To strum a riff off a beloved Queen anthem, your enjoyment of the X4 Hyperion Pack will largely depend on how into X4 spaceships you actually are. Lemme pig-splain.

Unlike the past five (!) expansions to the base game which introduced a new race, its modules, ships and systems (Split Vendetta, Cradle of Humanity, Tides of Avarice, Kingdom End); or a parallel plot focused on completing missions that earned goodies for your sandbox save (Timelines); the only thing the Hyperion Pack adds to X4 is – you guessed it – the Hyperion Vanguard. The rare, heavy Paranid corvette which you had to capture to own in X3 is pretty much all the new content you get for the price of admission.

Now, to be fair, it's one stunner of a ship.

The model, which – in X3 – used to be just two Perseus M3s stretched out of proportion and glued together upside down, has gotten a striking facelift and now looks completely unique. Opinions will differ, as they do, but I don't think anyone will dispute the fact that X4's Hyperion is among the nicest-looking vessels in the entire game. Between the Boron-level model complexity and standardized equipment nodes (which, unlike Boron ships, will take any equipment you have blueprints for); it's also highly customizable and, possibly, the most advanced ship model available.

Along with the new look come fresh stats. What used to be the only M6+ (that's "heavy corvette" in plain English); of Terran Conflict – and one of just two in Albion Prelude – is now an — L minus, I guess? A light destroyer, basically: less hull and shields than its bigger cousins, smaller hangar, but outstanding mobility (with engine and hull mods, I've gotten mine up to 300 m/s – faster than most corvettes, almost in heavy fighter territory).

With unparalleled maneuverability for its class and oppressive armament (six nose-mounted L cannons and eight M turrets); the Hyperion makes for an excellent (if strategic) strike craft, an accomplished raider (its 106 crew capacity leaves plenty of room for marines); or even a decent light trader most pirates won't catch up to (and those that do will quickly regret trying to take on). It's a versatile all-rounder, in short, and the perfect ship for a player's personal vessel.

To finish lathering on the praise, it's the first ship in X4 you can walk through – bow to stern – without using the quick travel elevators; and also the only ship period to boast its own crafting bench on the bridge. Oh, and it has an internal hangar bay for two S ships, which is also neat.

For as fetching as the Hyperion is, however, the rest of the DLC is fairly lackluster.

For one, the way you get it is so straightforward and un-Egosoft-like that I actually cringed a little during the process. For such an elaborate ship, I was expecting a long mission chain – some kind of grand adventure that, eventually, lets you lay claim to the pearl of the X4 universe: the only ship of its kind in existence...

What happened instead was the X4 equivalent of a YouTuber pinged me while I was flying through some random system, saying "Hey – that's the Hyperon! Wanna help me catch it?" I scanned some gates, tracked the thing to a new system, chatted with its captain, followed it to the Sacrosanct Conclave and – bam! Got two of the suckers in under an hour. Some mandatory "oh, by-the-by, we need x-amount of y" fetch nonsense followed and then the Paranid said that, as the Hyperion was so advanced, they'd be putting it into mass production.

So not only is the quest a letdown, the payoff is hardly unique: you're the first customer of a brand new Hyperion dealership. Congratulations. Here's your owner's manual and complimentary shammy.

The other issue is that – for the price (7 USD, which is half the price of a regular X4 DLC) – you don't get half the regular content
(not even of the smaller, Sideline DLCs like Tides of Avarice or Timelines, which still added 11 new ships and between 7 and 9 new systems). The three new systems (Ore Belt, Third Redemption and Adventure's Promise); and handful of new connections (like the gate between Ocean of Fantasy and Getsu Fune); are neat, I suppose, but little more than empty real estate, of which there was already plenty in the game.

Of course, the unspoken bonus is that the Hyperion Pack coincided with yet another Grand Patch Release (7.50), which revamped X4's flight model, gave the afterburner its own, separate energy source (which now finally doesn't deplete your shields); added a radar module to increase sector coverage for bases and, as usual, included a short novella's-worth of fixes. As all of these changes are directly funded by DLC sales, I figured it was worth a mention (even if the 7.50 patch is free and, technically, unrelated to the Hyperion Pack release).

So there you have it: a great ship, but – as DLCs go – a bit of a letdown. How that translates into "buy or pass" on your end, I leave entirely up to you.

For my own part? The answer should be obvious...

I painted mine blue.