X4: Foundations

Its a fun game to a extent but it feels strangely empty. It feels like there is so much to do but too little at the same time, hard to explain but once you play it you will understand what I mean. Very complicated to learn. I would like to see somethings such as planets to go to and some more diplomacy stuff such at nations and all that (might be in this game already I havent played much). Between this, No Mans Sky, and Starsector I would rather play Starsector than this to itch my space sim needs.

This is a child of Elite Dangerous and Mount & Blade.

As i write this review the game is running in the background. I am waiting for my, hopefully optimal, station to generate money, to create a fleet that will grow large enough to overcome the AI's capability with sheer numbers.

If you complete the tutorials and Timelines (which are great and bad at the same time) you should be able to handle yourself for about ~5 hours of the Sandbox gameplay.

"Elite" part ends very quickly. If you are a Elite refugee you will most likely be disappointed. M&B in space describes this game best.

After the initial 5 hours you will either get started with a mining fleet or a destroyer and a couple of fighters. This means that from this point onward you will mostly play by looking at the galaxy map. And sadly you will be fighting the UI and AI. Trying to figure out why your traders don't trade the product of your station despite meeting the prices or gate jump limits.
Why are my fighters so useless against the weakest of foes?
The amount of micro managing the player has to learn in order to overcome the AI and UI downsides is a bit too much.

The game is best left running in the background to passively grind money.

Google is certainly a must. However... i had hard time finding answers for my questions. X4 subreddit is extermely helpful, i recommend going straight there if you have questions.

I came across this and I thought, wow its on sale. I bought it not expecting much as I've not seen or heard much about it. Anyways, I started it up and it was difficult. There was some learning involved at the likes I have never experienced with a game. My beloved safari search tab on my phone and you tube shorts have been like a Korean sleeper agent mentor to me for this game. I'm only 30 hours in, and starting to get the hang of it. But I love this game its very nice of the germans, thank you germans.

10 hours of gametime, 2 hours of youtube tutorials, and i STILL dont have a clue how to play this game.
The tutorials are useless, teach you nothing at all apart from basic movement and trading.

I started the Terran cadet chain, as thats what people were saying would teach me the game, its literally just go here, go there, scan that, shoot at this for HOURS on end, i learned nothing. Still know nothing about mining, exploring, ship upgrades, weapons systems, who knows what a nav beacon does because it explains nothing. Missions are the worst, so extremely vague. Simple mission like deliver 2 food. They could have just told me it needs to be crafted using meat spice etc. But no, the guy who typed out these missions was clearly a fat lazy cunt because i had to learn that off youtube. Then i get a 'very easy' mission to find a few lootbox, 4 hours of searching, scanning, back and forth till i finally find a ? symbol, race towards it, and of course its not a lootbox but a MINE and now my ship is destroyed.

Sure, i see theres a great game hidden somewhere inside this mess, but fuck spending literally days of my life figuing it out. I mean i seen the videos and then read the reviews thinking 'it cant be THAT bad surely' but wow, it was way worse than i expected. I could maybe tolerate it all if the movement and combat was a little smoother, but its stupid and janky, the ship your in has two speeds, too slow, or too fast, thats it, no inbetween.

Im kinda in shock with this one, fancy making a game so complex, so deep, but then completely neglecting a decent tutorial for it, or a decent quest chain that drip feeds you features without delving straight into the repetitive fetch quest routine. And dont even get me started on the voice acting, its so bad, its like they didnt even hire actors but made the staff do it instead, as you can literally hear the 'i dont want to be doing this' attitude coming from every voice actor.

Id rate this game 3 out of 10

My goal buying and playing X4 Foundations and all DLC (yup) years after release was to experience a polished space sim.

It delivers on an enjoyable exploration experience, with the most interesting faction being the Boron imo.
The space combat at the S/M ship level is also very satisfying and fairly balanced, but fast-paced action stops there.
Fleet dynamics for larger ships are well-implemented, but do not measure up to my point of comparison, Starsector.

The crux of the game remains its industry / economy simulation which will be the backbone of your empire and fleets.
I didn't get all the way there, as the game successfully bored me before I could get to enjoy its main selling point fully, for the following reasons:
- NPCs are bland and inaesthetic - they will all greet you with the same death stare and monotone AI-generated voice.
- Ships are varied and carry great faction identity, but again are not pleasant to look at save for Terran and Boron.
- Weapons and systems variety is a letdown. They are few, sport generic names, and are functionally similar.
- Of the few weapons available, Missiles, Plasma and Flak dominate unequivocally, and seeking variety seems a suboptimal move in a game that simulates battles on a numbers contest.
- Performance starts to tank as the game progresses and more active elements populate the map, to the point I could foresee Stellaris levels of game stalling if I continued into the lategame, which I have borne enough of for a lifetime already.

