If it sounds like I'm focusing on nitpicks rather than “the real game" - the one with all the trading and ship-ownership and the story of a galaxy on the brink of war - it's because this is the real game. Doing anything in X Rebirth is like spending twenty minutes looking for your car keys and wallet before getting stuck in gridlock on your way to a store that probably doesn't even have what you want. It's all the petty chores and frustrations of everyday with none of the excitement promised by the sci-fi setting. X Rebirth just offers the wrong kind of immersion. There's a even a bizarre layout where you can go buy weapons and goods from vendors who are plainly inside what is supposed to be a prison. There's only a handful of stock station layouts, so wherever you go in the galaxy, it feels like you're right back where you started, talking to the same slack-faced drones. When you finally reach your destination, you can dock and go explore the ship or space station in first-person perspective, which sounds more exciting than it actually is. Why open a menu and select the option you want when you can spend five minutes flying around an enormous space refinery looking for that escort mission you glimpsed fleetingly a few minutes earlier? Why design a sensible and intuitive trade interface when you can fly within 10 feet of a briefcase icon and place a larger order for energy cells? And in between space stations, you can ride the space highways where you go faster by tail-gating other ships, so you can spend your trip among the stars staring at someone's space-bumper. This is because X Rebirth doesn't believe in menus, opting instead for hyper-immersion. It's how you find missions, commercial transactions, landing bays, and even hackable objects. Getting close to things and staring at them is a major part of X Rebirth. If everything looks big, bright and spectacular.then eventually, nothing does. It's striking at first, but eventually wearying. Space, as presented in X Rebirth, is not black and empty but is incredibly busy with gas trails, shiny asteroids, and ginormous space stations with billboards on them. That feeling of being in an aquarium is not helped by the fact that everything seems awash in neon nebular space gas. Pick any mission, and the odds are good that you'll have to spend 10 minutes traveling along the "space highways" - more on this in a second - and then another five minutes flying around at regular speed, staring at different parts of a station like some kind of wall-eyed aquarium fish trying to find specks of food. X Rebirth is unconscionably padded out with time-wasting quest lines that involve almost nothing but travel from one boring, ugly space station to another.
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