X Rebirth Review

In an age where linearity now means 'dragging the player through overblown set-pieces by the scruff of the neck' and gets openly gobbed at in the streets as a result, it was only a matter of time before somebody hopeful went to the far end of the scale, got out a set of jumper cables, and attempted to grant life once again to the dusty metallic monstrosity that is the space sandbox genre. The contender this time is the X series, and I'm sure you can understand why I went into its latest iteration – X Rebirth, that is – with an extra dollop of that ever-present healthy scepticism. When your game is presented as a dumbed-down reboot of an ageing niche franchise – moreover, a reboot that has evidently been rummaging around in the Videogame Subtitle Bargain Bucket – that's my cue to reach for the hacksaw. Having said that, if the tales told by jaded space veterans over a Martian camp-fire are anything to go by, then the earlier X games were about as straightforward and approachable as a copy of Microsoft Access lodged in Medusa's unruly perm.So perhaps a bit of simplification was in order after all.

Things start off about as token as it gets: you are a young generic faceless spacefaring type whose name I completely forget (okay, I checked: it's Ren Otani), down on your luck and picking up whatever odd jobs you can in the outer space colony of Albion. You've just looted a priceless prototype ship from an ancient battlefield – quite functional, of course – when you pick up an escape pod containing a member of the local underground resistance, whose name also escapes my mind (checked again, it's Yisha Tarren). In between fiddling with the radio and hand-feeding you the prerequisite basic tutorials, she asks if you wouldn't mind making a little road trip across the sector and dropping her off somewhere safe. Naturally this has bad news written all over it, but I certainly wasn't deterred. I familiarised myself with the basic controls, eased the throttle forward, pointed the bow towards the stars and mentally prepared myself for an exciting science-fiction adventure that spans the cosmos. Then, about thirty seconds later, I had to pause and fiddle with the graphics sliders a bit. Then I had to Alt-Tab my way out and make absolute sure that my processor hadn't melted into a toxic silicon sludge while I'd been gaping slack-jawed at the game's glittering skyboxes.

To put it less passive-aggressively, X Rebirth runs like a Morris Marina with a petrol tank full of soap suds. Speaking as an owner of a fairly beefy computer, I was flabbergasted to find that the framerate was barely brushing up against 30 per second – you know, the sort of number that next-gen console owners get in a tizzy about – and this was just when all the game had to render was me, my ship, my co-pilot's frankly unsettling visage and the empty expanse of space. Encountering a sprawling space station or cluster of ships only served to drive the already-crippled framerate into zoetrope territory, which might have been bearable for cruising around but certainly got on my nerves during dogfights in and around larger structures.Which is, as you'll know if you've played a space sim before, the more interesting kind of dogfight since it doesn't involve turning end over end looking for your opponent's thruster trail several thousand miles from the nearest space-bollard.

In an ideal world such dreadful optimisation would be justified by gorgeous polygon-crunching graphics, but in humdrum reality X Rebirth is a bit patchier and prone to occasionally throwing its graphics down a flight of stairs. Sure, it's a looker when you're out and about in space, gazing through the parting dust clouds at the diffuse alien light of distant suns as you skirt around the hulking ruins of an abandoned mining station (etcetera etcetera) but it soon becomes apparent that X Rebirth, demonstrating a telling symptom of many games of this era, knows how to do impressive vistas and not much else. You can dock your ship at various points along structures and go poking around inside, though doing so will reveal that the environments are achingly small, repetitive, uninspired, populated exclusively by residents of the uncanny valley and plagued by texture quality that a Deus Ex mod would have laughed at. This isn't even granting mention to the way the game often fails to render their geometry in time for my arrival, which looks hilariously low-budget if you don't mind ruining your immersion. It's not to say that X Rebirth isn't a treat for the eyes – far from it – but only on an astronomical scale. Get up close and it loses all its appeal.

Just a moment, I seem to have my notes all mixed up. Graphics before gameplay? What kind of hollow excuse for games journalism d'you call this?

I'll say this for it, though: few things are quite so married to a concept as X Rebirth is to sandbox gameplay. There are two options when you start a new game, 'Free Play' and 'Campaign', and it should be a testament to the game's open-ended nature that the only difference between them is that one has a badly-written campaign tacked onto the side while the other throws a few thousand credits into your account from the word go. Naturally the universe is huge, something that's to be expected in such a game, but thanks to the constant traffic and closely-packed settlements feels refreshingly busy as opposed to the black empty vacuum of space that characterises most of its kin. I'm still not sure what to think of the fast travel mechanic though, which replaces the monotony of pointing your nose-cone at your destination and hitting fast-forward with the slightly less-insipid monotony of flying your ship onto the stellar equivalent of the motorway network and playing a little tailgating minigame for the next few minutes. It's not especially offensive, but it gives the impression of a game that's jumping up and down looking for ways to retain your attention, like it just wants to stop you from getting up and making a cup of tea halfway through the journey. It's alright, X Rebirth, I'll be back in just a second.