X4 might resonate with your inner spreadsheet enthusiast, but it wasn't the space sim I was looking for.

---
I am also aware that mods exist, and tried them out. They successfully throw balance through the window and the game remains similarly boring and unsightly, just with more variety populating the expanse. A handful of modded ships like the ATF Freyr are very aesthetically and functionally pleasing however.

I played X3 years and years ago, and yeah it was pretty janky with weird cutscenes and such. But it was beautiful and fun, and it worked. I've played this game for 7 hours - half of which have been playing through the awful tutorials...which frankly didn't help at all.
I then started up a new game (after realising nearly all of it was locked behind extra DLC) and went out in my space suit to explore the station for hacks....I promptly Got dragged through an asteroid field by a large sip and thrown out into space. After hitching a ride on another ship, I found that I couldn't call my ship for help, as I hadn't bought a pilot for it yet, and was lsot on the other side of the galaxy with no way of buy a new ship or getting back to mine.
Well, restart and a few moments later my shipglitched through the middle of another ship and exploded.
Okay, thrid time is the charm apparently...I finally found a little distress beacon, started a conversation with a boron scientist who...stalled, went silent, and promptly locked me out of all menus and controls. I couldn't even save. I wouldn't be too bothered if it wasn't for the fact that this game has four DLCs but the core game still hasn't been fixed of basic game breaking glitches like this. I loved the idea of being able to walk through my ship (which you also cant do, btw) but found the game, in the end, awful.

needs to replace the X-Y-Z axes with map will be a better choice.Work on the turbo engine cool down timer is to long and not powerful enough

Start out in a teensy ship, struggling against other teensy ships that want to steal your lunch. Keep winning, buy bigger ships, buy friendly ships, buy good investments. Eventually control a multi-star system empire, helping or crushing empires at will.

Then go fly that teensy starter ship through your grand economic machine, just for the hell of it.

#goodfeels

If you buy more than the first part meaning all expansions it's amazing. Nice work on the Hyperion too it's an awesome ship to pilot.

at this point ive hit the 300hours mark.
i have every expension and plan to buy the next ones that will come.
The game is so deep that after 300 hours you will still learn new stuff and or figure new things out.
better or efficient ways to run your stations.
ways to impact the econemy .

Best to descibe this game to someone who never played.
Eve online/elite dangerous, single player mixed with GTA that evolves to stellaris during your playtime.
Dogfights, station managment builder, galaxy sim. econemy tycoon.


for devs.
we want ventures back! not as beta but as part of the game. make it a new dlc. so you make some money.
autopilot can use some love
For endgame when you have an empire. there should be a better option to make peace with another faction. or atleast a cease fire

still runs like crap
and the flight model makes anything bigger than scout fighter feel like fly a 1000 ton bar of soap.
its fair enough to update the flight model but it seems that none of the environments or controls have been updated to take into account the new model. for example the already terrible auto pilot is now now completely unusable as it just crashes into everything and travel drive speed instead of just regular speed.

X4 is one of those titles that falls into the Worst Best game category. I feel like it really is the absolute best 4X/Grand Strategy/Space Sim on the market but so much about it is unintuitive and poorly implemented. You start out small, just you in your little ship, and work your way up to conquering the galaxy through might and economics. When you begin a game you take on missions to start building reputation and your fortune, you can buy more ships, buy pilots to fly the ships, have a crew follow you around, buy real estate in space, build space stations, undercut the competition by providing more goods at a lower cost, or just offer what the competition cant, eventually you can automate building your own fleet and dominating everyone that isnt you. The big downsides are that the default controls dont really mesh with what the rest of the flight/space sim market have come up with. Its a bit odd figuring out how to set up your controls, for instance I eventually bound acceleration and deceleration to my scroll wheel. Strange but it works well. Some missions are difficult to understand, what are my objectives? Where do I need to go? Who am i supposed to talk to? Where do I get whats requested? Sometimes its best to take a mission and forget about it for a while and take on some other ones. The absolute worst part about X4 though is the menus. Learning to navigate and use the menus is a game all on its own and its annoying and terrible. Nearly everything you do in the grand strategy portion of the game is done through the menus and most of the important interactions are hidden in sub menus inside sub menus inside sub menus. There isnt a good tutorial in game to teach any of it to you so youll need to go on forums or youtube to get educated on how it all works. Some information youll want in the late game isnt even in the game at all and some resourceful people have put together spreadsheets and tools to help you figure out the info youre looking for. If you have the will to learn the menus and rebind your keys in a way that works for you X4 opens up and is the most feature rich space sim period. Games like elite dangerous and star citizen dont even come close. The only other game thats really similar would be eve, but that has the downside of being an mmo and taking an incredibly long time to come close to the scale of X4, like years.

