First of all, let me get something out of the way: If you clicked on this review because you thought "X3" was in some way related to the X-Men universe (like a good chunk of my friends who aren’t quite "up" with the gaming industry), you may wish to click that "Back" button now. X3: Reunion actually has little to do with the war between crazy mutants and the human race, and is more related to the war between… well, crazy aliens and the human race. To an extent.

I’ll clarify: Based on the venerable "X-Series" of games which began in 1999, X3 aims to continue expanding the freeform universe created by Egosoft by completely overhauling the graphics engine (again), adding new weapons and ships, new plot missions, and of course a buttload of additional sectors to explore. But that’s just on the surface – digging into X3, I soon found that the developers had gone to great effort to try and address some of the inherent gameplay issues that had plagued the series up to this point, and was both surprised and even impressed at some of the changes made. Let’s delve into X3: Reunion and examine what efforts Egosoft has gone to in an attempt to recover from the massacre X2: The Threat inflicted on what remains of the space gaming industry.

To begin with, "Starforce". There, it’s said and out of the way – the game uses Starforce for it’s copy protection method, so expect to be met with a good deal of annoyance when you are prompted to restart post-install (or watch as your IDE devices implode if you’re one of those wacky people planning to go down to Russia to take the Starforce developers up on their little challenge). With that noted, my own personal experience with the game’s copy protection didn’t result in any particular forms of misery, so aside from the errant disc-swapping, the installation and setup was relatively painless – after also accounting for the 100+MB patch required to make the game playable, of course (I won’t even start with that).

My first few hours with the game taught me that Egosoft has tried to increase focus the action on the game’s storyline once more, with a slightly long-winded intro reel in the form of an Argon newscast (the Argon being the game’s "human" faction) relating the events from the past game, and introduction some additional details for the game’s main character, Julian Brennan. Julian’s father has taken a turn for the worse, and with ongoing attacks from the "Khaak", the "Xenon", and assorted pirate factions, the current level of turmoil in the known universe is drastically going up. Of course, when I mentioned an "increase" in focus on the storyline, this doesn’t necessarily mean players can expect a level of dramatic storytelling on the line of, say, Freespace 2 (the baseline title in which all space games must naturally be compared to). While the horrific puppet-oriented cutscenes that I dare-say "plagued" the game’s predecessor, X2: The Threat are now gone and replaced with much more graceful pre-rendered FMVs, this doesn’t really make for a more compelling or detailed storyline experience, simply due to the fact that the basic assets required for a decent story, such as characters the player can actually care about, or above-average voice acting, are not present. I have to applaud Egosoft’s ongoing efforts to try and improve the game, but their current implementation needs a serious re-thinking if they actually want to draw players in.

I’d like to touch base a little more on the storyline, however. X3 is known of course for being something of a free-form space sim series, and as such the player is free to break away from the storyline at almost any interval and jerk around the galaxy as he pleases. Having had extensive experience by playing every game in the series up to this point, I of course took the opportunity early on in the stock campaign to break off and build up my own little empire of ships. Then I decided to stop back in and finish up the storyline just for the sake of completion, and was instantly struck by the sheer linearity the scripted missions demanded. The game was basically transformed from a large-scale open-ended fleet management game to a straight up arcade shooter, because any time the game wanted to show me some specific portion of action, it would just jerk me away from my current ship and literally teleport me into a gun turret or some other vessel to complete the given objective.

I’ve even heard one example of a player casually exiting his ship to go "claim" a vessel an enemy pilot had abandoned during combat, but a scripted event suddenly triggered that caused him to be dragged along in a formation of other friendly ships to the next waypoint - in his unarmed space suit. The problem with the mission scripting is that it’s too specific and doesn’t really make sense from a logical point of view, and because I had this sizable fleet of escort fighters standing by, I kept asking myself "Wait…. if I have so much backup that I’ve gone out of my way to create, why is my character deciding to do this instead of letting me call in my fleet?" Basically, the forgettable storyline doesn’t seem to really flow at all with the rest of the game, and is too much of a forced "effort" to really make it worth going through except for novelty value and a little extra backstory (and the occasional free goodies, of course). I’m not saying the developers shouldn’t try and engage in the player in the game universe – just that they should re-think their strategy of doing so first, particularly when the player is being whisked from place to place with no clear idea of what’s going on or why.

