The X series has never been very welcoming to newcomers; players were just thrown in a deep and complex universe without much help or sense of direction, and the player would have to discover what to do by themselves (or by doing some research online). Many players would never get to see the real beauty of an X game simply because it was hidden, waiting to be found and explored. Egosoft are looking to change that with X Rebirth, technically a sequel but more of a reboot to draw more players into the world of X.
Presentation wise, X Rebirth varies from looking gorgeous in some areas, to dated and unflattering in others. The ships, cities and space in general look great; the models are highly detailed and look believable, and you will find yourself audibly saying “wow” as you fly through some parts of space. On the other hand, characters and interiors look flat and very dated. The facial animations look especially terrible, and it seems like every dock in the universe hired the same architect and decorator because they all look exactly the same. It does feel like a lot of the sections where you are not in your ship are lazily tacked on, they don’t look great and they don’t play particularly well either. But more on that later.
The voice acting also isn’t up to par, with a lot of the character’s voices sounding like what you would expect from a 90s game, and not in a good way. In addition, lip sync is non-existent, which can make for some really awkward looking conversations with NPCs.
The biggest issue with X Rebirth‘s presentation, however, isn’t the occasional flat texture and poor looking character model. The game suffers from a lot of visual glitches and performance issues regardless of what settings you are using. I turned down my settings quite a bit and, despite that, I would still get horrible frame rates for no apparent reason. Again, the indoor sections seemed to be the biggest culprits of this, but this isn’t to say the rest of the game areas are problem-free. There is also a fair amount of texture pop-in and things loading into the game world way slower than they should be which, overall, really hurts the presentation.
On the plus side, the soundtrack for the game is easily one of the strongest points; there is a nice mix of orchestral music to accompany you as you slowly fly through desolate areas of space and more upbeat electronic music for when travelling fast in a highway or in combat. The soundtrack makes travelling seem a lot more enjoyable and always seem to be playing the right track at the right time without ever feeling intrusive.
On a gameplay standpoint, things aren’t looking too good. The first step taken by Egosoft to help ease players into the world of X Rebirth is the introduction of a proper campaign. You take control of Ren Otani, a young freelancer who managed to find an old prototype ship which was lost many years ago during a battle. The ship is known as the Albion Skunk, and you’d better like it, because you cannot fly different ships, unlike other X games. The Albion Skunk will be the ship you will be piloting for the whole duration of your adventure; the ship can be upgraded and fitted with different parts to help you shape it more like you want it, however you are going to have to control and give orders to your other ships remotely, without ever being able to pilot them. The Albion Skunk is fun to drive around and feels like a jack-of-all-trades but my main issue is that you still feel very restricted. You steer your ship using the mouse, however, if you are going to be travelling in a straight line for a while, you can disable the mouse steering.
At first, I thought that once that was disabled, I was free to look around my ship, play with the gadgets on board and maybe even walk around. Unfortunately, none of that is in the game; you just sit there doing nothing, despite having a cockpit view of the action. Even interacting with maps involves pressing a button which switches your perspective. This would have been much better and more immersive if you could simply turn around to face it and click on different monitors to have information and menus appear in front of you.
The campaign will eventually guide you through everything you need to know about the game, and does a decent job at doing so. You will quickly find out how to fix your ship and equip new parts, trading and making money, combat and fleet control… Etc. Unfortunately, this is where things have already started going wrong. In previous X games, the majority of all these activities were done through a menu. Granted, it wasn’t the prettiest or most engaging way to do things, but it was simple and reliable and got the job done. In X:Rebirth, Egosoft tried to add an extra layer of immersion by allowing you to leave your ship when docked and remove menus almost completely. One of the first issues you are guaranteed to have is that you will be looking for a specific person or merchant, like a mechanic, for example. You dock at a nightclub to ask around and see who you can find. When you try asking people for directions, the NPCs would just turn you away for no real reason. What you have to do before even attempting to ask an NPC anything at all is befriend them: you have to wait for an NPC to say something, and a speech bubble sign will appear over their head.
Once that’s there, you can engage in small talk. Small talk involves you having to play a mini-game so you can “impress” them enough with your silver tongue. If you fail, they turn you away because you are boring and uninteresting and they don’t want to deal with you anymore. If you win they will acknowledge your brilliant way with words and agree to answer your questions. Remember, all of this started because you wanted to ask them if they knew a mechanic. This gameplay choice quickly becomes gimmicky and repetitive, and it doesn’t help that there only seem to be a handful of small talk topics (I can only talk about highways so many times!).
My most dreaded part of the game was the combat. It’s difficult, hard to follow and not entertaining at all. Even on your first combat encounter, a fight against two small drones, I managed to die at my first go. Enemy ships seem much faster, accurate and more agile than you, allowing them to get quite a few hits in and zoom past you before you have time to react. When you fire at them, I never got the feel if I was hitting them or not, how much damage I was doing and if I was being effective. I just kept shooting at them hoping I wouldn’t die first, and the lack of a proper targeting system makes combat a lot more tedious than it should be. It doesn’t help that, through the game’s story, you have a whole faction against you very early on who could crush you at any given moment. In that part, you have to carefully navigate through sectors avoiding combat at all costs or at least tactically hiding your ship and using drones to do your bidding.
The whole experience is made much worse by the persistent amount of glitches and bugs. I honestly lost count of the times I had to reload a save because the missions were bugged. Once I glitched out of a highway and found myself having to travel 400 Kilometres in nothing but empty space until I reached my destination. Another time my save was corrupted and I had to load an even earlier save and retread old ground. At times, the game feels like it’s nothing other than a glitchy mess.
X Rebirth is plagued with problems, and I haven’t even listed all of them. Hell, I wasn’t even able to finish the story because I’m pretty sure the game glitched and doesn’t allow me to advance. Yet, when it works, it’s fun. I’ll be honest, I hate the small talk system, but I like the fact that you have to go around and befriend random people which then offer you advantages later on. I like the idea of controlling a fleet without having to pilot the ships, the main issue being that the whole fleet systems is completely broken right now.
The bottom line is that X Rebirth has the potential to be a worthy successor to the X series and is in many ways better than the previous ones, when it’s not glitching out uncontrollably. Egosoft is working on fixing the issues, but it’s clear the game wasn’t fit for release and is almost unplayable at the time of writing. There is hope for the future, and I do see myself playing Rebirth and having fun once the bugs are fixed, whenever that will be.