Bad UI which is the main cause of the steep learning curve of this game.
If you can look past that (Youtube videos are your friend), there's a pretty good game for hours and hours of fun and entertainment. Enjoy!

This game offers everything I haven't found so far in a space game, the ability to enter and take command of multiple types of ships, actually enter stations and other areas, as well as build your own facilities, while interacting with other life forms. Most space games I have played have either been primarily human focused with the belligerent or invading alien race that you have no contact with other than fighting. This game is truly one of a kind, a shame I haven't found it sooner.

Overall, I like that game and what it tries to do.
But there are some major issues that ruin the experience more and more as I progress into late game.

1)NPC piracy is horrendous, "I was asked to drop my cargo" If you have a substantial fleet of traders, you will be hearing it a lot. No matter how aggressively you destroy pirates there is always more.

It is ridiculous, no matter what you do right now, fighting huge fleet to save galaxy from Xenon, doing quest in order to stop civil war, building station to trade or want to just explore space in peace, you will get this idiotic message: "I was asked to drop my cargo" again and again and again and again.

What is worse it's all fake, pirates are appearing out of thin air, and you cannot prevent attacks by destroying their station or through deterrents like well-equipped traders or increased patrols. And your traders are actually actively trying to get killed! Their default response is to stop and then flee, which is what actually making them vulnerable for attack, if they would just ignore it, pirates would never catch them. But Egosoft didn't give us option to just ignore pirate demands, because pirates are too stupid and that would basically remove npc piracy from a game.

And as cherry on top, if you drop your cargo pirates don't even try to pick it up, so everything about that mechanic is fake.

2)Station sieges take a ridiculous amount of time, even when you're using 10+ destroyers. I understand that factions need some time to react to an attack, but still, it's insane how long it takes. And what's worse every now and then your destroyers just randomly charge into melee range and get obliterated in seconds, despite having 4-5 KILOMETERS range advantage, why?! Why 7 years after release ships cannot hold distance to a STATIC object.

3)The new flight model in 7.5 has ruined S-class ships for me, they are completely uncontrollable. Maybe the old model was unrealistic, but it felt good. The ship was responsive and handled nicely. Now small ships tend to drift all the time.

Also there are some minor stuff that is just weird, why it works like that 7 years after release:
Why there is no stats on weapon/equipment icons in the wharf/shipyard? Why you need to open encyclopedia to see something as basic as range or damage.
Why you can only compare 3 ships at a time, if there is space for more ships to be compared?
When you target subsystems on L-class, after you destroy them, your target frequently jumps to something random on the other side of the ship, which completely disrupts your attack, it would be so much better if it select only elements that are visible to you right now.
Why there is no command to mine in the whole sector? Only to mine at specific position in the sector.
There is new button in 7.5 to move everything in your inventory to and from storage, which is great in theory, but why it also moves SETA, EMP bombs, launcher, blaster, repair laser etc to storage?! it doesn't make any sence, why would you want to lose all your equipment every time you want quickly drop illigal stuff...

Just want to say a quick shout out to the devs for seemingly achieving the impossible and maintaining a fantastic native Linux version of X4. It's been running great for me for years, all major functions of the game seem to work well; cloud saves are saving, graphics are beautiful (High Settings, Native FSR3, 75-90 FPS), game is stable over hours-long play sessions.

I'm running the game on CachyOS (Arch) Plasma Wayland
AMD Ryzen 5 7600X
AMD Radeon RX 6750 XT
32GB RAM

Thanks for all your efforts Egosoft, I love this game :)

A little buggy still, but very fun and immersive!!