Combat's a bit of a wet fish too, mind. There's no particular aspect that kills it – unlike the bits we'll get to later, subtle foreshadowing be damned – but the minimal HUD makes it difficult to keep track of opponents since you don't have a proper minimap, the off-screen indicators aren't nearly sufficient enough, and it seems to be a toss-up whether you'll get the icon telling you where to lead your shots on a target or not. Going up against larger less-mobile ships feels more like pruning a hedge than a space battle, what with you slowly circling around taking out turrets and shield generators with well-placed missiles, but the extensive barrages of returned laser fire certainly raise the challenge somewhat, giving the impression that taking down a big meaty bruiser of a battleship is a task to not be taken lightly. The game also has this strange obsession with encouraging me to use remote-controlled drones at every opportunity, apparently oblivious to the fact that my ship is kitted out with far more sophisticated methods of ending promising young lives and – more significantly – stops moving the moment I dig the remote out from between the cushions of the captain's chair, leaving me at the mercy of whoever I'd been failing to make diplomatic relations with. Presumably Yisha never got her pilot's license because she certainly doesn't offer to fly for you during these sections. That or she's too busy playing with the dashboard vents or something.

Normally this would be the point where I point out that X Rebirth is actually a space trading sim and, as such, combat is more of a sideshow than anything else, but the more I played it the more hollow those words sounded. There's still the opportunity to spend a worrying amount of time ferrying large quantities of nondescript goods all over the galaxy, but aside from a few brutally irritating missions early on, it's never really obligatory. You could just as easily make all your money from scanning the area for resources or hunting down and taking on various side missions, which usually involve patrolling areas, assassinating targets, fighting off bandits and other suitably manly things for those of us that spend resources on bigger guns rather than a more cavernous cargo bay. The problem is that while this might be more satisfying in the short run for instant-gratification types who just want an NPC with a flat face to tell them what they need to go and shoot, the side missions never really evolve past the narrow spectrum listed above and, consequentially, start to repeat themselves extremely quickly.

One of X Rebirth's major departures from its predecessors – and space sims as a whole – is that while you can still buy extra ships for your space garage throughout the game, you can't actually pilot them, and must stick to your battlefield relic while hiring nondescript people to fly your extraneous craft in your wake like a fabulous gunmetal-grey honour guard. It has to be said that I personally took offence to this, especially when the game started wheeling out monstrous battle cruisers with enough laser cannons to reduce the moon to a fine grey powder and forced me to watch as the AI piloted them around instead of me. Such offence, however, paled in comparison to the frustration that accompanied the task of trying to actually manipulate them.

The idea behind trading, if I may take a moment, is that you merely direct your subordinates rather than having to lug fifty cans of space cola around yourself, allowing your fleet of ships to take care of all the dull back-and-forthing while you go searching for a bar that does Pan-Galactic Gargle Blasters. It's a nice idea in theory, but in practice just transforms the whole business of managing your precious inventory into the whole business of managing your entourage. You still have to be in the general area of the merchant in question to conduct the trade, meaning that you travel to all the necessary locations anyway, and the extra level of redundancy caused by having the AI manage the delivery quickly makes itself apparent like a shard of broken glass in a cupcake. In one such situation – when time was of the essence, mind you – I organised a trade of one hundred assorted gizmos and sat back waiting for my freighter to swoop in and pick it up. However, after idly flying around for a while I noticed that the order had not been completed, and the reason soon became clear: I had, somehow, managed to hire a deaf-blind pensioner with eleven demerit points on his license as the captain, who was ensuring that my trade freighter crawled towards the docking port with all the urgency of an existentialist glacier. This might be acceptable, albeit still bloody stupid, when trading is something to be done in the background, but I needed those gizmos right then and every moment spent watching them very conspicuously not entering my possession was like a cheese-grater to the frontal lobe. I'm also fairly sure that it wasn't because my octogenarian captain was obeying the local traffic laws, because if he had then he would have definitely not driven the ship straight through the side of one of the space station's residential modules, with a disappointing lack of any feedback on the game's part.

Ordinarily wasting this much of my time in such a manner would be grounds for me to burn the game directory to a disc just so I could have the satisfaction of being able to stamp on it in a physical form, but by this point it felt like getting enraged about somebody emptying a bucket of dishwater into the Thames circa 1824. X Rebirth does not pace itself so much as it trips over its own feet straight out of the gate and spends the rest of the journey crawling around in the dirt. It took around five torturous hours before the game stopped bludgeoning me about the head and shoulders with an endless sequence of aggressively-padded tutorials, and here's the best part: I was still utterly lost. Instructions were often so vague and lacking in important details that I ended up trialling every last possible solution in the hope of stumbling upon the right menu or the right train of logic. All I knew for certain by the end was that I never wanted to hear another line of dialogue from this game again. Bad voice acting? No, bad voice acting is the standard in the world of videogames. X Rebirth, comparatively, makes the ending scene from Devil May Cry look like a touching Shakespearean tragedy. Even if, by some miracle, the lines had been written by somebody who hadn't spent the last twenty years locked in a room with a VHS player, a copy of Spaceballs and five hundred boxes of Fruit Loops, their awkward, stumbling, tone-deaf delivery would have sealed their fate.

