If deep, engrossing simulations are your thing, 'specifically space sims - X3: Reunion is your pot of gold at the end of the interstellar rainbow. X3 has it all - a gripping storyline (that you can ignore if you like); wide open, truly free roaming game play; jaw-dropping graphics that will make you stop you in you ion tracks; and some of the most hardcore, in-depth game mechanics we've seen in quite some time.
It is a larger and more ambitious title than the previous games, which is no easy feat as the X series has always been thought of as particularly ballsy.
Great game. i have spent a lot of time on this title. It has a great story with memorable characters. Good gameplay and best cut scenes with good dialogs.
An incredible game burried under a horrific launch where the game was unplayable out of box. Yes, the game really did not play at all... for anyone, out of box. The game needed almost a full month before it was stable enough to be called playable and by then the reviewers had already skewered this game in the reviews and rightly so. Even I am deducting 1 point from this, otherwise stellar game, due to the poor condition it was in at release. It was unacceptable.
On to the game in its current condition.
The Good:
- Huge Open World
- Excellent Economic Simulation for a Video Game
- There are tons of ships... so many I cant keep count
- Ships have different designs and usages
- You can fly all the ships!
- Tons of awesome mods! Many are professional quality.
- You can play how you want to play. Kill an alien race that annoys you. Build an economic empire with factories, freighters and trade routes. Invade enemy sectors. Be a pirate. Capture ships. There is tons to do.
The Bad:
- Blatant copy of X2 with very few to no meaningful upgrades except to graphics
- Quests are too few and very repetitive
- The main plot remains buggy to this day
- Plot remains poor with little to no attention given to it
- AI is not good in combat and needs serious modding help
- Learning curve is steep and tutorials are non-existent.
Probably the single thing I dislike the most about X3: Reunion is that I’m ultimately left with exactly the same impression I was with X2, in that it adds a bunch of cool stuff and helps expand the universe further, but still is a concept badly in need of higher production values (though I will credit the game with having excellent music) and extreme amounts of refinement.
Played the first Xpansion. Played this one and enjoyed it. Takes time to learn things and especially to get anywhere in the game. This game also prefers specific players - the ones that enjoy slow pace, slow development, and ... space! :)
Chouette graphiquement et c'est vraiment le seul compliment qu'on pourra lui faire, car pour le reste, on a beau chercher, on ne voit rien de valable dans cette daube intersidérale sidérante d'amateurisme dans ses mécaniques bancales et mal foutues. L'interface est un bordel sans nom et l'ergonomie la plus élémentaire y est bafouée régulièrement avec un aplomb qui laisse pantois. Un étron injouable.
This is not so much a game as an accountant's version of a space holiday.
Pirates are ridiculusly powerful. Resources are ridiculously hard to find. There is no plot. There is no point. After over two hundred hours on this I can safely say that this game is poorly designed - meaning that it is not enjoyable, hard to understand and counter-intuitive which results in a frustrating experience all-around. Definitely an example of what not to do. Go ask the guys who built Galaxy On Fire how to make a space trading game
Don't believe the hype: this is EvE Online without the flowcharts. What X3R tries to do has been done better a thousand times before with more realistic everything. I actually bought this game when it came out many years ago and when the computer I intended to play it on died it sat in a box for many years waiting for a machine that could run it. I dug it out recently (being a space freak) and thought it'd be worth a bash... but was I ever wrong. The learning curve is beyond vertical with no tutorial and no introductions, Just an endless list of email spam the first time you do something new, and if you can't find your ingame inbox you're out of luck anyway. There doesn't appear to be any way to plot a course, you've got to do it from memory and if you happen to forget one of the totally generic and forgettable names along the way you'll get lost or dock at the wrong base, and forget about issuing orders in a hurry if you're flying with an automated ship.
Trading is completely inscrutable, prices don't fluctuate nearly as much as the game claims and the only useful profits are small-potatoes on short hops for minimal returns, add to that the fact that there is no easy way to gain freelance work and no real money to be made off contract and the only sane choice left seems to be piracy. But even then it's such a huge grind-fest the game box may as well have contained a pepper mill instead of a DvD.
The interface is BEYOND disgusting, flight is fine and the addition of inertia to the turns and acceleration is nice, It's not actual newtonian physics but it's nice, but doing everything else that requires doing in a space sim seems to have been made MUCH harder by way of compensating. Navigating the menus seems to require its own manual, and the context dependent keypresses mean that if you're in a menu screen and need to stop in a hurry or turn off the autopilot you're SOL. I have gotten lost in the menus more times than I care to count and it took me half an hour to figure out how to buy stuff, even with help from the game forums.
The storyline is instantly uninteresting. You're dumped into the middle of a universe sometime after the last instalment, your father in a coma after an encounter with the bad guys, and no reason to care about either his plight or their motivations. You're expected to know how to fly (fairly straightforward) but everything else is left inscrutable and unless you do some reading you'll never learn how. the game has some wonderful innovations (like an economy-tracking device) but they're not worth holding out for. I have seen better work done on every facet of X3s gameplay some of them by indie firms producing free software. This game SHOULD get a 1 just for being a space sim, but what it's doing is poisoning the well by the fact of its every existence. If people think 'X3: reunion' when they think of space sims then the game has done a disservice to the genre.
SummaryX3: Reunion immerses the player into the most realistic, living universe, ever experienced. Extensive development has gone into the X³ engine, making full use of DirectX 9 technology, to create dramatic visual effects and stunningly realistic starships. The economy model in X3: Reunion is more complex than any previous X game. Coupled wi...