It's an immensely satisfying and fun space sim, as long as you're not defeated by the learning curve and UI like I was originally 5 years ago. I would still recommend the tutorials as they are helpful, but a Youtube video will quickly get you running and show you most of those dumb menu interactions actually have pretty good hotkeys that avoid the worst bits of the UI, at least for your own ship/commander. And once you're past that... Boy it's goooooddd.

I always thought the X games sounded kind of small and overly ambitious, but they're actually fantastic. The easiest and quickest way to describe it is Space Kenshi. Factions have different relationships and will trade each other supplies in the detailed economy or go to war with rude neighbors. You pick a typically solo game start, maybe begin doing random missions, your own thing like mining, or one of the many mini plots in the game/dlc. You quickly pick up additional ships, assign crew to support you, build a space station, and transition into running your fledgling faction from the Captain's seat.

The DLCs do offer a lot of content and a couple features that make them important additions but you can also just add them slowly over time without issue. Unless you want to do certain mods, like Star Wars Interworlds. Most big updates to core game are free though, such as the flight model update (which if you didn't have 1000 hrs on the old model, the new one is better). Future free Diplomacy and Exploration updates sound great and like they'll round out the gameplay. Now where's the line for a graphic refresh on some of the old sky...star..spaceboxes?

Don't like the new update for flight. 3600 hrs now I don't enjoy it.

Actually, I liked this game until I finally got my big station for a lot of credits, and I realised that all promised buttons are just fake... AI is stupid as hell. They cannot mine properly; they don't sell properly or buy properly; they don't get resources from your own nearby station. I mean, yes, you needed some mods and a script editor to run such stations comfortably in X3, but X4 has no script editor. That would be fine if the "programmed" stuff would work, but it does not. I don't want to "micro-manage" my station for things that are supposed to work. I only need it to get money for my fleet!

+ it's still fun to attack Xenons with a fleet

+ plots are good, but nothing out of the ordinary.

+ compared to previous titles many new different missions

-90% of equipment you will never use, because there is just one that is best

- need to buy all stories thrue DLCs

- no script editor limits the game.

- Completely stupid AI for trading

-no hotkey for fleet commands

So, if you do want to build an empire and get a big fleet. Which is the unique selling point for this game, it's disappointing.

It takes everything I love from all my favorite space sims and puts them into a single game. I love that you can build your fleets any way you want.

Want to claim the galaxy for yourself via war? Go for it.
Trade Empire? You got it.
Mining monopoly? Yessir.
Space exploration? Absolutley.
Lone Merc taking contracts? Yuuup.
Want to pilot your own ship in an immersive 1st person? Of course.
Action combat in the 3rd person? Hell yeah.

You can command entire fleets from a map and manage their resources or tactically command a squad in the middle of a dogfight from the seat of your own fighter. Build space stations. Board ships. Whatever you want.

All in a constantly simulated universe. So the game goes on without you, meaning you can take your time building your empire or just learning the ropes.

Open sandbox or narrative driven adventure? It has both.

I am only 16 hours in and I am obsessed. I can see myself playing this for the next few years EASY.

Space capitalist simulator.
Start in a small space ship and end up being the leading force in the galaxy.

Build space stations, exploit minerals to turn them into usable wares. Use those wares to make more complex wares, Use those wares to build ships. Sell them, or use them to build your own navy.
Set up factions to each others throat, more wars means more profit.

Or just be everyone friends and fight the Xenon threat.

You can be a pirate, a trader, a real estate magnate.

Anything you wish.

Truly a masterpiece.

It's the first time I've hit 100 hours in a game and felt like I've gotten relatively nothing accomplished but still managed to have fun.

Hard to learn, easy to master. Once I learned enough of a % of the game to start having fun, this game grabbed me with its tentacles, hooking me in a mix of Factorio, Mount & Blade, and Kenshi.

The "point" of the game started to click as I learned more, and did a storyline I enjoyed (Emergence). Rewardingly nerdy mechanics in a game that doesn't care whether or not you exist. Getting into fleet management & space station building hooks me the most, but the idea that I can have solid gameplay as a solo fighter pilot too, or even a squadron leader, is some chef's kiss energy.

Also a Star Wars mod exists, and is one of the best produced mods of all time. Get this game if you are OK with a long learning process, and thirsty at the promise of it paying off into one of the most insanely engrossing sandboxes ever made.

