opencritic has it at 89% for both audience scores. besides the crappy performance and some bugs journos are gushing about black female protagonist and heavy focus of "cinematic narrative". however it didn't save deathloop and on PC it's chained to the epic store which is where games go to die. which is ironic because I wish remedy some success so the can continue doing what they do (there's certainly an audience for it) without having to deal with stupid publishers...
x: rebirth was their so called "console x" (iirc egosoft itself said they only toyed around with it and that was what came out of it, so take that as you will), it was a pretty big divergence from the former games. x4 in turn takes a lot from rebirth, so the name kinda fits (and then x4 is missing features from rebirth....)
in true egosoft fashion it also ran like crap and quite messy gameplay at launch, but that's been mostly fixed by now. hence the heavy downvotes it still hasn't really recovered from (some people are STILL butthurt about it not being x3: part 4, when x4 has been out for 5 fucking years, and there's even farnhams legacy for x3 which is free). there are still some weird design choices that can't really be fixed even with mods, like lot of smalltalk being the exactly same (it's not like egosoft is a big studios that can dump millions in voice sessions and VA) which worse you can't skip. and you're supposed to use smalltalk a lot (unless you change it with mods), which then begs the question why go with a voiced protagonist and RPG style dialog system...
story is also more linear with some sandbox features, way "smaller" than say x3, but imho it's a good game to get a taste for the x games (which I suspect was part of what they tried to do) and bringing in a lot changes to refine on later.
all in all you'll probably get a solid few dozens hours out of it, and it's not like freelancer had a lot of staying power once the campaign was over.
