X Rebirth Review

There are however some examples of good ideas on show, though sadly with less than optimal implementation – giving you a ship interior and access to stations in a first person perspective is the prime example. In theory, this sounds great; in practice though this feature isn’t developed enough to be worthwhile – with middling texture quality in this view, a bizarre quantity of loot-able containers covering every inch of most stations which are all made up of a very few modular sections, making them all feel exactly the same. In reality a trip to a space-station in X Rebirth is a surreal spree of kleptomania broken up only be shallow interactions with the NPCs, which feature exceptionally wooden voice acting and poor animation.

This lack of quality on the NPC front make interacting with them an unpleasant experience – especially irritating given that your own ship is infested with a deeply irritating NPC co-pilot called Yisha. The on-board computer is fairly talkative as it is, and Yisha adds to this with unnecessary monologue throughout (albeit to a lesser extent in sandbox mode). The real kicker is that you are forced to interact with NPCs face-to-face in order to do just about everything, from buying upgrades to finding crew for your other ships. While you can only personally fly the one ship, irritatingly named the ‘Albion Skunk’, throughout the entire game, you do at least get to own other ships and order them around. Unfortunately, you need to find crews for these ships which requires you to fly around stations scouring bars and other odd locations for crew members to recruit. To top it all off you have to manually ferry them to the ship as well – they could at least get a shuttle to drop them off.

The move to give you control of just the one ship is not one I really understand. While it simplifies matters a little it means that much of the sense of progression is lost – you can of course buy upgrades but there’s a bigger sense of progress when you change to an entirely new hull. I would understand it better at least if the interior of the ship was more developed – when you exit to a station you can walk around the rear loading ramp and a tiny common room but that is all – walking onto the bridge is a canned animation you have no control of.

In truth, the game would be better without any of the first-person elements and it’s a shame that they weren’t cut before launch. As it stands this part of the game will take an incredible amount of work to truly fix – new character models with better lip syncing, a great increase in the number of modular segments which the stations are built from, and an entirely rethought interior of your own ship would be a great start though. Oh, and an option to mute Yisha, please.

The combat in the X series has always been something of a let-down for me at least, but Rebirth has the worst of those that I’ve played. There are two big factors in this: the lack of a radar and the size of your ship. Without a radar you’re forced to rely on small indicators dotted around your HUD, which aren’t obvious and are quickly lost in a combat situation. Making this yet worse is the horrendous implementation of the physical cockpit you’re sitting in – it’s ugly, taking up most of the screen with over-sized displays, and you can’t even turn your head to look around and take advantage of the windows which would make tracking targets a little easier at least.

My complaint with the size of the Albion Skunk is that it’s too large to be an effective dog-fighter, being easily outmaneuvered by dedicated fighters, whilst being too small to take on larger ships (though that is made more practical due to the lack of ability displayed by the AI at pretty much all times). A redesign of the cockpit with a display for a radar system would make combat a much more pleasant affair, though the only thing to be done about the size of your ship would be to allow players to fly more than just the one – something I doubt will ever be implemented in patches, though perhaps we might see that in an expansion.