This game is not for everyone most sure. But if it clicks with you, prepare to be lost in it. I'm over 150 hours in (began playing GOG version, then repurchased on Steam to use workshop and get faster updates), and feel like I just scratched the surface.

coming from freelancer, miss multiplayer, but otherwise the best space sim currently out there imo

Very good game and totally addictive, love the ships, and the space you fly around in, and the lovely sky boxes in each new area. I like the way the game plays out with the stories and such. My only issue is there is a huge learning curve when you first start to play the game, with all the menu's what each one is for and what everything does. There is tutorials in the game but i dont think theres enough to explane everything there is that you can do. Other than that loving it so far 245.4 hours in only in a few weeks, man thats nuts.

x4 is my favorite space game. its what i always wanted in a space game. u can fly around in a small ship by yourself doing missions or u can make a huge fleet and go to war or u can build space stations and do business and profits and all that. its got a lot of ships and weapon types and a big universe to explore its great.

X4 is a difficult game to get into, but once you do get into it it's great fun. It gets a recommend from me.

I played almost 1400 hour's in this game. It got it up's and down, but by far it a great game. None other comes close. Early game there more action where late you mostly watching the map controlling your empire and fleet's. Think Grunt to admiral. I will put many more hour's into this game. The only bad thing i could ever say about it, is i cannot enjoy it with my friends. Besides that it one of my most favorite game's of all times.

The new update is amazing! The ships fly so well! In 2025 would definitely recommend to players who are looking for a sandbox game with unlimited potential. Thank you developers.

I don't think I've ever been more hooked on a game in my life with the exception of maybe Kenshi. It's an open sand box space sim and boy does it deliver. Now it does suffer from some performance issues even on the best machines from what I've read in various comment sections but if you can push passed that, the game is very much worth it. It still gets updates and new DLC fairly regularly which is always a good sign that the Devs care about their product. Highly recommend it.

lowkey a game that ive always looked for but never found, do you like building an empire? do you like being influential on the ai economy? do you like being able make 2 factions go to war? do you like taking over the universe? do you like building stations in space? then this game is for you, the amount of times ive started a save over to learn something new i could do is absolutely insane, plus some awesome mods that make the game more fun and especially with the new flight model update coming, this game is just getting awesome, and its just gonna continue to become the best space game IMO in the world, with how much you can do nothing can beat this

Since X1 this series has always kept me engaged. X4 is no small game and you can get whatever you want from it.

Just want to fly around getting incremental upgrades and blowing stuff up? you can
want to engage in storyline missions? you can
want to be a simple trader? you can
want to build a giant capitalist empire? you can
want to topple governments and conquer space? you can

Editor's Note about 100 hours after my review:
They have taken the gate and Hatikvah's Choice I. We have rallied to the gate from Argon Prime but can not hold them for long. We cannot get out. Signals, from beyond the gate. We cannot get out. They are coming.

TL:DR Game is complicated but also makes it easy to learn the systems you want. Much recommend.

I've never heard of the X series until like, 3 weeks ago when I heard that it was a 4x Grand Strategy game where you have to manage things on a micro and macro scale. I have a love/hate relationship with complicated games (2,500 hours in HoI4) and when I heard there was a Star Wars mod for this, I decided to grab it since it was on sale. Turns out the Star Wars mod requires like 4 different DLC, which I did not grab. Damn.

ANYWAYS, on to the actual review.
This game is... interesting. There's, if I remember correctly, TWENTY-ONE tutorials you can play to learn various mechanics, and they don't cover everything. For a first impression, that did not give me a lot of confidence. HOWEVER, I now understand why that's necessary. You don't have to interact with a lot of the systems if you don't want to. Want to be a dedicated pilot who operates just their one ship completing missions, trading, or doing mercenary work for someone? Sure! Just play the pilot tutorials to learn how to pilot a ship and you're all set. Don't want to put the effort into piloting and instead want to run a mining company? Go look at how NPCs work and how to manage a station. BAM, now you've got your own mining operation turning ore for $60 into refined metal into hull parts for $200. You don't even need to pilot beyond landing at your first station and spending half your starting cash on an NPC!

Been playing a merc for 40 hours and only did the piloting tutorials and now want to make a space station? Fear not, the 21 tutorials allow you to play whichever tutorial you want at any time. Just hop into the space station tutorial to learn how that works and then apply it to your run!