For the above reason, many players will find themselves soon getting sick of the story and wanting to instead focus on the game’s major appeal: the free-form living universe. X3, as of the latest patch, now incorporates a highly active universe vastly upgraded from that of the previous game, in which NPCs will now actively spread out, dynamically trade in competition with the player, and even construct stations if needed. It’s definitely a pretty cool concept to see in action, though it also makes for tougher gameplay when it comes to trying to maintain dominance over the markets. For this reason, players also now have upgraded control over all of their craft. Freighters, for example, can now be equipped with mark-three trading software, which will enable both the "Sector Trader" and "Universe Trader" options. These two options will cause the freighter to autonomously roam a given sector (or the explored galaxy, respectively) to automatically find the best deals on an item and work to boost a player’s existing wealth. Definitely a really cool feature that helps the player to automate his burgeoning empire.

Then, once the player has a strong enough financial base, the time of course comes to start up their own business by creating their own stations. Much like being able to pilot pretty much any ship in the game, another novelty to the X-series is that players can also construct their own version of any major facility seen in space. This is an integral component to the extent in which how the player is able to interact with the game’s economy in this living universe, as once a player has constructed their own stations, NPC ships will soon begin flocking in to trade or sell resources accordingly based on the basic driving element of supply and demand. Running a station is pretty much the same basic process as it was in X2, with a couple of interesting revisions. First, as a global change, almost all stations in the game now use external docking points instead of the rendered interiors presented in previous titles. From a visual aspect this is neat, because players can now visually see all ships that are docked at a station, and this also means that there is no longer an annoying transition to the "pocket-universes" that made up the station interiors in the previous games (which were cool, but unrealistic from a scaling standpoint as well as the brief load time needed during the transition). There is also a downside however, as it also means that there is now a physical limit on how many ships can be docked at a time, which can make for some unforeseen problems when working with many ships at once exchanging commodities for your stations.

This leads nicely into the "complex" system. Players now have the option to tie all of their facilities together into a single station. By constructing a "complex", players not only gain the benefit of having a single centralized docking point for all of their stations, but also cool little rendered umbilical tunnels connecting each station to the complex itself, allowing them to instantly share resources. No longer will players need to clumsily set up transports to manually construct their own weapons or devices between their own stations – now complexes will distribute these resources automatically, a really cool addition that I have to really applaud the developers for coming up with (even if it does make some sectors into a navigational hazard once you have enough inter-connected stations going).

Sadly, in spite of the improvements Egosoft has integrated into the stock user interface and AI scripting (I was delighted to note that AI fighters no longer charged my ships in constant kamikaze attack-runs every time I tried to engage), there are still many basic flaws. Most irritatingly was that there was no way to tell my freighter pilots to not fly directly through known pirate-infested sectors in search of the best Energy Cell prices, ultimately making this particular aspect of automation useless, when I found my own freighters getting wiped out after just barely starting up my own business when they could have easily taken another route and avoided this issue. Additionally, some of the problems from the previous games still exist – integrated turrets in multi-million-dollar capital ships still don’t pick targets in a logical manner, and the path finding on these larger vessels is questionable at best (I’ve seen AI vessels run directly into asteroids or other stations in a manner that seemed almost deliberate, and some ships designed to be part of an enemy "invasion" into a sector tend to just fly around doing nothing until destroyed). I still consider the AI to be "vastly" improved just based on their revamped combat behavior alone, but much like many of the game’s other aspects, there are still numerous, and very obvious issues that need to be touched on.