X3: Reunion

This game is beyond awesome. It has the bones to be the best space simulator ever made.

There are automation elements where you can autopilot your ship to do practically anything you can manually do. You can do the same with ships you own, creating vast fleets of warships that can patrol sectors to eliminate enemies or destroy a specific factions trade routes. You can use the same automation to set up your own trading empire, with factories to produce basic goods like solar energy cells up to extremely elaborate super factories that create highly complex goods like weapons, ships, missiles, shields, and pretty much anything you could imagine.

The factions are fun and interesting though the dialogue will get repetitive after a few dozen hours. Each faction controls their own territories and in Reunion they tend to go to war with racial enemies which can change the power dynamics in a sector at a moments notice.

Ship to ship combat is fun up to a point. Flying your own ship is great, nothing is cooler than jumping into a system and chasing down a fat transport and lowering his shields until he ejects. You can either capture his goods, his ship, or the pilot himself. That is until your combat rating gets higher and the fights start getting unfair. You can be the best pilot in the universe in your M3 but when that capital ship or corvette shows up, you are pretty much guaranteed to lose. It will have dozens of support ships that will all simultaneously wreck your face. You can get creative with ship builds and last a good while, but eventually you will require fleets of your own ships to support you and thats where things fall apart.

The NPC AI is fantastic and believable. Your AI, however, is incredibly dumb. Ships in sectors you aren't present in are notorious for mysteriously exploding out of nowhere because they got too close to an enemy faction. Even ships in your own sector can fall prey to stupid decisions like coming through a gate the same time a capital ship is going into it and colliding. Trading ships can be incredibly dumb and will make a bee-line for the first enemy ship in a sector and get wasted. Entire stations can get destroyed because your support fleets break and don't patrol sectors correctly. There are lots of bugs in the AI on the player side. Patches and the like have come out to address some issues but if there is a major weakness in this game, your AI is it.

As for the rest of the game, its and absolute blast. I mostly played as a pirate and had the most fun I have ever had in a video game ambushing ships at gates to add to my collections. I even managed to capture a few capital ships and started my own shipyards up. That was until I invested most of my credits into a behemoth battleship that I couldn't possibly afford to arm. I had the lasers and the shields but it took an army of trading ships just to transport energy cells and missiles back and forth to it and the better equipped enemy AI's ate it for dinner.

Like I said at the beginning, this game has the bones to be the best spaceflight simulator ever made. It has everything. A graphical overhaul and some addressing of the AI would put this game a century ahead of it's time.

Good game!

Complex, odd, and totally wonderful.

Great game but overshadowed by latter iterations of the game, mainly X3TC. Only worth playing if you want to experience the story line from X2 the threat (picks up right where it left off). Other wise do your self a favor and jump right into X3TC.

Maximum speed in the simulator, okay.

a game you can play and explore forever

A really fun space trading game. It has easy automated ship navigation and fast travel. Controls are very easy to learn and everything but ship combat can be done with just the keyboard or just the mouse or both. All keys can be re-configured to your desired keys. It's also has a nice relaxing space opera atmosphere and the story-line is interesting with relatable characters.

I have held an interest in space travel since watching the original series of Star Trek back in the day. And so I took an interest in this game, and the like. The game runs very well, except for the auto-docking, depending on which way you do it. Not much at all other than that. I give a 4 out of 5 big stars!

a few years ago I played on steam os, bought aircraft carrier and tl from splits,
****
now the first minutes of the game - critical freezes, crashes,
thanks for a good game,,,,,
minus for turning off the game on non-windows os

Great game with good story. Plenty of ways to play and mostly free to roam around to chose your own path, just need to finish the first few missions to gain enough reputation to be able to start buying ships to expand your fleet operations. Great graphics and good controls even for someone like me who's not good with keyboards. Only thing I didn't like was that they don't have pictures for the ships in the first buying menu like the did for X2 and they made it a little more convoluted to find ship details before you buy the ships; you need to use the U key while in the buying menu's first page to get the details so you know what weapons and shields you need. Be VERY CAREFUL when reading online guides or forums as they have INCORRECT information; the ONLY TWO ARGON vessels that have Mobile Drilling Systems compatibility are the Mammoth and the Centaur. Just a matter of tooling around during your first mission to get a hang for the nuance of the controls and the game becomes more dynamic once you get that down.

First of all, I love this game.. I bought it from gamefly years ago and played it with no problems at all.. It never crashed even once. When gamefly sold out to direct2drive, I can no longer download and install my games as the game is missing or the code doesn't work and they won't fix it so I purchased it through steam.. I have played a bit on steam as well with no problems but moved, got really busy on my new house that I forgot about this game for a few years.

I tried playing again recently and for some reason, even on a fresh install, the game crashes and freezes and hangs up. It is no longer the smooth playing. I cannot even get past the first quest.

As much as I love this game, something has changed and it crashes, freezes, hangs up a lot. I don't know what happened. I can no longer recommend this game as it is no longer stable.

If they fix the game I will be glad to change my review.

I keep trying to get into these games but then my ADHD having ass sees all the spreadsheets and stuff and I die a little inside and go play a game that caters to my attention span.

I wonder if Egosoft has ever apologized for the interface mess of Reunion. Truly atrocious and could have been a franchise buster. I know they made many improvements for Terran Conflict and Albion, lucky for them.