Reviews - SombraHookier

Short:

Mayhem takes the most ambitious gameplay features that X3 always offered but never really put emphasis on and gives them the love they needed to turn it into a game with a very solid early, mid and endgame without getting boring anytime soon. It turns X3 into a First Person RTS without taking away the feeling of X3 we love. You should definitely give it a shot, you won't regret it!

Long:

I've stumbled over Mayhem thanks to a video called "5 Reasons to try X3 Mayhem Mod" by Darth Fiscus/Hector0x. It was posted by someone in the Community Hub of X3 Albion Prelude on Steam, which is literally the best place to advertise mods (other than here, to be honest). At first I chuckled about this guy's strong accent but then decided to stick and watch the video, and boy, I am happy I did that because it convinced me.

In the past I finished playing X3 Albion Prelude with most of the story lines, just to find myself at a point where actions are just there for fun, they don't matter though. I then later played Litcube's Universe which gave the game a nice shake-up, adding cool new features like more complex mobile mining, Saturn Complexes and all that. So that gave me another few hundred hours of fun. That being said, the two main goals in Litcube's Universe are pretty stale - fighting the Phanon Corp. is more annoying than a challenge, as they attack you only there where it hurts. Setting up a defense was pretty unsatisfying as there rarely was a good way of protecting weak assets. It gave me X2 The Threat flashbacks, as the Khaak behaved similarly and were just an annoyance instead of a challenge, especially in early game. The other goal was beating the OCV, which basically forced you to just amass hilarious numbers of ships and each battle would be horribly painful in management of losses.

And here comes Joubarbe's Mayhem mod and removes any remaining flaws of vanilla and Litcube's Universe. It gives a solid midgame and endgame experience. How so?

- Actual Empires
Mayhem finally manages to make actions have consequences in almost all cases. All races can go to war with another. Apart from home sectors, everything can be lost, for good. And you have your own empire with your own diplomacy. You actually get encouraged to go to war with two races to receive benefits for your empire from it. You can claim sectors, you can lose sectors and you need to defend what you build up. Most importantly: You can't build anything in sectors that aren't yours! So creating and expanding your own empire is HEAVILY encouraged. This is one of the aspects that turn this game into a strategy game.

- Optimization of previous features
In Vanilla and partially Litcube's, using the SETA to skip time was never really punished. AFKing like that was a scummy way of letting the stocks go up and down or your traders and miners do their job while you were watching porn on the other monitor. Mayhem actually punishes you for not playing the game actively and gives you enough stuff to do to not make you feel like the SETA was actually ever needed. Skip 24 hours in SETA and your empire will have a BAD TIME competing with the growing threat. Literally.

Boarding is now extremely convenient and fun, thanks to teleporting marines instead of launching them into space and losing half of them on the way. The RPG-like dungeon-crawling text logs are pretty entertaining and you can name your marines, growing attached to them. Losing one of them will actually matter to you, if you care. Boarding also now has a nice equipment system and offers more than just boarding ships.

Litcube's mining system was nice, but it introduced new resources that didn't matter. They were just loot. Now they matter. In fact, many resources of Mayhem have their individual roles in your empire, meaning aquiring credits is no longer the only thing you need to care for. This is the first time X3 took a hint from modern gameplay methodic: If there is only one currency, the player will do exactly the one thing that is most efficient to acquire it. If there are multiple resources to aquire in different ways, the player will do different things to get these resources, each in the most efficient way. That prevents the player from getting bored from grinding the same activities over and over again.

- Plots
There are multiple plots that make you do multiple things. There is a lot of secrecy to it. The Perk system of your station encourages you to progress in all plots offered to get the best perks to individualize your stations.

- Customization
As mentioned above, there are perks for your so called Sanctuary stations, the central station of a sector. These are fun, extremely useful and make you think twice about which system to develop into what. You need to focus on certain things, especially in the early and mid game.

- Piracy and Bartering
These are an actual thing now, and especially bartering will help you greatly.

Hell, I could write even more.