X3 : Reunion

[triple88a]

I purchased this game about a week ago because of great reviews on how great the graphics, the ideas, the sim and the overall rating of the game is. I mean many reviews give it 9/10. I just had to try it out. Well as soon as i installed it, it automatically checked for updates which made me believe this game should be by far one of the best space sim games available in the stores today. As soon as i turned it on, i was shocked. This game clearly leaves you in the complete dark, and no i am not talking about the darkness of space, i am talking about the darkness of confusion. There are tons of menus, there are tons of possibilities, there is tons of space but not a single good tutorial of how to actually play the game. Eventually your game play gets interrupted by your "ship's computer" telling you that you have a message however you are left to guess on HOW to actually check your messages. Learning curve of the game is horrible. Because there are so many possibilities, instead of a game filled with excitement of shooting other ships and doing missions and upgrading your ships and getting new weapons, you are left at the exit of a space station with a game that is closer to the strategy genre and you are trying to see which button from the about "83" hidden ones increases the throttle. After you have this figured out, next thing you have to do is locate the starting point of a mission that can be a confusion of another dimension and no not a single tip comes up to guide you to how to properly play the game. As soon as the mission starts, the confusion expands even more as now you have menus buried underneath other menus and again you are left with no help on how to play the game at all. As soon as you start moving you realize that the "so amazing graphics" are really not that amazing. The 3D stuff does look great. No question about it. The space ships have amazing graphics, the space stations have great graphics and so on however the rest of the stuff is where it's bad and there is tons of it in space. Let me give you an example. You are approaching a dust field of some sort. When you are far away from the dust field you do not see it, you see the background image of stars clearly instead of where the dusty cloud should be. You cannot see the cloud until you hit it. At that point instead of you feeling like you are passing through it, you are left with somewhat transparent moving image on your monitor however behind the transparent image you can still see the background stars just as clear. To explain that, imagine you are going through a snow storm in freelancer, you can see the objects closer to you however you cannot see the further away objects because of the bad snow and obviously you cannot see anything else. What this game does is sort of like driving with a curtain on your windshield (in a sunny day) instead of being in the snow storm, you see the background all the time.. just now there is something in front of it. The impressive 3D work is nothing with out the proper special effects. A lipstick on a pig does not change the fact that it's a pig. The sound effects are not bad however they get repetitive especially when you interact with other players that say the same thing in the same voice.
The only thing i like about the game is the many possibilities it has. You can build space stations, you can pick tons of ships, you can purchase ships and have the computers work for you. If you could make it that far before you get bored, may the power be with you.