X Rebirth

In the distant future, the X universe faces a period of profound and irrevocable change. While the universe stumbles towards an uncertain future, countless adventures await as new enemies rise in search of power. Enter a young adventurer and his unlikely female ally traveling in an old, battered ship with a glorious past - two people alone against the galaxy, playing a key part in the events to come. The fate of the universe rests in the hands of the player.

The renovation fails: not only are the new additions crooked and wrong, they also bring the really solid foundation down.

No matter what happens with stability and bug-fixing patches, its poor controls, awful interface, and dull pacing ensure that X Rebirth will remain unpleasant for all but the most forgiving, die-hard space jockeys.

Rebirth lacks inspiration, purpose, good ideas. It's riddled with bugs and, even when it seems to work, it manages to be dull. There isn't any true reason to play it.

Too many issues make X Rebirth an unplayable game.

X: Rebirth will get better over time, and anyone who’s open-minded enough to look past the ‘X’ branding and see the ‘game’, may even find many hours of entertainment.

X Rebirth is a 4X game marred by numerous bugs and falsely good ideas.

X misses the spot. The occasional bit of spectacle can't save this boring, broken and charmless space simulation. [March 2014, p.60]

The concept sounds good – bringing the complex X-Universe more comfortably to life, with improved handling and management. But the release version is a disaster, filled with many bugs and design issues, that neither satisfies veteran fans nor newcomers. We stopped reviewing the game after more than 40 hours playing it, ended up in patched version 1.13, but still it is not satisfying because of bugs.

The concept is good, but the release version is an authentic disaster.

Instead of giving the series a new life the developers buried it and the patches are a classic case of ‘too little, too late’. There’s a lot of things you can forgive this game but not the fact that it’s boring. [02/2014, p.58]

Long story short: In its current state, X Rebirth is just a sad affair.

Playing this game is quite simply a pain, thanks to an entire armada of bugs and flaws. It's hard to imagine how Egosoft will be able to fix this mess.

The will to innovate crashes against almost every other part of the game. A "rebirth" the X series does not deserve. Hard work usually pays off, but it feels like there's a lack of it in this game.

You can (barely) fathom some good ideas about offering the players more accessibility in a saga that surely needed some, but they soon get lost in the utter and complete mess of unfinished mechanics and bugs that, sadly, is X Rebirth.

Somewhere behind the incomprehensible UI, forced interactions with pointless characters, poor optimisation and boring mini-games, there’s bound to be a good game. It’s a shame you can’t really see it amidst all of the rubbish.

It’s a universe filled with boring people living on boring space stations, and playing in this universe is, unsurprisingly, really bloody boring. There’s not one thing that X Rebirth does that Albion Prelude or, indeed, any of the X games doesn’t do better beyond a few visual treats. Even when the bugs are fixed, the bizarre design choices will persist, as frustrating and counter-intuitive as they were at launch.

Patches may stop the glitches, but I think this space sim is far beyond repair.

X Rebirth might be worth grabbing in a Steam sale in a couple of years, after 100 patches and with a dozens of mods that create an entirely different game. That game could be fun if you are into modding. As it is right now at launch, X Rebirth is simply a broken, flawed, and almost unplayable mess.

No matter what your level of enthusiasm for the X series is, do your best to escape the pull of Rebirth's gravity. It's only bound to cause a fatal crash.

X Rebirth is the most disappointing PC title of 2013. A heartbreaking, gut-churning mess.

A mess. This is no surprise given Egosoft’s penchant for releasing messes and then tidying them up after the fact. But the problem with X Rebirth is that it’s a different kind of mess than the previous games, in new and terribly wrong ways that are beyond tidying up. X Rebirth doesn’t seem to understand what people liked about the previous games. It is a game based on misguided assumptions.