X Rebirth Review

Gamers are so eager to finally get a decent game about Space Everything at least three big projects on the topic were financed on Kickstarter. Meanwhile, the game X: Rebirth made its way to the shelves (apparently). It was difficult to come up with the best release time: while Star Citizens and company feed the public with promises and screenshots, here we have new “X” games! Reborn, polished (in theory), and just cool. We should get them, at least to brighten up the wait for the upcoming Ragnarok of space simulators.

Well, let’s figure out how it actually is.

In fact, the game is buggy and currently receives patches almost twice a day. Usually, this kind of fun in our computer entertainment starts to happen after the actual game starts, but X: Rebirth is special in this regard. Perhaps it was some strange policy by the localizers, but look – half of the menus are in Russian, half – in English, some texts – in Russian, some – in English. Even if you know both languages more or less, this chaos distracts and annoys, and soon it just confuses.

And it gets worse, of course. In the first few days of the game, it crashed for unknown reasons, but it seems they managed to fix it promptly. Now it just lags in random places and hangs on certain interface screens. But if you really want to play, you can, the main thing is not to forget to spam F5 after every significant event.

And I want to play. After all, with just a couple of clicks in the menu, you are promised a huge space where you can do anything you want. Plus, the money has already been spent anyway.

At the very beginning, the reborn X offers you either to go through the local campaign or to dive headfirst into space without any story missions. I considered myself a space sim guru until the moment I loaded into the “free flight” mode, and these illusions turned to dust. Here, there’s a cockpit, there’s a station ahead, there are ships docking, and you have no idea what would be good to do now, how to get moving. You still need to first see what’s what in the campaign.

In general, everything starts exactly the same way in it, only instead of a space station, there is an asteroid field ahead, and all ship systems are intentionally disabled in anticipation of training missions. They don’t handle the controls very carefully – successfully reaching some inhabited rock, shooting at minerals and drones, I set off in search of the Commander of Defense, who is positively necessary for my team (official translation), and suddenly discovered that, firstly, it’s a challenge to find him at the stations, and secondly, he’s not affordable for me!

That’s how my real big space adventure with missions and trading began, with a tutorial hanging halfway. It took me a while to figure out where I could earn money. Primarily because X: Rebirth has a terrible trading interface. Maybe it’s because of the poor translation, but still. It’s still a mystery to me which side of the slider is my ship and which side is the trader. Just like these pluses and minuses in the accompanying statistics of the goods. Whether the goods are sold below or above the market price, or it’s relative to my purchase price, and how they are calculated if I quietly picked up half of the stuff for free from abandoned crates at the station – it’s impossible to figure out without a week of googling, trial and error.

It was easier to immediately fly over to that tempting icon of the Merry Roger next to one of the docks. “Money doesn’t smell,” said the aspiring successful space businessman to himself and went to find out what interesting prospects were there. Funny enough, the situation turned out to be exactly the opposite of what was expected – they were hiring not a team to rob shuttles, but an escort for them. Reminding himself once again that money doesn’t smell, the inexperienced space worker flew off to guard the barge of the future.

The job turned out well. On the way, the convoy, consisting of me, my beloved, and no one else, was attacked three times by random solo pirates. All three of them were poorly equipped, their self-guided missiles didn’t hold up well, and they didn’t even come close to the space barge. As a result, I managed to earn some money, have some fun, and look around.

The universe in X: Rebirth looks, um, quite worn out. There are dirty rocks and dust everywhere, everything is gloomy, and the stations hardly flicker with the classic neon rainbow from sci-fi movies… in general, it’s tough, but not too oppressive. Space is space. I want bright starry landscapes, but either I simply haven’t found them yet, or they don’t exist at all.

The spaceship looks about the same, but inside it’s cozy.

Sometimes, they make a cockpit, and throughout the game, the gamer has a burning desire to completely disable the interface under their skin, so that their eyes don’t get tired. And sometimes, in just a second and a half of contemplating the cockpit, you immediately want to set up a second monitor for all kinds of trading information and other charts, as well as buy some bulky controller specifically designed for your game. So that there’s a separate lever for acceleration and braking, a separate panel for launching different missiles, and maybe even a steering wheel… It’s all madness, of course, but if something like this really happens, then at least the cockpit is made right.

Laugh as much as you want, but in a pleasant cockpit, it’s a quarter of the overall enjoyment of a space sim. It would be great, of course, if there was customization – hanging a Christmas tree there, an icon of Commander Shepard… that would be the life.

***

As you can easily notice, I haven’t had the chance to fly and try out much in X: Rebirth. Among the potential crew members are intriguing “architects,” the star map will probably never be fully explored (although, maybe it’s an illusion), and so on. Somewhere on Monday, this review will be supplemented with more complete impressions of the game, but for now, the cactus occasionally pricks, but it tastes quite good.