Recent reviews by Alcobob

After the newest patch, which vastly reduced the difficulty i can recommend this game.
But it is a cautious recommendation. If 8 hours of playtime is worth 10 bucks for people.

That said, some more direct issues i see:
First of all, i don't see much possible growth for the train. We already have all the systems we want with very few possible new ones in future updates that i could imaging besides upgraded tiers of what we already have. But maybe the developers surprise me.

At the same time, i feel like there is a fundamental flaw in the threat design of the game. Everything depends on the energy (and other resources) you leave a station with, but you don't know how much you will need on the next section of the track in advance. One of the 2 turrets, and the one you start with, uses energy as ammo. So if you don't have enough, the drones will likely destroy you. On the other hand if you got spare energy you can blast away and easily get past them.

The middle ground seems to be missing, one where you take damage but get away with it. Or rather, there is feedback missing if you are doing good or bad besides: You won, you lost.

In my safe (before the patch) i ran into a situation where 9 drones started attacking me, each requiring 4 hits to destroy so 360 energy minimum. I had to stop the train to get enough energy to shoot, had to repair the turret once while the drones blasted everything else including the train controls, but i barely managed to defeat them. So i started repairing everything but then died without a warning (or visual indication really) because my health drained insanly fast, cause my stamina was quickly depleted, even though i had a heater in the work area.

TLDR: You can get enjoyment out of this game, i think the price is fair, but it is flawed.

So, after finishing the NOD campaign i can absolutely recommend this Remaster.

The units are just as stupid as you remember:

A brige will without exception lead to 2 harvesters blocking each other.
Sandbags still are the perfect defense and offense.
Enemy units will still forever target the unit that firsted attacked it. A mammoth tank will chase behind an attack bike that you've send to the other side of the map, while your small tanks slowly wither it down.

That said, there are some changes to the AI, especially how enemy airstrikes work. They used to target units at the top of the map, now they seem to target by value.
This make some missions stupidly hard, especially those where you start without a base but 2 groups of units at different sides of the map. Normally you were able to sacrifice 1 soldier to keep your groups safe, now you can expect to lose either your commando or your artillery tanks.

A technical note: Don't install this on HDDs. It leads to very frequent stuttering of the game. This might have been because i use Windows Storage Spaces, but at the time of writing many people reported this. Installing on an SDD makes the issues go away.

Now after over 35 hours i can absolutely recommend X4.

Unlike X Rebirth, which i played for less than an hour.

First of all, i'll ignore Power Drive 2000 in this review,
because while similar in the 80s style, i think there's a place for both games.

But to OutDrive itself:
In general i like the game.
The Story is simple but enough for this game: Drive fast so that the girl survives.
The 80s style design is really nice and the music is fitting and good.

One neutral point is the potential time you can get out of the game.
I don't think i'll play it more that 1 hour in it's current form.
But at the same time, 1,60€ for 1 hour of entertainment is ok in my eyes.
Maybe future updates will bring new content

But there are also numerous issues:
The steering just isn't very good, a very short tap left/right and the car will change it's direction way too quickly.
Maybe alter it a bit so that a short keypress will initial change the direction only slightly while increasing the rate over longer key presses.

Another big issue is bugs, mostly clipping:
My first run lasted 9 minutes, at which point the helicopter created an explosion while i was on a ramp and suddenly i was below the road, falling until the girl had died.
On my second run nearly the opposite happened, a helicopter explosion boosted me about 20m above the road where i was able to keep driving and only fell down back to the road at some point 1 minute later (i think there was a ramp on the road at that spot..)

TL;DR: I think the game delivers enough gametime for it's price, so i'll give a positive (slightly above neutral) recommendation.