There's a reason why I normally don't bother with dissecting a game's interface, and it's because it can usually be trusted to quietly do its job and get out the way: you click the buttons, and unless you're playing Cookie Clicker, they do something important. That's usually where it ends, but X Rebirth deserves special mention for some of the most badly-executed interface design I've seen to date. Being forced to track down dullard NPCs in order to trade small goods is obnoxious enough, but even regally conducting operations from your captain's chair is fraught with issues. You'd think that a game aimed at newcomers to the series would at least have the courtesy to ferry them in and out of menu-driven features as quickly and painlessly as possible, but X Rebirth seems to take a perverse delight in making them more sluggish and awkward than a morbidly obese man trying to stand up on a bouncy castle. First you need to open your basic radial menu with a hotkey, then go through a few more radial menus to find the option you want, then the camera painstakingly rotates to your support character as she stares dreamily at you and brings up a fancy holographic window detailing whatever nonsense you're trying to manipulate, then you finish up, close the window, rotate back to facing the windshield and continue on as normal. Oh yes, and did I mention that if you're doing this outside of a galactic motorway, the ship completely stops moving? So if you wanted to, say, order your first officer to run a hot bath or order the purchase of one thousand titanium kitchen knives while your ship plods away towards its destination, then you get to kiss a hyperdrive’s exhaust port, Captain Efficiency. Not to mention that like every single other minuscule thing in this game, the menus occasionally bug out and won't let you click on any of their elements, forcing you to either load a quicksave or hope that you can duck out by hitting Esc.

If it sounds like this review is schizophrenically flitting from complaint to complaint like a jet-powered hummingbird it's because I am, once again, spoiled for choice. I haven't even really touched on the game's fascinating array of bugs yet. Like a set of Batman villains, they occupy a colourful spectrum from mostly harmless to completely sodding insane. Saves get corrupted, NPCs can't be trusted to make a cheese sandwich, missions drown in their own circular logic, dialogue trees collapse, and while I'm on a roll, the game also has this nasty habit of waking me in the middle of the night with a taste for the blood of a first-born.

Nevertheless, a little bird – sadly not jet-powered – recently told me that Egosoft have a reputation for substandard releases that get slowly polished to perfection. Apart from the fact that excusing a game on its potential quality at some indeterminate point in the future is absolutely the last refuge of a scoundrel, I find this difficult to believe since sufficiently patching X Rebirth would probably involve rewriting most of the game from scratch, but if people want to place their faith in that sort of thing then so be it. To this end, then, let's stop faffing about and jump straight to the big one, the single problem that would still remain even if the game was repaired in the forges of the dwarves of Moria over the course of about a decade: X Rebirth completely misses the point of being a sandbox.

You see, while sandboxes are traditionally characterised by being huge non-linear environments full of things to do, that's not what actually drives their appeal. X Rebirth healthily demonstrates this by filling out those characteristics down to a T and still being dross. A sandbox needs motivation for you to actually play around in it, otherwise it's just a set of meaningless tasks artificially distanced by a commute, and X Rebirth lacks that motivation. There's none of the destructive gratification that characterises sandboxes like Prototype or Saint's Row or Grand Theft Auto, and none of the slow constructive satisfaction of creative toys like Garry's Mod or Minecraft. Sure, you could assemble a fleet of battle cruisers and watch them systematically erase an entire settlement off the map, but there's no creative spark involved. You could hop onto the nearest space-highway going in the opposite direction to your objective and continue travelling until the game erects a massive brick wall in your way. While the various locales are indeed quite pretty and varied in their scenery, they're also functionally identical, hence heavily diminishing any hope of an exploration aspect too. The game presents itself as an open-ended reactive universe without any fixed objectives, which is probably quite true, but without any driving force behind me I just tend to coast around purposelessly. In short, everything is done for its own sake. Perhaps therein lies the point, to provide a big complex toy with loads of switches and shiny lights, but I'm kind of in it for the game over here. Is that too entitled of me?

To bring this down to a more objective level, X Rebirth is a game that burned its bridges before properly building any new ones, and now sits in the middle of a frothing tidal swell of confusion. Say what you like about the earlier games but at least they appealed to somebody, and now the head-crushing depth that created that appeal is just gone, to be replaced with a meaningless stump of a game that's just as difficult to get into without any of the subsequent pay-off underneath. It should probably be taken as read at this point that I didn't come close to finishing X Rebirth, mostly because my save file spontaneously combusted around the twelve hour mark, but quite frankly I was already prepared to give up. The very next mission could have been an Agatha Christie mystery set aboard a space pirates' galleon – or alternatively, one of the massive space battles the game had promised to me countless times – but it wouldn't have mattered. I had already ploughed through far too much glitchy unpleasant misery for it to ever earn a positive recommendation. Clearly Egosoft have a lot to learn before they start work on a sequel. Worry not, chaps, because in the interest of helping I've already thought up a suitable name: X Reloaded.