If you want a more indepth review of generalized content, you can probably find some on youtube from someone much more experienced than I am. I may be 140ish hours in, but this is only my 2nd run and I've got a LOT to learn. Anyways, time for a review of my playtime:

I started a run as the basic start where I had to go do stuff, but had no real idea of how anything worked. I got a mission to go drop resource probes, but had no idea how getting resource probes worked. Rather than worry about that, I decided "You know what, I'm bored. Let's go do a sandbox run." HOLY SHIT, do I love the sandbox. There's 2 different versions. One lets you do everything from the get-go, the other is based off how much you've done and experienced. I chose the 2nd one because I like being able to track my progress. For my starting settings, I decided I wanted to be a mining company supporting the Argon/Antigone factions against HOP and so spent 2/3rds of my initial funding on setting up in a sector there with a few starting miners.
After an ungodly amount of time, and I mean probably like 60+ hours, I've finally turned my mining company into the worst "A Rearmament Group Organizational Network" you've ever seen. Not only do we mine stuff, but we also turn that mined stuff into other things, which get turned into other things, which get turned into EVEN MORE THINGS, and finally get turned into ships. These ships are purchased by Argon/Antigone and, because I (was) set up on the border, these ships are produced MID-INVASION and immediately sent to reinforce. This may sound psychotic, but it works. Antigone managed to not only fend off HOP's massive invasions that would level half the sector at the start, but managed to push south out into the HOP sector, taking it over.
That brings us to now. I'm, I think, 100ish hours into this current run. I have 8 miners working to gather me raw materials with escorts of 5 or 10 fighters depending on location. Pirates ignore regular shipbuilding and simply appear out of thin air, which angers me greatly and has resulted in a massive bulk up of escorts there. In addition, I managed to purchase my first ship, a Large ship, the Behemoth Destroyer. It's a carrier, but with bigger guns and is cheaper. It's super weird. I'm attempting to get the player HQ, but I want to find a new sector that'll be good to start establishing in before I do it. While my scout does scouting, I figured I'd leave a review because this game is fantastic.

Anyways I gotta run, the xenon have come in force to push the Argon Federation out of Hatikvah's Choice I and are currently winning. I need to see what I can scramble to mount a counteroffensive before they blast through into Argon Prime itself. War is good for business, but I'd rather my northern flank survive than all my meager funding being spent towards barely holding the xenon back.

Hard to describe, its a deep space sim like Elite Dangerous, Its also a polished mature rts/economy sim/strategy game. Its like having two games in one, switchable instantly with a press of "M" key. Game reaches its potential after initial few mission. Most of the yt videos don't do justice to the depth that gameplay has.

Base building is interesting, but placing modules is janky i should clarify that its not inaccurate or buggy, i would describe it as : if product like fusion 360 had bad navigation interface. Thats how it feels, its experience is more mechanical than smart.

Wishlist : local coop where two player can manage the empire together. Ship interiors? Performance improvements and hardware utilization can use some rework(Your mighty gpu wont make much of a difference, game seems to be cpu bound, and number of cores/threads wont matter beyond 4 cores (or 6?). That said, it runs good overall.

Also, looking at dlc history, patches and beta updates, i think devs/egosoft deserves a special mention. these are the folks community should support.


highly recommended if you like the genre.

I have spent several hours across several forums trying to get a control profile for my T.Flight HOTAS and I still cannot get a control scheme that makes any sense in the game. The default T.Flight profiles in game have no strafing inputs and have the throttle mapped to twisting? Can't believe in a game with a space flight sim that no effort was put into HOTAS controls.

at the start this is the closest to the perfect sandbox game as it can be - the first expedition around the map, the first mining fleet, the first base, the missions, all pure bliss. But as soon as you have L and XL class combat ships, thier AI is the most frustraiting thing i have ever experiensed. Please please please, devs, do some work on AI, i even don't mind buy it as an DLC

A fun game which scales from being a space mercenary type of game to a logistics simulator. The building and ship command bear some getting used to, so make sure you start small as you will likely need more money than you think to support your starting enterprises. Also, make surer you assign plenty of ships to mining as it is very profitable and important later - though watch to see if the sectors you mine in are safe first.

There are many mods for this game and once you learn the game a little i HIGHLY suggest you mod the game. There is SWI (10 of 10) there is VRO (10 of 10) also X4 Reemergence (11 of 10) all new games of their own. You WILLLL need a good system to run this game on higher settings and a GOOOOD CPU. The game is CPU bound. i play almost on max settings with a 7800x3D and a 4080, I still sometimes have issues. AMAZING game.......My top 2 of all time. Fair Warning...its a slow burn...but GOD is it a good burn.....I have never played a game like i have played this......egosoft......HATS OFF TO YOU....GOOD JOB!!! PLEASE DONT STOP. My only nock at the game is there are not many ships and weapons/turrets, mods fix this.

