When you see something like X Rebirth pop up on Steam, giddy thoughts of flying through space and going on adventures come to mind. Stamp out those thoughts immediately, because despite waiting almost 20 patches before this review, X Rebirth remains the most ugly, incompetent, mishandled, overpriced piece of trash I’ve had the displeasure of reviewing in 2013. If you have any standards, if you love space, if you don’t love space, it doesn’t matter: Do not under any circumstances play this game.
X Rebirth is in theory a game about piloting a ship around the galaxy, filling odd jobs, carving out your own piece of the pie, and getting into heated battles. Two modes greet you on the main menu: Sandbox and Campaign. Launching directly into Sandbox from the start is sure to be a mistake; you aren’t taught how to do anything, and so you might find yourself instead quitting and going straight to Campaign, if only for the tutorial.
It’s here in the Campaign mode that you witness one of the game’s first horrors: the voice acting. To this day it is still unclear whether it’s meant to be a joke or meant to be serious. The main character whose name escapes me (darn) sounds like he’s narrating a car commercial, and your sidekick, some woman whose name also escapes me (darn) is equally bad. Indeed, everyone in this game sounds like they’re reading off a piece of paper for the very first time with direction such as “try to sound as monotone and emotionless as possible, like a text to speech application. Bonus points if you say things like ‘we’re under attack’ with the same inflection as saying ‘enjoy the taste of Pepsi!'”
It’s a constant embarrassment, to the point where I was left with little choice but to mute the voices.
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I’m pretending this is a screenshot of the game, because it doesn’t really matter anyways.
The game performs terribly. At release it was unplayable, and recent patches have improved things to very slight degrees, but not enough to make playing the game any more enjoyable than feeling like you’re playing by telling someone else what to do. There’s so much frame rate stutter, lag, etc. that just going from point A to point B is an exercise in patience.
The ship’s dashboard is bloated, gets in the way, and offers very little actual information. What information is does present is damn near hidden by blending in with the chunky panels.
Honestly, despite fighting with the game’s performance, terrible voice acting, stiff controls for several hours, none of it really matters because X Rebirth loves to crash. Even almost 20 patches in playing the game for 5 minutes resulted in a crash.
So what’s the point? Why bother getting angry at this hunk of junk? Why fight with the controls? Why cringe in disgust at the strange character models, the bad voice acting, the everything? For $50 you could get a handful of fantastic space games, and that’s what I recommend. It’s clear that this will never be fixed. If they can’t be bothered to offer something better than an amateurish broken game for such a fat price tag, I won’t write a single word more in this review.
