verun

It's better than FF 13 in many ways, but when you are a perfectionist and want to play a game to it's max capabilities, then you're in for some MMO-style farming, taking not hours but many days of mindless, funless mechanic grinding until you just give up and see the recent games of Square Enix for what they really are: soulless cash cows. This is not Final Fantasy anymore. FF died when Hironobu Sakaguchi left Squaresoft. Took me 13 years to finally accept that.

This game suffers, like most PC games today from severe Consolitis. I only played 5 minutes until I deleted the game: your mouse cursor does not move. Instead your mouse moves the camera (intended for game pad play). Your mouse cursor gets LOCKED to only be able to move vertically when you open the build menu. There is no borderless windowed mode. 0/10 because of Consolitis.

Instead of a review, I'll write my experience with this game. I've waited a half year to try this because Egosoft usually takes this long to get a new X game running. I was eager to try my new Saitek X52 Pro on this one. First I went into options, like with any PC game to set some graphical stuff. I found the resolution was set to 1280 which was very odd, so I set it to my native res (usually done automatically in PC games, first fears of Consolitis surfaced in me). I read on the net, that the "story" mode is a big tutorial, so I went with that to get ready for free play. The first thing I saw was this polygon puppet that is supposed to be a woman. It looks exactly like a 3D woman looked.... back in the year 2000. I'm not exaggerating here! The character animations are on the same level and look like a mixture of zombies and robots. The game is (supposedly) not about character interaction though, so I thought and just ignored that and went on to fly.... ... or not. The entire Joystick keybinds were completely messed up. Like this game was made for a (inferior) console and not for the PC gaming master race. So there was some Consolitis in the game. I didn't even know they released this game for a console. A space sim... really? They are MADE for PC's. I accepted that too, though it started to bug me... Anyway I went on to configure the joystick so that it was able to actually fly forward (strafe up/down; left/right were set as default instead of pitch and jaw) and use some of the functions that were unbound or bound to strange keys (autopilot, map, dock, targeting). I still had to choose menu options with the mouse and run around with kb+mouse setup. Strangely there were highlighted button names like they appear on game pads (A)... hmmm... I was kinda pissed at this time, but I still hoped the game was at least bug free, stable and that the free play mode later would offer some fun. After one hour I was ready to fly. Yippee! A big universe awaits! First mission: target practice! The game tutorial told me the highlighted stuff was showing me where to go. This was nice, the only downside was that there was no highlighted stuff. It also told me it would display the distance - but it didn't display anything, not even my flight speed. While I was still trying to get that display of normal HUD info up and running, which is to be expected in every space sim game since the most early ones, I suddenly lost all control of not only the ship, but also the HOTAS, the mouse and the keyboard too. The ship was now drifting towards some asteroids... So I half heartedly tried to solve this next obstacle... I even tabbed out of the game and tried to go back, but couldn't as it was "Not Responding". Well okay, then I'll not respond to it either. 0 points for this epic wanna be space sim fail. Deleted. TL/DR: Wow! After a half year, this game is buggier than the alpha version of Star Citizen - Arena Commander, it surpasses all games I know in terms of unplayability and the character models and animations were directly sent here from 14 years in the past. In short: Consolitis, severe alpha bugs, stay away at all costs! This game will never reach the state X2-The Threat had, better go with that game!