Best space-economy, battle and strategy game i ever played.

This is the space version of "Getting over it". A great game with a horrendous interface.

Once you get to the point that you are running a small space empire and you accept your automated ships are just a bunch of lemming, you are past the suffering part

As good a game it could. Just that bad the interface is. Things just dont work for an immersive experience.

Im an hour in: I WANT to like this, but the controls are so uncomfortable. Flying a ship feels great with a controller but is weird with mouse and keyboard; now you might reckon just play with controller and I want to; but then theres the UI; its almost impossible to navigate with controller, in fact its not great with mouse and keyboard either. So I find myself often having to switch between mouse and keyboard and controller and its annoying tf out of me which just makes me want to play something else instead. Im gonna keep at it, but this games first impressions are some of the worst ive experienced, pity too cause its a good looking game. Its just really hard to get past that UI.

This is a great game, not without it's flaws but still fun to play. It's a bit like single player Eve, safe(ish) areas, gate camps, deep economy, space stations and ships ... lots of ships. The random spawn seed means it's slightly different each time you start a fresh play-through. The seamless transition from walking across a station landing pad into a small fighter, flying to a medium ship docking and moving to the cockpit of that ship and then docking with a capitol ship and taking control of that all without a loading screen is very immersive. On the downside however is a somewhat clunky A.I. which can be frustrating. A mixed bag of DLC's although these can be de-selected which is a plus. The biggie for some will be the slow burn, this is a game that will take you longer than most games entire play time to decide if a seed has given you a playthrough you will want to commit to. Overall a good game but not for those who already have their next game lined up

The graphics are great. However, I found the controls confusing and unintuitive, and didn't even get through the tutorial. To shoot, you press down the third mouse button, or both mouse buttons? And yet also need to hold down left click to aim? So, you can't aim and shoot at the same time then?

Essentially Star Citizen but single player and more to do and less requirements to run

Yes. God yes. Why are you still reading this? Get the game and look at the mods. Make it into what you want and rule the galaxy!

I've played this game for over 1300 hours. Time enough to decide it's qualities. First, it's an awesome game - in theory. It is massive in scale, even if it doesn't look that way when opening the full map. The ships and stations are outstanding to visit, own, fly and command. The economy is tricky but dynamic and seems to work well. Over all I like this game. So why do I not recommend this game? I has one major flaw that it's had for years and doesn't appear to being fixed anytime soon. The load time is atrocious! I can literally start the load sequence, go get a cup of coffee, drink that cup slowly while waiting for this game to load, finish most of a 20oz cup of coffee - without hurrying to do so, and still be waiting for this thing to load! Exiting the game is just as bad. Press escape to get to the main menu, select Exit to Desktop and then - wait, wait, wait, and wait some more. I have a moderately powerful gaming PC. 32 gb ram, 16 gb GPU Nvidia 3060, 3 TB ssd drive with little on it, cpu running OC at 4.3 ghz. Even so, this game's loading and unloading takes so long that by the time I get into the game I've already lost my desire to play it. Then getting out of it to play a different game that actually loads in a decent amount of time is equally frustrating. So yes, I really would not recommend this game unless you have a PC so powerful that it can load this game in less then 90 seconds, because even though this is an amazing game, having to wait so very long to get to load in the first place just to play it makes it too frustrating for me to enjoy it.

Your mileage may vary.

(As an example, I set the game to exit to desktop, waited until I got tired of waiting, alt-tabbed out of it to write this review. Finished this review and posted it which took me back to my steam home screen and the game had still not exited to the desktop! I finally just clicked on the Stop option in steam to kill it!)

This is a fun game once you learn it and start getting multiple ships that trade and stations for a while. In reality if you want to make serious credits it would take more hours than I care to spend building an empire. If you're someone who plays the same game for 900 hours then this a game you could certainly do that. There is a wide variety of achievements that take time to get. It touts itself as play how you want style but reality it is a space trader game. You don't want to plan trades and build stations probably not for you. I enjoyed hiring crew member from all over the galaxy that made for a diverse work force. I hope the next X they make the people look better.