Metareview: X3: The Reunion

by Conrad Quilty-Harper on Nov 17th 2005 8:00AM

X3: The Reunion comes from a long series of space trading games that started way back in 1984 with Elite, the game that's credited with creating and defining this genre of game. It's a sign of how defining Elite was in that it gets a mention in practically every review of space trading games. Indeed, two out of the three reviews we felt were worth of a mention here, mentioned Elite. The fact that the original game in a 20 year series of games is still the benchmark today, is also a sign of how little the genre has moved on since then. There are more complex space sims, more beautiful space sims and more fun space sims, but none of them can claim to best Elite for originality and creative success. If you were expecting the latest X game to once and for all make Elite irrelevant, you'll be disappointed.

Eurogamer (70/100) - "many players new to this impressive, ambitious series may well give up after an evening or two of head-scratching, missing out on an engrossing experience."
Amped (72/100) - "While the initial missions move along slowly—almost excruciatingly so—the pace will increase significantly, and assuming you can survive numerous bugs, the surprise ending offers a gratifying payoff."
Total Video Games (80/100) - "For newcomers potentially interested in what X3 has to bring, you'll find a dynamic world in which the economic laws of supply and demand are fully realised – but only if you're willing to stick with it."

When three reviews representative of the industry average (78%) mention an extreme learning curve requiring some serious commitment to enjoy the game, you'd better listen up. X3 is not one for the casual gamer.

Tags: PC

Reader Comments (3)

1. Buggy
2. Starforce Protection
3. Runs slow even on highest end machines

BUT HEY, IT LOOKS PRETTY!

Agreed with #1 in every aspect.

Oh, also add on that the manual was printed before the game was finished and it ends up telling you about all these menu options, etc. that don't exist. The worst of these missing features is the lack of any kind of basic training! I mean, you're just expected to jump into the game and know how to pilot the ship!

And to add insult to injury, an Egosoft guy, replying to a post in the X3 tech support forum, stated that all the training missions were there! One of us must be blind. :P

Oh, yeah. And the current patch breaks the game so that the plot never continues on past a certain point. This should be fixed in the next patch due out in the next week or two.

Have been anticipating this game for a long time, and for the first time in my life, I 'preordered' a game. Needless, to say when I got it, I was disappointed. My computer and video card was more than enough to handle X3, but it ran as slow as a turtle. The game seems to skip/pause every 4 seconds, and I get annoying squeaking 'static' sounds in some sectors. Not to mention, X3 seem to crash every once in a while. And the Starforce protection on the DVD...every time I initially ran X3, my DVD player sounded like it was tearing through the DVD due to Starforce protection trying to 'verify' if it's a legit copy. Added to all these nuisances, I have to turn off all video effects, as well as antivirus software just to get X3 to run, even with that done, it still skips. And this is with patch 1.2 installed. I gave up on X3. I am not going to bother trying to get it to work until they release patch 1.3 later in November, which 'suppose' to fix most of the bugs and performance issues. I guess that's fine, Magna Carta will keep me entertain for quite a while.