About B: Rebirth :
This is a beautiful perspective on X that focuses on manual flying. The story AND sandbox are pretty linear, don’t expect X3 or X4, it’s like a huge interactive cinematic that has most of the mechanics of the series without the polish to be a good sandbox, buy X3 or X4 if you are looking for a refined dynamic sandbox. This is not it, it’s good though and you can sink a lot of time into the fragmented X centre of the map. Short version: For the plot, just watch on Youtube. This game cost Egosoft a Roguey (formerly a big fan/promoter/guy who runs a nice X-game site) and was a waste of a Cycrow (modder who brought life to a lot of the X-games). This game isn’t a sandbox. It’s a pretty garbage can. Long version: Changing the format from my 3.6 review to just be: who did their job right; who sort of did their job right; who did their job wrong; noticed changes for 4.0; conclusion. Misspellings readers notice are prbobabally intentional. Who did their jobs right? Well… nobody? Graphics people were here, until I found myself complaining too much. Who sorta did their jobs?
- Graphics people! Everything is gaugeous! Big ‘ole cap ships with so many guns, to the tiny boarding pods (which open up on contact with a ship! Crazy detail)! Character models are pretty bland, and many are bald; apparently it was much worse in 1.0 though. Travelling on highways is still nice; though they’ve shortened the ‘roller coaster’ highways. Stations are huge and feel like realistic-ish space stations. Might not prefer the big empty interiors that have less game impact, but that’s minor. Big problem: you still glitch through ship/station surfaces and get stuck on the inside. It seems rarer now; either 4.0 fixed most causes or I got better at avoiding collisions.
- Combat people! Weapons fire, missiles track, but there’s very little balance. Missiles are useless in a firefight against fighters because they’ll never connect; missiles are the only real weapon against capital ships because lasers are too low dps. Cap ships regularly have 12+ (think I’ve seen 17) fighter escorts. When you’re trapped in a fighter, 12 to 1 odds means run or die. Or rarely run AND die. Plasma/LR turrets (look like beam lasers) have laser accuracy and can 2 or 3-shot an upgraded player ship (the turrets are mounted in groups of 2 or more, so it can functionally be an instant kill). Boarding operations frequently end with ‘How did I die?’ I have also never noticed any of my ships or stations launch combat drones, despite the fact I keep stocking up on them.
- Economy people! Ships fly and trade; stations will build correctly now. People assigned to posts will show up in menus and you no longer have to restart to interact, buuuut… Stations are still functionally indestructible and quickly rebuild if you’re not actively shooting at them. Player stations STILL take over 24 hours real-time to construct. Construction Vessels (CVs) still don’t get integrated into stations like the description says – they’re ugly, inconvenient (extra crew needed, etc.), and a huge vulnerability to a station performing upgrades. I’m going to elaborate on stations later, because it was the biggest non-glitch-related let down for me. Who didn’t do their jobs?
- Story people! Spoilers! The game could have been titled “Uncanny Coincidences… in Space!” At least then Ego could have claimed some allusion to The Three Princes of Serendip. Changes I’ve seen: Collision glitches happen less rarely than 3.6. Weapon mods – RANDOM modifications to ship weapons that enemies drop. They increase or decrease damage, range, rate of fire, cooling, etc. Not all mods are good. You can craft them with dismantled mods, but the result is random, so you reload a lot. Two new weapons I haven’t gotten because the story arbitrarily locks the weapons you can access. Save files are now compressed in .gz format, making them harder to modify. Cargo drones don’t seem to get stuck (though we could have used transport devices from previous games and avoided the issue). Home of Light is a thing. I don’t regret not getting it, even on sale. There’s a tester with a positive review that includes something like “Fix the fog! It’s dropping frame rates to single digits!” SETA (time speed-up) is back. There’s a jump drive, haven’t gotten it (spent time early in the game amassing a big fleet to see if you could kill a station). You can apparently cap certain Xenon ships (stuck early in the plot). There’s a mission bulletin board, so you don’t have to fly all over to try to find missions. Any mission requiring station defense is a guaranteed win – accept the mission, continue what you were doing before, and get paid. Because stations are unkillable. The rant: The state of stations is really irritating. They’re the only non-randomly generated things in the game, and therefore their creation and destruction is the only way to truly affect the universe. Well, you can construct your own, over the course of days! Who the f*** thought that was a good idea? DAYS. But you can’t destroy NPC stations. You can bring their hull to 0, but! AI ships (which you can’t directly control without mods) are too stupid to shoot at all the modules on most stations, so those modules can’t die. And 0 hull stations will be back before you can “destroy” a second station because they rebuild (repair) so fast. Player stations as defensive installations are pointless – spend days making a station that’ll shoot a few randomly-generated NPCs? But even as factories, they fall flat. They make stuff that feeds other factories, which make stuff that feeds shipyards, which make ships. The player cannot have a shipyard, which is limiting in its own right. So you can supply one of the few NPC shipyards. Well you can buy ships from them, when they’re not making their own ships that quickly despawn. OH! And you see ship info, there’s a section for what command they’re executing. 4.0 seemed to make that command “???” more. So you go close and scan the ship to find what it’s up to. Well, if it’s got the ‘explore’ command, it’s going to despawn soon. So, they hid ship commands with “???” because too many people were aware the ships had that despawn “explore” command. Anyhow, you’ve got your factories. You’ve got your ships. But NPC stations aren’t sand castles in a sandbox; they’re steel bars with sand glued on. So, at some point you’ll realize your sandbox is really a prison. Thumbs up if the review’s helpful. Thumbs down if it isn’t. Por favor.
