X3: Reunion review

I have something of a funny relationship with the X Universe. For a long time if you put my name into Google the most popular links would all be interviews I conducted with Egosoft about X-Tension way back in 2000. It shows that while the X games aren't for everyone, there's a very strong interest in this type of game out there.

Of course interest in space trading games goes all the way back to Elite and every time a new game appears on the horizon you hear people ask "is it the new Elite." We're never really going to see something that captures that magic again, Elite was a long time ago and gaming has grown more sophisticated. It's sad, but we've outgrown Elite, to be immersed in a universe like that we need something much more sophisticated than Elite and that brings us to X3: Reunion.

Reviewing something as big as X3 poses some problems, just as it's almost impossible to fully review something like World of Warcraft. In the end I can't tell you everything about X3 because you'd have to wait six months to a year for the review. So bear in mind that this review is something of a work in progress, these are my feelings after a week or so with the game.

Same Universe?

X3: Reunion takes place in the same universe as X2, and as such you're going to find the star system names rather familiar. It's like comfy shoes, here I am again in Argon Prime, oh look there's Home of Light, you get the idea. Beneath the familiar though there's a quite a different gamer thanks to some major changes in the way the game works.

One aspect of the game that has received a welcome change is the way the plot is handled. Now for our younger readers let me explain that games used to be open ended, there wasn't some plot voiced by a Hollywood star, instead the game was open and you could play it for as long as you wanted without being disturbed by some game developer who thought he could write a plot intruding with some strange event that destroys all your carefully planned work.

X2 was rather annoying from this point of view. Although it had pretensions of being a sandbox game, taking part in a few missions unleashed the Khaak invasion, which made playing a free form game rather difficult from that point onwards.

Plotting a Course

Now you can actually ignore the plot completely in X3. Egosoft even gives you three different ways of starting the game, supplying the player with different equipment depending on how you plan to play the game. If piracy and combat is your goal, you can start up with no money but a rather tooled-up ship. Fancy yourself as the Arthur Daley of the space-faring universe, then you can begin with a small fighter and a transport ship to begin your financial empire.

Ir's more fun taking this approach I've found as the plot features, once again, some really dreadful cutscenes and voice acting. It's about time Egosoft outsourced this stuff to a specialist because the look of the CG characters, the plotting and the voice acting really does spoil the immersion in what is otherwise a very immersive game. Imagine watching Babylon 5 style space sequences followed by a dialogue scene by the folks behind the kid's show Pigeon Street and you'll get some idea of how bad the cutscenes are.

New GUI

One of the real triumphs of X3 is the new way you can play the game with the mouse. Controlling the game this way is now better than using a joystick. Right-clicking the mouse brings up the pointer which you can then use to select onscreen icons, alter weapons configuration for example, and click on ships to target them.

Using the mouse this way makes navigating in systems much easier, you can just double-click on a station and your ship will fly towards it and dock. Not all the changes to the graphic user interface are successful though. It can be fiddly at times and it's all too easy to find yourself undocking and leaving a space station when all you wanted to do was go back to the previous menu.

Building Empires

Perhaps the most important change to the way X3 works over its predecessor is the new economic model. In X2 the economy was rather flawed and it was often more profitable to trade in the cheaper products such as energy crystals than build up manufacturing processes for the more complex products.

Here in X3 things are very different. Firstly the economy reacts to supply and demand. There are no more endless milk-runs where you can always guarantee a big profit with every flight. Now your financial empire requires much better management on your part, ensuring that you're buying materials at the lowest possible prices. Prices fluctuate with supply and demand, meaning that your carefully planned trade run could be ruined if a rival trader gets to the market first and floods it with products.

Combat and Handling

One of the less successful aspects of the game is combat and ship handling, a problem that's long been apparent in the X series. Much of the time it feels you're flying your PC through space rather than a ship, with the handling being more about the roll-rate of your joystick than your ship.

Don't get me wrong, it's much better than X2. But if you're after a good space combat game and that alone, then you had better look elewhere. Yes you can upgrade the ships and it's worth doing so, but it's not really game for those who want to enjoy flying around. From this point of view Freelancer was a much better game.

Graphics and Performance

Let's cut to the chase, X3 is one of the best looking games out there on the PC today. It really is incredibly gorgeous to look at. The ship designs are superb, the use of lighting highly atmospheric and there's a polish to the visuals that wouldn't be out of place in TV special effect.

All this comes at a cost though and X3 is something of a system hog. Stuttering is par for the course even on high-end systems and it's clear that X3 is a patch or two away from being the finished article. But if you want a game to show off your new graphics card then this is the one to get. The cutscenes sure look dreadful, but once in space you can't help but gaze in wonder.

Final Thoughts

How good is X3? That really depends on exactly what you want to get out of it. If space trading is your thing, if you want to set up a huge empire of ships and factories, then this is the game for you. The economy works much better than the previous game and offers a deeper more thoughtful challenge.

If exploring is your thing then it's worth taking a look at too. There's so much to do and see that it will take you a long time before you are bored. However if you're more combat orientated then you may want to give X3 a miss, it's really not that type of game. Sure it offers the ability to play this way, but the ship handling is a little too clunky at this stage to make this gameplay style a real joy over rival games.

Don't get me wrong, X3 is a great game, but if Egosoft grasped the challenge and offered immersion of the type seen in Freelancer and similar ship handling, combined with its own beautiful and complex universe, then we might finally have a game that deserves to called the new Elite.