A 
Review by Vulture
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Short and simple: if you enjoy the other X-games even a little bit, then you will enjoy this incarnation, even if just a little bit. That is because, well it's nearly the same game as the last X3, X3 Reunion.
The new stuff is: new weapons, ships, stations, storyline missions, generic missions, user interface, and a new race... but you knew all that already. What you don't know is that it all goes well together.
The new race, "Terrans" is a fun addition. Personally, the race feels unfinished to me as you cannot buy their stations for use, nor can you trade in many of their wares. The Terran economy is artificially supported by "heavy lifters," which bring goods from planet's surfaces up to space for trade. Their ships are a mixed bag of spectacular and dumpy in respects to design. Their ship performance is largely on par with the other race's ships. Overall though the race and thier sectors are a welcome addition.
The new weapons are impressive, and change the way battle is fought dramatically. No longer can you fly into a swarm of xenon in an M3 fighter and come out on top. Combat takes some forethought now, as well as clever implementation of the different weapons available to you. The new weapons have some good animations and effects, but the sounds are largely recycled form the older weapons.
New missions! the new missions are great, mostly. The new storyline missions are very fun and rewarding. They are addicting once you get into them and do paint the X-Universe as alive. The "generic" missions are pretty good too, even if they need some massive re-balancing. You can now pick up generic missions through communication channels with stations rather than having to dock and page through the BBS like previous X's. You can now see what stations are offering in the ways of what types of missions through icons displayed on your HUD while navigating within a sector.
New ships. The new ships are well done, there are tons of them. There are a few new classes of ships with the different racial incarnations. The new ships are balanced pretty nicely and are largely niche' combat ships. They look great, and perform well, you will want to own them all.
The new interface is well... it is what it is. It is clunky, unintuitive, boring and an eyesore, but it has always been that way. The changes that they did do are almost entirely cosmetic. Some menu rearrangement has occurred but unfortunately it has not streamlined the experience. The new ship combat controls are pretty good however... As an X-player, it took me a while to get used to them but i like the current incarnation better than previous ones.
What they missed: They really missed out on the opportunity to implement a better station construction interface. It's as bad as it ever was, which is a shame. The mod community has made a few fixes that really do make complex station construction at least bearable; i wish they had taken some cues form the community on this one. Storyline missions are bugged largely, at the time of this review. There are a few storylines that are un-beatable at the moment. There are balancing problems with the generic missions. Many generic missions suffer from an unrealistic timetable for tasks, as well as inconsistent rewards. I wish they had included a few of the more popular mods "in the box" for release, but that's a small issue as they are available through the community site. The game also performs very poorly which is highly unfortunate. I have a good PC that can run Crysis very well on high settings yet it struggles with the load of this game for whatever reason. This is curious as it is the same engine as "X3 Reunion," and my PC can run that like butter. As of now i get a bad framerate and unexplainable stuttering in combat. My drivers are up to date; the problem is documented on the community site and it seems that egosoft is looking into the problem.
In all it is a good game, pretty much the same as Reunion, but with new toys and missions. It is worth picking up on Steam for 40 bucks. It needs some work still, but knowing egosoft and the community it will get worked on in time.
Pick it up now if you loved Reunion, if you just liked Reunion wait some time for bugs to get fixed and for it to go on sale.
Disclaimer: I did not finish the game. My review is of the perspective of an unfinished playthrough. With that said, if you are familiar with the X series of games, then you know that there is no way of really "finishing" a game.
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anyways, if the game had been released in this current state i would have rated it "love it," so "love it" it is....