggy and filled with performance issues upon release, but that's not really the worst part. While I do appreciate the revamping of caps and trying to add further immersion, the base concept is flawed. For one, if you're going to make stations, least do them proper, create decent models for npcs and actually give them useful dialogue otherwise you're just creating a terrible feature that does nothing but waste time that could be spent actually playing the game. Two, here's a biggy, if you're going to give people capital ships, DON'T FORCE THEM TO WATCH IT FROM A FREAKING LITTLE RING IN THE DOCKING BAY. If you're really can't handle making a generic capital ship bridge interior where we can actually get readouts on what's going on and be able to look out from the bridge instead of a little window with a 45 degree FOV, least give us 3rd person view. Sitting in a tiny little ring in the docking bay with a 45 FOV window with no information on what's going on is pointless.

    -That being said, you can't really use directly control anything else other than the skunk, which wouldn't be as bad if it weren't for the aforementioned.
    -Gone is the intricate single menu where you could control the entire world, in it's place are even worse menus that require you to take a 6 sec animation to actually get any useful reading plus founding through even worse menus.
    -Did I mention for a space sim generally about getting new ships, you're stuck in a single ship?

    Fundamentally, the game's broken, even asides from the bugs and the performance issues, the base game's broken. Less they actually bother changing that or some mod does, the game's essentially unenjoyable if you plan doing more than fly around the galaxy in first person in a single ship. Only reason you're even getting a 2 is because yes the game does look decent and battles in theory should be enjoyable if it weren't for the fact that they're not.    … Expand
  97. opensauce
    Nov 16, 2013
    2
    I have played in excess of 12 hours since the launch... the more I play it, the more angry I get. I cannot believe I wasted my hard earned money on such a disappointment of a game! I was excited that a faster pace, easier to use interface was going to be created in this new X, but there is so much missing from the other series.... The bugs are everywhere... There are repeats, music,I have played in excess of 12 hours since the launch... the more I play it, the more angry I get. I cannot believe I wasted my hard earned money on such a disappointment of a game! I was excited that a faster pace, easier to use interface was going to be created in this new X, but there is so much missing from the other series.... The bugs are everywhere... There are repeats, music, characters on all docks... you can only get one pilotable ship!! which sucks... and cannot switch it. The missions, specially the escort missions, the ships are stupid and get stuck, or don't move... The game is unfinished, unpolished and purely a waste of money. If I could get my money back, I would! Egosoft, you really did us in this time!… Expand
  98. WolfR1
    Nov 19, 2013
    2
    I have been waiting for this game since it was announced. I've experienced previous "X" games from Egosoft and muddled through their releases until bugs and problems were resolved to make the games MOSTLY playable.

    But this X Rebirth is an atrocity. It's clearly hobbled by some need for it to assume a console like play style to say nothing of the myriad of show stopping bugs that beset    I have been waiting for this game since it was announced. I've experienced previous "X" games from Egosoft and muddled through their releases until bugs and problems were resolved to make the games MOSTLY playable.

    But this X Rebirth is an atrocity. It's clearly hobbled by some need for it to assume a console like play style to say nothing of the myriad of show stopping bugs that beset the game. Mini games??? Command wheels(instead of keyboard bindings)? A space ship that more than occasionally wants to 'upright' itself??? Just when you think you're getting somewhere or you're starting to have fun...BOOM! You hit that brick wall where your trader won't trade or your comrades (and even your own ships) won't fight leaving you to do all the dirty work (which was supposed to be the most fun). Or worse yet you have to figure out how to execute some task that's not even remotely clear in the UI and there's zero tutorial help. Go read the forums if you want to see the rest of this carcass.

    Something told me to wait until January to buy this game. I've been looking so forward to it that I ignored that and got bit by Egosoft once again.

    End result is that I'm not investing tons of hours into a game that's incredibly broken and released that way despite Egosoft knowing it. They HAD to have known it. I don't believe I can support Egosoft in any further ventures and cannot recommend anyone get X:Rebirth without the expectation of a broken game.    … Expand
  99. Metametheus
    Nov 15, 2013
    2
    Base standard for my review... FIX IT, FAST!.
    I've played a lot of buggy games in my time, and I didn't think a early release (Actual) would be worse than Sword of the Stars II which was a pretty bad early release, those of you who have played and know what I am talking about will get the idea, but its worse in X Rebirth, a lot of the control systems are buggered, no joystick support    Base standard for my review... FIX IT, FAST!.
    I've played a lot of buggy games in my time, and I didn't think a early release (Actual) would be worse than Sword of the Stars II which was a pretty bad early release, those of you who have played and know what I am talking about will get the idea, but its worse in X Rebirth, a lot of the control systems are buggered, no joystick support unless I use Pi, damn near a crash bug every 15 20 minutes, a lot of graphical command problems where you'll see twitching or fizzling in the graphics and I am not talking about combat. (And before anyone tells me otherwise, all my graphics drivers are up to date, my directX is upto date, my Sound is upto Date, and yes my C++ Redistributables are current with 2008, 2005 effectively as well). I would recommend this game after a stern redevelopment point kinda like what CDProjectks and Kerberus do when they say: Enhanced Edition. Because this has 1.2.1 Worth of patches written all over it, and its only 1.0.0.    … Expand
  100. garlor
    Nov 16, 2013
    2
    4 in graphics
    0 in interface
    2 in gameplay systems

    you will spend more time waiting for a ship to deliver/receive goods than doing anything else, oh and walking inside stations looking for some dude

    poor game overall, x3 was way much better
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Awards & Rankings

12
#12 Most Discussed PC Game of 2013
55
#55 Most Shared PC Game of 2013

Critic Reviews

All reviews »
Metascore
33

Generally unfavorable reviews - based on 24 Critic Reviews

Critic score distribution:
  1. Positive: 0 out of 24
  2. Mixed: 0 out of 24
  3. Negative: 24 out of 24
  1. IGN Italia
    Feb 18, 2014
    40
    Rebirth lacks inspiration, purpose, good ideas. It's riddled with bugs and, even when it seems to work, it manages to be dull. There isn't any true reason to play it.
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  2. CD-Action
    Feb 10, 2014
    30
    Instead of giving the series a new life the developers buried it and the patches are a classic case of ‘too little, too late’. There’s a lot of things you can forgive this game but not the fact that it’s boring. [02/2014, p.58]
  3. PC Gamer
    Jan 31, 2014
    39
    X misses the spot. The occasional bit of spectacle can't save this boring, broken and charmless space simulation. [March 2014, p.60]
    Read full review
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