1st of all, imagine this for me: You are in a vast, beautifully rendered universe. You want to explore it, only to find that you've been shackled to a network of boxes roughly 80km2 on average, the only way to get from 1 box to another is via one of the arbitrary jump gates along the borders. So, instead of exploring other planets, investigating distant nebulae etc, all you can ever do is dawdle about inside the box, mapping the locations of the jump gates and stations then going through 1 of those gates to the next box and doing it all over again! So that's X3: Reunion, the 3rd game (not counting its half-baked expansion pack Terran Conflict) in a series that has taken the concept of space exploration and thrown it out the airlock with a passion! Ships move so fucking slow that you could finish dinner by the time you arrive anywhere. What's that Egosoft? I can get there faster using the Singularity Engine Time Accelerator? Great....no wait; this is nothing more than a FUCKING FAST FORWARD BUTTON!! Pure fucking genius, it makes warp drive look like a horse-drawn carriage! The Prince of Persia never had any use for fast forward and do you know why? Because he only would've DIED faster!! Same thing goes for when I'm being chased by a ship with bigger guns; pressing fast forward would only bring up the game over screen quicker! What's that, a jump drive? Woopdy-fucking-do, I can now instantly teleport to distant boxes, skipping up to a dozen loading screens in the process! Do you have any interstellar tra......where've you gone!?
I just don't understand why - when space flight sims are supposed to be about explorative freedom - this game dictatorially keeps the player shackled within it's claustrophobic grid of jump gates. The navigational map always keeps centred on the midpoint between the gates, only grudgingly zooms out a few kilometres and forgets you even exist when you fly too far away from the grid. You can even buy a ship computer add on, the Ecliptic Projector, which projects a square grid onto your HUD between the jump gates from vich you vill not deviate! Plus everything is quite far away, or so it feels, thanks to the agonisingly slow ship engines!
Planets are realistically huge and so beautifully rendered that they practically beg to be explored but the game doesn't even let you do that either; when I tried landing on 1, 1st of all it took yonks to get there and 2nd, as soon as I got the re-entry warning I just bounced right off it!
Calling the ships in the X series 'interstellar' would be like saying that a cripple can run a marathon! In Freelancer, on the other hand, each sector is roughly 200km2 and those actually comprise whole star systems: stars, planets (some of which you can actually land on albeit via docking rings only), nebulae, asteroid fields etc plus you have cruise drives for getting from A to B. Granted, it's far from being realistic and you still need to use jump gates/jump holes to travel to other systems but at least it gives a much better sense of freedom, speed and exploration; that ships, if not interstellar, are at least interplanetary, which makes Freelancer light-years better than X3, which seemed so hell bent on keeping me within the boundaries that I was worried that if I did stray too far, an Egosoft destroyer would suddenly drop out of hyperspace, having been sent from a base at the planet next door and give me 10 seconds to get back in the gate grid or be destroyed by 1 of it's beam cannons, Freespace 2 style!
Story. Somehow, contrary to the back of the box, it just doen't feel like an 'epic story with twists and turns at every jump gate' but a bunch of boring, rushed, disjointed, schizophrenic cutscenes joined together by blank loading screens between 10-20 seconds, which all in all feels about as 'epic' as morning fog. And it doesn't help that the NPC's are all the same blind, infuriatingly stupid retards from Freespace 2 who say 'only minor damage' when in fact they're only 1 stray laser shot away from certain death or 'we can't take much more of this' but their ship hasn't taken a single sodding scratch!
Thankfully though, you're never forced to go through the whole thing. In fact, you can choose to start a game with the main plot disabled, which begs the question: Why did they even bother with it, considering how shit it is?
Combat. The workman always blames his tools so to speak, which would normally mean that you're a sore loser who blames lack of skill on crappy equipment but in X3, that's a perfectly legit complaint because no matter how skilled you are, if you're flying a scout ship and are taking on medium fighters with bigger guns and shields, you may as well hit the self-destruct button so combat just boils down to who has the bigger ship, nothing else and the greater manoeuvrability of scout ships is rendered moot by the shitty Newtonian flight model, which has you spinning on the spot whenever you try making sharp turns, thus making it easier for enemies to blow you to bits. Oh hello again Egosoft, what's that? I can strafe up/down and sideways? No I can't because I forgot to buy the fucking 'strafe drive extension'!!
