Patience, Patience and Patience is required.
The game is basically about travelling in space and trading, fighting or finishing the plot of the game. It is a very open-ended game, as well as a very visually pleasing game (if you have the hardware to do it ofcourse, as this is quite a power-demanding game). My PC is a Pentium 4 3.0Ghz with 1024MB ram and a Nvidia 7800GS graphics card. With the newest patch, It runs smoothly.
Why do you require Patience, Patience and Patience?
1: The new patch that has been released (1.4.03 at time of writing) has fixed almost all of the problems in the game. Many reviewers have complained about the errors in the game, and it is true. The original release version was horribly flawed in almost all aspects. Now, however, the game is reported to run much smoother on all computers, and the amount of crashes has plummeted to zero (on my PC at least).
This was a lesson learned already with X2: The Threat (the previous game in the series): Because the developer is a small company, they have to use YOU (the player) as a sort of beta-tester. This is purely a money issue, and Egosoft is a very respectable company as they have an excellent technical support forum. Also, they release a lot of patches to their games (unlike some developers who never patch their broken products). All that said, you have to be patient if you purchased this game on its release date (I did, but I knew what I could expect). I, for instance, helped some other players on the forum with some Saitek-joystick issues that I had discovered the solution to. The X3 community is a very devoted and helpful community, and their forums on Egosofts website are second to none. My patience paid off as the game is currently very good and is running smoothly. It is now pure enjoyment for me.
2: This is not a game you play for 10 hours and then uninstall, because you have explored all star systems, bought the most expensive ships and space stations and won the main plot of the game. The game can literally take hundreds and hundreds of hours to play through if you want to see everything (like I do). If you just want to blast through the main plot of the game as quickly as possible, it will still take at least 20 hours (I am guessing here, as I have not done it that way) to complete. This is the reason my review is written so long after the game's release date. It took me half a year of joy and tears to really grasp the game... And I have played X2 (saved me some of the learning curve)... It is THAT big
3: The third reason you have to be patient is because this is a game about outer space. Travelling from one end of the galactic map to the other will take quite a long time (even at 10x time acceleration). My point however, is that it is not a game for the purely action-hungry gamer who wants to buy a good fighter-ship and attack hordes of enemies 5 minutes after installation. You can ofcourse play this as a shooter-game, and kill some pirates for a while (or become one yourself), but the real depth is only experienced by playing all the parts of the game. Patience is needed because the possibilities of what you can do in the game are many... very many. And it takes time to earn the money to do all those things.
Well... Looking back on the first part of this review I realize it is more a political statement than a review of the game. As you might have picked up on by now, I really love this game (I would not play it for 100+ hours if i didn't... right?). Graphics and music is beautiful, and the whole game is a great experience.... But what about the bad parts?
The bad parts of this game is mainly the story ("the plot" if you like). It is interesting, but poorly delivered. You are sent on missions to recover some crystals in the beginning, and things evolve from there, but it is not very easy to understand what they want you to do next. The game is in great need of a "quest log" or something similar that you find in most good RPGs these days. Also, the "cutscenes" are quite bad and the sound is badly synchronized. Sometimes the speech in a mission briefing is cut short because the animation is finished, and you wont hear the last sentences (it is written in you message log afterwards, but it gives a stuck-up feeling). Generally, the technical issues with the plot are not yet resolved, but actually, that is not the worst problem with the plot...
The worst problem with the plot is.... It does not make much sense if you have not played X: Beyond the Frontier, X-tension and X2: The Threat before. The story of the universe so far is neatly presented in the manual but it still does not make much sense... What does this mean: "In 2912, Capt. Kyle William Brennan arrived, in his experimental gateless jump ship, in the X universe after an accident, which took him far beyond the frontier of Earth. Kyle became instrumental in the attack on the Xenon mother ship (...)" and it continues in a similar fashion. If you have not played any X games before you might ask: what is a "gateless jump ship", what is "the X universe" (another dimension maybe??? ... no it is not, for the record), what is "the frontier of Earth", and what is "the Xenon". I have played X2, so I can answer most of the questions, but not the parts about the gateless jump ship as it was the story of X.
Once again, this can be attributed to the weak economy of Egosoft, as they cannot afford to create long elaborated cutscenes with voiceovers by celebrities reading lines written by real writers.... but is is really a shame as it detracts somewhat from the experience.
Fortunately, the "rest of the game", or as I might call it "the biggest part of the game" is very good. I can tell many stories from the game that I have personally experienced, and that is a sign of quality (in my opinion). Ofcourse, you have to have good imagination and a weak spot for science fiction to enjoy it, but I can tell you stories of dangerous smuggling runs through hostile systems. I can tell you of the time i saw a huge battle between pirates and Kha'ak (dangerous aliens) in a sector, and I just hid behind an asteroid... hoping not to be seen. I can tell you of the strange sights I have seen in the X-universe (everything from a derelict spacecraft hundreds of kilometres from the trading routes to strange spaceships without callsigns zipping through the sectors). I can even tell you of fantastic trading stories where great profits were earned... A story beginning with "I remember a time I was on the Seizewell-Kingdom End trade run when I suddenly saw..." is yet another story I can tell you from my "other life" within this game. It is a game about pretending, playing, thinking and imagining. It is only as enjoyable as YOU make it yourself. If you only build a space station, switch on time acceleration and leave the PC on over night to earn money for you, you have missed the point of the game. You are supposed to enjoy it, and it is supposed to take TIME.
If time is not a luxury you have, I would not recommend this game as it can be dangerously addictive.
If you do not like spaceships... I would not recommend it either.
If, however, you have the time (and the patience) to play this game the way it was supposed to, it can give you some of the best experiences you have ever had in front of a PC.
The Good: Graphics, Music, the Experience of being in outer space, trading, fighting, earning money, graphics, physics on spacecraft (better than X2)
The Bad: Story glitches and choppy briefing, No landing on planets (maybe an unreasonably high demand considering the vast number of systems and planets in the game...). No cockpits (although you can download a very good cockpit-mod from the website now)
What should be added in the next game (X4 ?): Planets you can land on. Individual cockpits for all spaceships. And finally: The option to select a more realistic physics model (I want to be able to switch off the thrusters and glide through space... like the game "Independence War" was on "free thruster mode")
Why I bought it: I played X2 and loved it. I love spaceships, sci-fi and outer space.