User Reviews (11 - 21 of 40)

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Uses Starforce! It will install Malware! Skip this game!

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 19 / 43
Date: April 17, 2006
Author: Amazon User

A good game potentially, but since it uses Starforce protection, it messes up your computer! Skip it until they remove the Malware Starforce.

Fantastic Space Simulation in the Mold of Starflight

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 5 / 6
Date: March 23, 2006
Author: Amazon User

If you are, like me, someone who has always hankered after a space role-playing game with the graphics of Freelancer and the depth of the Civilization series, you are looking at THE game. I purchased my copy in February. Yes, it was initially buggy -- but 98% of the bugs have been fixed. I routinely let the game trade for me all night and I have not had a crash recently. I don't understand why people are complaining about the interface. It is complicated, but if you are patient you will learn it and even appreciate how logical most of it is. Documentation has been substantially improved since release, and there are large FAQs available on any of the forums. The graphics are fantastic, the scope is amazing, and the gameplay is very very deep. A great buy for space traders and armchair warlords.

X3: The Reunion - challenging but rewarding

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 5 / 6
Date: May 23, 2006
Author: Amazon User

It has been said by some of these reviews that the game is difficult to learn. I for one require that in a game. I'm sick of mindless games that you can annhilate in hours, or spend years doing the same thing for little reward. X3 is a challenging game to learn and incredibly complex. That is the beauty of the game - I love how complex the universe and how much you cna do. There are some drawbacks in that it is not multi-player, and it installs a program on your computer called starforce that is pretty demanding, but if you have a good computer you should have no problems with it. I love the game because there are endless possibilities. Even once you 'finish' the storyline, you can continue on, and that, in my opinion, is when the game begins.

Huge game, immersive, big learning curve

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 5 / 6
Date: March 17, 2006
Author: Amazon User

A marvelous, ambitious game. The last patch, 1.4, has cleared up almost all off the game mechanics errors--I have had no crashes to the desktop or freezes since that patch. The game finally appears stable.

If you like empire building games, with a dose of heart pounding space combat action (plus some gorgeous visuals), then this may be what you are looking for. You'll need a decent graphics card, relatively recent, with a PC to match. This game is used by a number of online Gaming PC review sites because of the load it puts both on the CPU and on the graphics card.

Finally, if you are a newbie to the "X" games, as I was, make sure you spend some time browsing the forums whenever you start feeling overwhelmed or confused. They are very good about marking spoiler information so you need not worry about ruining your own discovery of the game.

So many bugs. . .

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 7 / 11
Date: December 23, 2005
Author: Amazon User

The game plays like a beta test. There's crashing and freezing everywhere, random glitches that stop the plot or keep you from doing things, TONS of features mentioned in the manual were never actually put in, many of the things in the previous game X2 were just omitted because they didn't have enough time, the economy bugs out after a few days, several different ships from different races share the same model, and this game features the worst character animations I've ever seen in a game. The latest patch improved frame rate somewhat and fixed the economy, but it also added a bug causing certain weapons to drop framerate to 1fps, and for many people, it randomly spawned hundreds of pirates and enemy ships (including destroyers and carriers) that would annihilate everything player owned.

On another note, the graphics are pretty.

Buggiest game ever

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 10 / 20
Date: November 20, 2005
Author: Amazon User

Complete waist of money!! Patches only make it worse, corrupted my system files causing a reinstall of WinXP. Constantly locks up your system requiring a forced reboot with chkdisc operations. This is equivilant to the Sony disaster! Dont buy this malware if you value your operating system. Its a complete joke and Ive was able to send it back to Amazon as malware and defective.

Might be worth a shot

3 Rating: 3, Useful: 5 / 7
Date: January 05, 2007
Author: Amazon User

If you're worried about the StarForce copy protection (and you should be) you should know you can now buy this game via Steam -- without the nefarious StarForce drivers being surreptiously installed on your machine.
As for the game itself, it feels like kind of a cross between a game like Freelancer (mission-based combat with lots of opportunity for trading-runs for profit) and a classic "build an empire"-type game.
The controls and UI do leave a bit to be desired (a common flaw in European games if you ask me) but they're workable.
If you like the space genre, and the idea of owning space factories that produce goods just for you, this game is probably worth a shot.

One of the most enjoyable games I've ever played.

