As an old-school Wing Commander Fan - and I also liked the X-Games - I was optimistic about the new X: Rebirth.

Some days ago time was there and I was able to download and install. There were some cool trailers, and so much was told about new features and stuff, so I was excited :-)

After starting the game up there was the first big dissapointment. The graphics look awful. I mean really. Sure. They have populated the universe and it looks very vital, very lively. So in Space everything would be acceptable, because textures are not the big concerns. The feeling is right.

BUT

They decided that you can now enter space stations and ships with your avatar and run around in First person View. Well. Nice idea. Annoying, but nice. And the graphics THERE .. you'll get eye cancer from. It does more look like a game from the last century.

There is also no big reason to run around in spacer stations. Always the same cut scenes (not skipable!!). Bah.

I see the reason, what they were intended to do. They want to make a very realistic universe. But they may have failed with it. They just thought it would be that easy and I think, they were just low on time, so they never brought it to an acceptable quality.

Speech is horrible. Not very much flair. Animations are horrible. Junky, blocky, no lip sync (lips doesn't move at all). 10 years ago, that would be no problem. Nowadays, they should have discarded any real-time-interactions at all and should've been stick with image animations onscreen like it was in the prior X Games.

Steering is .. .. I am not sure if I can evaluate this. Maybe there is too much time passed and I've just lost feel for it. But in comparison to modern sim games, it feels not right - but at least I can play with my Saitek X52. Whic works, but there is a horrible dead-zone (which is not configurabel in game).

Nvidia Surround does work so far, but be prepared that this will have an big impact on game performance. So I had to lower graphics settings to make it smooth. On Single-Screen everything was fine on my GTX 670.

And there are bugs. The game just feels uncomplete. Feels like a beta. Just does not feel to be thought to the end. I would guess there will be bugfixes and patches and the game may get much better with some time but at the moment, you should only get it, when you feel comfortable with playing a game which feels a bit like a beta game.

If someone would ask me, I would say, they were low on budget and in need to release, before there graphics engine gets even more out-dated.

Is it worth the money... hmm .. I would say no, not at the moment. There is just too much hassle and too much annoying things. Like the always-the-same station docking, always the same cut scenes, useless boxes on stations which you can open .. it just feels, that they wanted to be a GTA but only started with little things and never thought them to the end.

I would suggest to wait for a deal and stick to the older X-Games for now. There is many work involved in X: Rebirth for sure, but it just feels like an very old game, not like a modern one and therefore it is not worth the money for a modern game.