Recent reviews by TheDrgnRbrn

This is a strange game.

Do I recommend it? No.

The game, at its core, wants to play like a kind of fighting game, with stuns and knockdowns to take advantage of. Its just not that much fun because of it. Hit detection seems strange sometimes, but if you mesh with the combat system, it actually clicks pretty well.

The biggest problem is everything in the game that ISNT giant robots shooting the hell out of each other. The menus are archaic, the lobby system is completely unnecessary, and the entire thing is funded by a pretty awful gacha system. Gachas are fine, but some of the power for higher rarity machines very much feels like a pay-to-win mechanic. It makes the pseudo-fighter mechanics in the game feel even worse.

The game is old, and frankly, its not very good. It sucks to get some cool machine, only to have the matchmaking points cap say that you can't play that machine til rng decides that, yes, now is the time to play at that points level! Many folks have already mentioned the disconnects, which just makes the awkward wait to get into a match worse.

Avoid, go play pretty much any other gundam game and you will probably find something at least a little bit more entertaining, rather than the frustrating mess that is this one.

Well, this is it. 5 Years of development, to end with a fairly mediocre voxel builder.

Bought in at the start, got a copy for a buddy for multiplayer shenanigans.

Overall, dissapointing. The core gameplay loop is missing from the game, and there really isn't any 'story' to the game to engage with. A lot of features are in the game but serve no purprose, for example, water manipulation and embarkation supplies.

Dev team lost the vision for the game a long time ago, I feel, and thus the core, fun gameplay loops of the game, that of building buildings, making things, fighting off bad stuff, essentially never got there. It took them til this year, 2018, to give you a reason to actually build buildings. This was a fundamental concept of the game, but one that was entirely forgotten til this point.

In the end, Riot isn't really to blame. The original dev team probably over-promised on kickstarter, and the current one just lost interest in the project. Hard to blame them, really.

Would I spend money on it? If it was on sale, maybe. 20$ pricetag? Go buy Rimworld.

Short and sweet: Dont buy the game, dont support the devolopers. The game has had a year of patches and features are still non-functional, the AI is laughable, and there are still bugs and crashes.

The Nitty Gritty: The developers put out the game as a steaming mess, almost every feature in the game non-functional. Literally, every feature, from combat to building to trading to diplomacy. Everything was horrendous. After a year and a 'free' expansion, the game still has features and techs that don't function. Unfortunately, the rate of patches and updates released for it has slowed, as the developer has essentially run out of money to fund it, instead having to turn to other games to try and garner the neccessary funds to continue releasing patches.

In essence, the game is a traditional turn-based 4x, with a focus on combat rather than the micro-management of an empire. Credit given where it is due, the combat is pretty, with satisfying weapons and ships that look great when they go boom. The game uses an armor-matrix system instead of health to determine the damage ships take, with boxes of armor mitigating damage till weapons penetrate the hull, and even then you have to hit something critical to put the ship out of commision. Of course, its hard to tell what the critical hits actually do, because it provides little information in game, forcing you to go to an external wiki.

The tech tree is satisfying, with tons of different options and plenty of weapons, enforcing the focus on fighting. You can construct stations and devote them to each of the various trees to help you develop techs faster, giving you an edge on the opponent, but it can get expensive quick. Stations are also fairly easy to kill, so must be defended. For veterans of the original game, the tech tree doesnt go much higher than antimatter, but is diverse enough to make you want to see everything in it. The addition of battle riders, smaller ships carried into battle by larger ones, is welcome, though the interface for working with them is frustrating, making you assign them to each ship capable of carrying them, rather than just filling them up. Micromanagement where there should be an option to bypass it makes the game frustrating in several situations like this, especially when its in referance to a bunch of ships that are going to get blown away and have to be replaced every battle.

The UI is usable, with everything fairly clear and easy to understand. Everything is controlled by sliders, allowing you to easily dedicate your empire to production or research, while still allowing you to drill down and make planets do specific tasks for you. The Empire Overview is another section that could use some more explanation, as some of the sliders seem arbitrary but serve purposes, such as the ones relating to security. Most of the complexity in the interface could be easily served by a tutorial, which the game lacks, instead relying on an overlay which you can toggle which is supposed to point out how everything works.

As of this writing, most things are functional, with combat not crashing all the time, trade working as intended, and the interface being usable, if not sometimes cryptic. However, the AI is still lacking any challenge at all to a human player, end of turn times are still bad, and diplomacy is still in what essentially appears to be place-holder graphics, with little to no built-in explanation of what anything does. Several technologies are not working, with vague descriptions of what they should do. The developers have done a good job of making it playable, and for that I applaud them, but the state of the game at release was unforgiveable and should not be forgotten.

Overall, the game is playable and moderately fun, with combat being the highlight of the game. Lousy AI makes it rather repetitive unfortunately, because it forces you to fight over every single planet they own. Diplomacy is still cryptic, and turn times are still a little long, but you can now get through an entire game from start to finish. I recommend playing it with your friends if at all, because that is the only challenge you will get with it, and the only way the diplomacy makes any sense. The unfortunate reality of having to have the wiki open in another window at all times is frustrating, because all the information should be given in game, but is not.

I still do not recommend buying it, even with the developers attempts to make good by their players, because it was unnacceptable to launch it in such a state, and judging by the rate of updates now, it will never be in a complete state. If you dont mind learning the interface and stumbling through things, then you can find some enjoyment in it.

X: Rebirth is not an X series game. If you are trying to buy it while expecting such, dont. It is simply unsatisfying to play if you are looking for anything more complex than a space shooter.

The developers spent 7 years working on the game to release for console, so the interface, options, and controls suffer from that design decision. As of this review, there is no way to target enemies besides clicking on them, all the menus are radial and difficult to navigate, and overall the performace of the game, even on high-end rigs, is poor.

Being stuck in the same ship the entire game (The Albion Skunk, endearing..) is unsatisfying, especially when you see all the other cool looking ships flying around. Your co-pilot is annoying as humanly possible, your ship is invulnerable if you activate a drone, and you cannot carry any cargo inside of it. You have to hire other people to fly your other ships and carry cargo for you, and they have to be the most retarded pilots ever.

The combat is weak and unchallenging. Enemies have spawned inside other ships and inside stations on several occasions, or they will just spawn in empty space and sit there, doing nothing as you blow them up. Though, why you would blow them up is a mystery, as they never shoot at you.

The only good thing about the game is that stations look and feel truly alive and massive, with tons of npc ships flying around them and giving them satisfying feel. Unfortunately even this is ruined as the developers turned it into a minigame, making you fly and look at every inch of these massive stations to get missions and discounts. I won't even go into detail about docking and walking around inside of them, as that has to be the absolute worst part of the game, and you should live in fear of it.

Overall, this is not an X game in the slightest, and was released in a state not fit for human consumption. Do not buy, and do not support a company that releases games in such a state. Everyone will tell you that the modders will fix it, or that the company will, and that is not an acceptable excuse for such a mess. Developers need to make functional, fun games, not engines and wait for the modders.