Here's where the combat really shits itself inside out: you cannot target anything specific on an enemy ship but at the same time it's also possible for components and add-ons to get randomly destroyed after your shields have failed, meaning strategy has also been thrown out the airlock! So say your shields have failed and you're desperately trying to scarper, you're just about to confirm your destination but suddenly the menu disappears and the computer says 'jump drive...strafe drive exte...ecliptic projector...destroyed'!
Buying a destroyer or some other capital ship isn't much better because those bastards have their own issues, the WORST of which is that their main turrets fire pathetically slow droplets of ionised piss that take 20 shitting seconds to reach their maximum 5km range, turn about as fast as a beached whale, meaning - when you've set the ships computer to man them, at which point it just nails down the trigger - that 15 minutes and as many squillion shots into empty space later, you still haven't killed those pesky fighters! And why the FUCK can't you use the mouse to aim the turrets while in the 3rd person view, like in Freelancer? Because that would've made the combat more intuitive and less tedious thus something Egosoft avoid like a plague! You can man the turrets manually but that means actually leaving the bridge and either letting the ship continue on its own or turn on the auto-pilot, which on 1 occasion caused the ship to crash into the nearest station and DIE!!
You can theoretically buy and manage an entire fleet of ships but there's no point because the game interface is only 1 frightening step above Eve Online in terms of friendliness and usability and involves having to go through nearly 7 interruptive, screen-hogging menus just to issue simple orders to just ONE ship, ONE!!!!
I think the only aspect of the game I sort of like is the dynamic economy because trading is the only one that actually works but even that's been tainted by the game's bullshit sin of forcing you to buy all its functions. You have to buy the aforementioned fast forward button, the strafe drive extension to unlock the strafe controls, engine tunings, rudder and cargo optimisations to upgrade speed, manoeuvrability and cargo space respectively to the level they should be anyway, the trading system extension just to be able to see the fucking selling prices on stations without having to dock, combat and trading software to unlock basic ship commands etc, all of which can be destroyed at random by enemy fire when your shields are down!!! What the hell next, you have to buy anti-aliasing!?!?
Considering that the vast majority of user-made mods and scripts that I've seen on the web seem designed purely to plug up the stupid design holes left by the developer, something's terribly wrong. The purpose of the modding community is to add different toppings to the already great tasting pizza that is the original game, to try out new flavours but X3 strikes me as a game that was taken out of the oven too soon so what we ended up with was a mushy pile of dough!
The only reason all the aforementioned flaws annoy me so much is that this game had a lot of potential but was tragically wasted because Egosoft were more concerned about tarting it up and over-hyping the fucking patches as though they're expansion packs than giving it decent gameplay!!
If you're looking for a space flight simulator, steer clear of this game but if you're after a space prison dawdling simulator or a tool set, then I cautiously recommend X3: Reunion.
I just don't understand why - when space flight sims are supposed to be about explorative freedom - this game dictatorially keeps the player shackled within it's claustrophobic grid of jump gates. The navigational map always keeps centred on the midpoint between the gates, only grudgingly zooms out a few kilometres and forgets you even exist when you fly too far away from the grid. You can even buy a ship computer add on, the Ecliptic Projector, which projects a square grid onto your HUD between the jump gates from vich you vill not deviate! Plus everything is quite far away, or so it feels, thanks to the agonisingly slow ship engines!
Planets are realistically huge and so beautifully rendered that they practically beg to be explored but the game doesn't even let you do that either; when I tried landing on 1, 1st of all it took yonks to get there and 2nd, as soon as I got the re-entry warning I just bounced right off it!
Calling the ships in the X series 'interstellar' would be like saying that a cripple can run a marathon! In Freelancer, on the other hand, each sector is roughly 200km2 and those actually comprise whole star systems: stars, planets (some of which you can actually land on albeit via docking rings only), nebulae, asteroid fields etc plus you have cruise drives for getting from A to B. Granted, it's far from being realistic and you still need to use jump gates/jump holes to travel to other systems but at least it gives a much better sense of freedom, speed and exploration; that ships, if not interstellar, are at least interplanetary, which makes Freelancer light-years better than X3, which seemed so hell bent on keeping me within the boundaries that I was worried that if I did stray too far, an Egosoft destroyer would suddenly drop out of hyperspace, having been sent from a base at the planet next door and give me 10 seconds to get back in the gate grid or be destroyed by 1 of it's beam cannons, Freespace 2 style!