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 5 / 7
Date: December 25, 2006
Author: Amazon User

I don't care for starforce either so what I did was: Install the game, run it, at the first screen hit check for updates, downloaded the 2.0.02 patch, ran the patch which on some older copies of the game require inserting disk one to complete the istallation of the patch, then I downloaded the starforce removal tool from the official X3 forum, ran the removal tool, and rebooted when needed to complete things.
I'm not a computer expert but I found a site that gives instructions on how to check for starforce files on your computer and as far as I can see they were all gone. After this patch, you don't even need a cd in the computer to play.
Since then I've been enjoying X3 alot without any problems worth mentioning. The game has an extreme amount of depth to it and you could play weeks if not months without even concentrating on the plot missions although it's worth doing a few of the first ones for the experience, reputation boost and a few goodies.

Very Fun and Addicting

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 4 / 5
Date: May 13, 2006
Author: Amazon User

I am a huge fan of Freelancer and enjoy space sim style games. This game has excellent graphics and an improved configurable interface that allowed for a quick learning curve. This game is a little slow at times, but this slow pace adds to the realism of being in space. The open ended game play is a huge plus. I am not a fan of time based linear games that take a week to complete. I had no issues with the game play, nor had trouble with installing the program. I'm not sure what legacy systems these other reviewers are using, but my system had no problems. Overall a very fun game that I would definitely recommend to any space sim fan.

It is a complete game now.

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 4 / 5
Date: August 30, 2006
Author: Amazon User

This game HAD its problems or so i've heard, because i only got it about three weeks ago. 99% of them have been fixed by patches. Played it for hours, it didn't crash once. The latest patch version is 1.4.03.

Somewhat steep learning curve. However, this is casued not as much by lack of comprehensive in-game tutorial but by sheer amount of things/activities that you can do in this game. Each of those activities is designed with level of detail that sometimes has to be seen to believe!

You can now dl X3 from Steam if Starforce scares you. [edit: forget Steam, buy the DVD version of X3, the latest as of 12/2007]

*The bad:

Interface - menus in particular (and there is lots of them) look like a wierd version of windows, but i don't mind it and when to think of it that's probably the best approach if you have to deal with the amount of information that this game throws at you. Only gripe is that those `windows' are unmovable and unresizable and you can't open more than 1 menu at once.
There may very well already be scripts or mods out there that improve that.
With those things in mind, is the game good? Is it fun?
That would be Yes, and Yes.

*The good:

Top of the line graphics (you're gonna need a decent PC to fully enjoy it `tho. i play on 6800GT, 1.5GB, P4 3.0GHz)

Economy. an actual economy run by the game's AI. Not a simplified facade of economy (ex. Space Rangers, Oblivion).
Over a hundred sectors, about 6 different races. Maybe about 50 different kinds of factories/stations/etc operated by NPCs but also which you can personally build/set up/and micromanage if needed.
Hundreds of NPC ships going about their own business at any moment, sometimes almost a hundred ships in one sector only! Traders - that are gonna buy from yours or any other factory - slowly piloting their heavy freighters, you see capital ships patroling sectors, you see couriers, bounty hunters, and an occasional marooned pirate... or pirates, or an actual invasion of a hostile race, battles involving capital ships and many fighters. huzzah!... ummm. All of it in amazing detail.

Hint: If you wanna start earning decent money by doing Trading you better learn what goods cost how much, what's the range of price on them... what races need what goods, what kind of resources do different factories need, what factories/stations/mines are where, etc, etc.

Combat - graphically comparable with what you can get in top-of-the-line regular space combat sims (Freelancer, etc.).
Many different kinds of combat ships with amazing level of detail... fighters, scouts, heavy fighters, light fighters, light capital ships, destroyers, carriers, >many< different kinds of shields, beam weapons, missiles.

You can own >many< ships. There are many different commands that you can give to your ships if they have appropriate modifications installed. Practically, with how many ships you can control in combat this game approaches the feel of an RTS game.

You can play it like an RPG game no problem if you wish so. There are different kinds of small missions available for `pick up' at every station.
And you'll get the real taste of this game when you go your own way and do what you wanna do - start and learn by trading, or capturing ships, or doing BBS missions, or just a bit of each.

Even knowing how buggy at initial release it was i can't give it less than 5 stars, simply because i was looking for this kind of game for a very long time.

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