This is a neutral review.
I saw the game being praised on steam forums by a fan. After playing a lot of x4, I fired it up to see if I missed a lot, and if the dude had a point. I bought the game 10 years ago, in 2013 and last played it five years ago, in 2018.
It is a huge mess.
Firstly, there are times when people make a game, while they should be writing a book. This is one of those. The whole PMC thing is a book plot that is terrible to PLAY through. All X series mission suffer from this, though. I think there were books about those universe before. X3 had the same issue with the abysmal planetary mission.
Some thing that immediately stood out:
* Main mission is awful and keeps breaking or giving odd directions like "use thing you do not have".
* Tiny areas with too much stuff in them. They are cramped and feel claustrophobic, especially early on, when there's for some reason huge moon sized boulders blocking everything in background. This is pretty much skyrim in space, meaning "too much going on on a tiny map"
* Docking is done starfield style. Meaning you dock through a cutscene, and there's unskippable animation of sitting into the seat. At least now I know where Starfield could've gotten all those terrible ideas.
* You can't walk around in cockpit. Fixed in x4, where you can loom over the pilot all the want.
* Badly done main menu. Someone really liked number buttons. Doing anything in x4 is faster.
* Your co-pilot is incredibly annoying, too much chatter.
* Highway music. Tiny 3-second looping clips that keep repeating. Infuriatingly annoying, and headache-inducing. Someone really liked that highway game (I think it was in AP) and clearly couldn't let it go.
That's the big stuff, that might make one want to flip the table. There's small stuff like black smoke when you boost which makes you feel like you're flying in ink in first sector, noodle people with giraffe necks and overall strange proportions on stations, lazy voice acting on ren otani, or the main plot insisting that you use hacking drones in hostile sector where half the ship want to kill you, or dull copy-pasted station corridors which remind me of bases from Chrome the videogame. Or the stuff where alt-tab causes game to show a loading screen, alt-tabbing sometimes breaks video playback, and while you're being shown that video, enemies continue shooting at you.
There ARE, however, positives:
* In fights you can actually do something. At some good points it even reminded me of freelancer. In X4 due to sandboxy nature, fights usually happen with overwhelming advantage on one of the sides. Either you drive Argon Vanguard with pulse laser mk1 and against you there's an Asgard and a fleet of beam ships... or you're in the fleet of asgards fighitng someone puny and insignificant.
* The atmosphere in some interioros. Despite strange anatomy, this feels like some vaguelly future setting, and bars look like bars. There are even holo dancers. Cyberpunkish feeling. This is better than in X4, where if you check the timeline, events are happening around year 3000, while things look like they're going at year 2100 top.
I think this might be enjoyable if you skip the awful campaign and do the custom start. Several of those are available.