Story. Somehow, contrary to the back of the box, it just doen't feel like an 'epic story with twists and turns at every jump gate' but a bunch of boring, rushed, disjointed, schizophrenic cutscenes joined together by blank loading screens between 10-20 seconds, which all in all feels about as 'epic' as morning fog. And it doesn't help that the NPC's are all the same blind, infuriatingly stupid retards from Freespace 2 who say 'only minor damage' when in fact they're only 1 stray laser shot away from certain death or 'we can't take much more of this' but their ship hasn't taken a single sodding scratch!
Thankfully though, you're never forced to go through the whole thing. In fact, you can choose to start a game with the main plot disabled, which begs the question: Why did they even bother with it, considering how shit it is?
Combat. The workman always blames his tools so to speak, which would normally mean that you're a sore loser who blames lack of skill on crappy equipment but in X3, that's a perfectly legit complaint because no matter how skilled you are, if you're flying a scout ship and are taking on medium fighters with bigger guns and shields, you may as well hit the self-destruct button so combat just boils down to who has the bigger ship, nothing else and the greater manoeuvrability of scout ships is rendered moot by the shitty Newtonian flight model, which has you spinning on the spot whenever you try making sharp turns, thus making it easier for enemies to blow you to bits. Oh hello again Egosoft, what's that? I can strafe up/down and sideways? No I can't because I forgot to buy the fucking 'strafe drive extension'!!
Here's where the combat really shits itself inside out: you cannot target anything specific on an enemy ship but at the same time it's also possible for components and add-ons to get randomly destroyed after your shields have failed, meaning strategy has also been thrown out the airlock! So say your shields have failed and you're desperately trying to scarper, you're just about to confirm your destination but suddenly the menu disappears and the computer says 'jump drive...strafe drive exte...ecliptic projector...destroyed'!
Buying a destroyer or some other capital ship isn't much better because those bastards have their own issues, the WORST of which is that their main turrets fire pathetically slow droplets of ionised piss that take 20 shitting seconds to reach their maximum 5km range, turn about as fast as a beached whale, meaning - when you've set the ships computer to man them, at which point it just nails down the trigger - that 15 minutes and as many squillion shots into empty space later, you still haven't killed those pesky fighters! And why the FUCK can't you use the mouse to aim the turrets while in the 3rd person view, like in Freelancer? Because that would've made the combat more intuitive and less tedious thus something Egosoft avoid like a plague! You can man the turrets manually but that means actually leaving the bridge and either letting the ship continue on its own or turn on the auto-pilot, which on 1 occasion caused the ship to crash into the nearest station and DIE!!
You can theoretically buy and manage an entire fleet of ships but there's no point because the game interface is only 1 frightening step above Eve Online in terms of friendliness and usability and involves having to go through nearly 7 interruptive, screen-hogging menus just to issue simple orders to just ONE ship, ONE!!!!
I think the only aspect of the game I sort of like is the dynamic economy because trading is the only one that actually works but even that's been tainted by the game's bullshit sin of forcing you to buy all its functions. You have to buy the aforementioned fast forward button, the strafe drive extension to unlock the strafe controls, engine tunings, rudder and cargo optimisations to upgrade speed, manoeuvrability and cargo space respectively to the level they should be anyway, the trading system extension just to be able to see the fucking selling prices on stations without having to dock, combat and trading software to unlock basic ship commands etc, all of which can be destroyed at random by enemy fire when your shields are down!!! What the hell next, you have to buy anti-aliasing!?!?
Considering that the vast majority of user-made mods and scripts that I've seen on the web seem designed purely to plug up the stupid design holes left by the developer, something's terribly wrong. The purpose of the modding community is to add different toppings to the already great tasting pizza that is the original game, to try out new flavours but X3 strikes me as a game that was taken out of the oven too soon so what we ended up with was a mushy pile of dough!
The only reason all the aforementioned flaws annoy me so much is that this game had a lot of potential but was tragically wasted because Egosoft were more concerned about tarting it up and over-hyping the fucking patches as though they're expansion packs than giving it decent gameplay!!
If you're looking for a space flight simulator, steer clear of this game but if you're after a space prison dawdling simulator or a tool set, then I cautiously recommend X3: Reunion.
