X3 Reunion Demo
Forgot to mention this one yesterday but a playable X3 Reunion demo is now available. The 905mb download offers you a limited section of the game's universe and shows off various key game elements.
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Dynotaku
replyI DLed this last night... man, it wasn't what I thought it'd be.
Talk about a steep learning curve. I thought this was a 'fly around and shoot stuff and upgrade your ship' game, but apparently it's more of a fleet management game. Not that you can't fly around and shoot stuff, but the first thing I did was somehow select a ship that I wasn't actually piloting, and started flying it by remote. I couldn't figure out why I wasn't moving, then suddenly I see this freighter come careening in from the side of my screen. I had to hunt around in the menus for about 10 minutes to figure out how to pilot my own ship. I know this because the game sends 'waves of aliens' at you to keep things interesting, and the first wave is 10 minutes in. I barely figured out how to fly around in that time. Luckily the first wave was super easy to dispatch.
Then I slowly started figuring out how to control my other ships, but it still took me another 10 minutes to figure out how to dock with a space station to upgrade my ship, and once I had, I couldn't figure out how to buy or install anything.
The game looks great, and I guess it could be fun, but the learning curve was totally prohibitive for me. I mean, the 'e' key rolls your ship clockwise, but apparently also ejects you from your ship, which is apparently one way to change ships, but I could never figure out how to make the 'e' key eject me instead of rolling the ship. A lot of keys have multiple uses like that and I could never figure out how to activate alternate menu functions.
Besides which, the game seems very 'flight simmy' like, once I figured out how to dock with a station on autopilot, it took about 4 minutes of just sitting and watching the screen while my ship slowly flew toward the station, then past it, then turned around, then flew toward the station, then slowed as it approached, then I accidentally turned off the autopilot, and I couldn't reengage it for some reason, so I had to turn around, fly away from the station, turn around, click on the station, was still too close, then turn around, fly way far away from the station, click on the station, activate the autopilot, sit with my hands folded so that I didn't turn off the autopilot accidentally again while the ship slowly pulled up to the station and docked, and then I couldn't figure out how to upgrade my ship or anything, and I must have hit 'esc' one too many times while trying to figure out the menus, and my ship undocked, so I called it quits. :(-
shift E ejects you
J speeds up the time ten folds
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I was curious about this, too. Thanks for the brief review. Sounds like it'd be too much time spent in trying to maneuver the interface than the galaxy.
