X3: Reunion Reviews

Good game!

This game is beyond awesome. It has the bones to be the best space simulator ever made. There are automation elements where you can autopilot your ship to do practically anything you can manually do. You can do the same with ships you own, creating vast fleets of warships that can patrol sectors to eliminate enemies or destroy a specific factions trade routes. You can use the same automation to set up your own trading empire, with factories to produce basic goods like solar energy cells up to extremely elaborate super factories that create highly complex goods like weapons, ships, missiles, shields, and pretty much anything you could imagine. The factions are fun and interesting though the dialogue will get repetitive after a few dozen hours. Each faction controls their own territories and in Reunion they tend to go to war with racial enemies which can change the power dynamics in a sector at a moments notice. Ship to ship combat is fun up to a point. Flying your own ship is great, nothing is cooler than jumping into a system and chasing down a fat transport and lowering his shields until he ejects. You can either capture his goods, his ship, or the pilot himself. That is until your combat rating gets higher and the fights start getting unfair. You can be the best pilot in the universe in your M3 but when that capital ship or corvette shows up, you are pretty much guaranteed to lose. It will have dozens of support ships that will all simultaneously wreck your face. You can get creative with ship builds and last a good while, but eventually you will require fleets of your own ships to support you and thats where things fall apart. The NPC AI is fantastic and believable. Your AI, however, is incredibly dumb. Ships in sectors you aren't present in are notorious for mysteriously exploding out of nowhere because they got too close to an enemy faction. Even ships in your own sector can fall prey to stupid decisions like coming through a gate the same time a capital ship is going into it and colliding. Trading ships can be incredibly dumb and will make a bee-line for the first enemy ship in a sector and get wasted. Entire stations can get destroyed because your support fleets break and don't patrol sectors correctly. There are lots of bugs in the AI on the player side. Patches and the like have come out to address some issues but if there is a major weakness in this game, your AI is it. As for the rest of the game, its and absolute blast. I mostly played as a pirate and had the most fun I have ever had in a video game ambushing ships at gates to add to my collections. I even managed to capture a few capital ships and started my own shipyards up. That was until I invested most of my credits into a behemoth battleship that I couldn't possibly afford to arm. I had the lasers and the shields but it took an army of trading ships just to transport energy cells and missiles back and forth to it and the better equipped enemy AI's ate it for dinner. Like I said at the beginning, this game has the bones to be the best spaceflight simulator ever made. It has everything. A graphical overhaul and some addressing of the AI would put this game a century ahead of it's time.