I hate to be the first one to say this but X Rebirth sucks. I’ve been a fan of the X series from the beginning and have for the last month waited for X Rebirth almost painfully. I even preordered the game, something I almost never do since I prefer to wait for reviews.
30 seconds: Try to setup joystick from the settings menu – obviously something is wrong. For example, I cannot bind the fire button and it starts unbound.
5 minutes: Start new campaign, cutscene – horrible writing and voice acting!
6 minutes: Some chick who talks to you like a jerk boards your ship without player permission. She walks to the cockpit and sits down. Who is this person? Why would I let someone I don’t know, who talks like a jerk, just board my ship like that? How does she know the layout of my ship, or automatically gain entry to the cockpit through a handprint access panel that was not set to her?
6 minutes 30 seconds: Booted out of dialog with chick while I was messing with the settings. Stuck in the back of my ship. No way to reenter – Handprint access panel does not work. Restart campaign. This is literally the fastest I’ve ever encountered a no-progress situation in a game.
10 minutes: Tried to fly with a joystick, realized it will never work because you cannot bind the controls for pitch / yaw at the same time as strafe. Even though the menu says joystick / gamepad it’s obviously gamepad only and was never tested with a joystick.
11 minutes: Using the mouse, how do I get rid of this annoying “Press space…” message at the bottom of my screen?
15 minutes: Despite Egosoft’s claim to dumb down the game to make it controllable with a gamepad, you still have layers of menus. The layout is actually worse than the original game as well. It’s not worth going into why, but it’s quite obvious if you actually try it.
20 minutes: After 10 minutes of flying around, I kill 2 drones. I’m supposed to control my freighter somehow, but no idea what to press. The help says to press 2-2 or something like that, but after doing so you still have another menu with no idea what to hit beyond there.
25 minutes: Alt-F4 in frustration, write this post.
I’ll let them patch for a year or so and see what it’s like then.