This review is aimed at X3 fans.
TLDR: This will likely be a great X game someday and worth picking up, but we're not there yet.

I initially thought X4 improved on X3 in every way, but after spending some time with it and my hype dying off, I can now clearly see a few places where it falls unfortunately short. This is not a list bashing the game but feedback for Egosoft and a way for people to figure out if they want the game. Here are some issues:

- Weapon variety is way down and nothing on offer is really geared towards capital ship use or feel special, it's only a few bland weapons, it's all basic fighter weaponry really. As far as I can see a gun is a gun, no size/class difference.

- The map is relatively small compared to even the first X3, which had 97 sectors if i'm not mistaken, X4 has 59. It doesn't help that the highway loop is extremely fast and everything is within 2 or 3sectors of it, making it feel really small, nothing feels remote, it's like the xenons are living in your backyard. I think Egosoft leaned a little too far on the side of convenience here, they obviously haven't given up on X Rebirth's attempt to appeal to and attract a "wider audience".

- Different factions' ship equipment seem to have stat variations but you can't see any of the stats except the main one like shield hp.

- The encyclopedia lacks info for a lot of important stuff, a lot of entries are just blank.

- Missiles don't show up on the radar/map, can't be targeted, don't seem to run out of fuel and will chase you even if you switch to travel mode and eventually hit you if you don't leave the system, which is very annoying for small ships that can get 1-shotted and only hold one flare. Hopefully turrets can shoot them down but seeing how they have issues hitting a ship...

- The AI feels worse than in X3, it can't aim straight most of the time and is pretty terrible at managing distance/positioning. It's also way too enthusiastic about wasting all of its shields boosting away and then coming back to you before they've recharged.

- Auto traders are pretty bad at the moment, even losing you money at times instead of generating profit, definitely not worth investing in. This is likely to get patched, but for now the economic side of the game is pretty busted.

- You'll have to do all the exploration yourself or micromanage an AI ship since the exploration command is woefully inefficient and fails to get anything valuable done in a single sector in any sort of sane timeframe, even with the fastest ship.

- The player HQ is in the middle of Teladi space so if you want to play as a pirate you can forget about it unless you keep Teladi friendly.

- Haven't found or heard of any special or unique ships or variants yet so I'm pretty sure we're limited to only the 3 factions' designs.

- Piracy is very limited not only due to the other issues I've mentioned, but also due to the absence of jump drives. If a ship drops its cargo(and I have yet to see any carry much value) you'll need a cargo ship to pick it up, but since you can't jump cargo ships in or out of the sector and they're slow, they're going to get intercepted by the sector's military.

- It might just be a bug some people have, but the radar makes no sense, you can't use it to line up targets, rolling the ship makes it rotate on two axis instead of one for some reason.

- I'm still having fun and the UI is definitely so much better than X3's, but I definitely see just how much more work the game needs now that I've had time to get used to things. Hopefully extra content won't come as standalone expansions like they did with X3.

I still recommend this game because there's no doubt in my mind that if Egosoft gives X4 the same treatment they did their other games it will eventually be a gem to be enjoyed for thousands of hours. This requires giving honest feedback though, which is what I'm doing here.

Hired a pilot to take care of my ship,
Was driven by my personal pilot through space, while watching the stars through the cockpit glass.

Ordered him to dock on the next station so I can leave the ship and make some crafting and shoping like "ok, I need to do some shoping, dock there, then go explore and pick me up in 10 minutes...".

Watched my ship taking off from the docking bay, and understood the scope of this game when I was alone on this station, shipless, fearing that it could never come back to pick me up.

Made some crafting and shoping, went to the station manager office while ordering to my pilot to go back to the station.
Watched my ship coming back from space, making it's way down to the docking bay above, all of this through the windows of the station manager's office...

While going toward the docking bay, a gigantic cargo landed in the center of the station. Couldn't resist to go on board.
Two paranids said hello to me, pilot and copilot, and suddenly left the station, with me on board, going on their trading journey...
I watched them receiving theirs orders, confirming them and doing their job, while stuck on their bridge.

Called my pilot "follow them to rescue me, I'm stuck". My fighter was way more rapid than their cargo and joined us very quickly.
Went through their cockpit gate, ejected myself through empty space with my suit on, went back to my ship, which was waiting for my orders in space. Jumped in, took the control of it, then suddenly putting myself away from the screen I thought " holy sh... did all of this just happened ?"


Thank you Egosoft.
Even if the game actually needs to be ironed out, it is really the game I was waiting for.

Plus: every part of the game is made so it can be improved, the structure of the game design seems to be very open, (like the elevator system for the station rooms) so every improvements from egosoft in the futur will only make this game better and better.

The game is a bit prematured (missing some details like the whole encyclopedia), but nothing game breaking for me at the moment.

I have played Egosoft games for around 20 years, and it is now with version 6.0 that I can recommend X4. The game feels complete at this point, all the races are included (some as DLC), mechanics are better fleshed out, and the game is about as polished as you can expect from Egosoft. 6.0 brings real collision detection, which allows tighter wing formations, and an improved lighting engine, all as a free update. Players complained that carriers weren’t useful, and Egosoft listened and added new carrier commands to improve their utility. If you’ve waited to get into X4, now is the time. Please know that the nature of an Egosoft game hasn’t changed. Expect there to be obtuse mechanics which often elude reason, expect features that sound cool but don’t work, expect bugs everywhere. However, again, the game feels quite polished comparatively, but I don’t want anyone to misunderstand that the game can indeed frustrate you in stupid ways sometimes.

The rest of this review is focused on what X4 actually is (or attempts to be), from my perspective:

X4 is a simulation of a small galaxy filled with humans and aliens, where, with some exceptions, the economy is real, every ship has a purpose, and if you can see a ship then you can one day fly it. While X4 allows you to play it as an RTS, you are always in the game somewhere, a real person in the simulation. You can pilot any ship from fast scouts to devastating carriers and massive battleships, or you can hire pilots to fly them for you while you play admiral, or you could even get on an alien ship and allow it to shuttle you around the galaxy as it goes about its business (which is useful if you want to sneak aboard a hostile station). You start as a small fry and grow your own empire economically and militarily, eventually building your own wharfs and shipyards to field massive fleets. While there are multiple starts, usually you’ll begin in a small fighter with few credits to your name. You’ll feel a true sense of accomplishment when you buy your first trader or miner, when you get your first corvette then your first destroyer, when you build your first factory, board your first ship through piracy, etc. Then one day you’ll realize you have dozens of traders and need a system to manage them. Alas, the game grows with you and gives you the tools you need to manage your empire as you go from single ships to fleets. Ships can even be assigned to factories or even mega complexes to work for them. There are several plots which give the game not only story but modify the simulation by creating wars or peace amongst varying factions. There are pirates and an enemy common to all non-machine races in the galaxy: The Xenon. You’ll run into them as you explore the galaxy, mapping it out and laying satellites to keep track of ship traffic and trade prices. You will need to earn the trust of various factions, who keep track of your reputation within their territory. They may love you or hate you, and this is reflected in game. If they hate you too much, they will go after your traders instead of only focusing on your military. However, if they like you, they will give you discounts, sell you their stronger ships, and allow you to buy blueprints to recreate their economy for yourself. There is no winning condition… it’s a simulation after all, so you’ll usually end up playing until you meet your own personal goals. The game is highly moddable, and some would argue the game isn't complete unless it is modded. Of particular note is the Star Wars Interworlds mod, which transforms the X universe into the Star Wars universe, complete with Star Wars ships (and interiors) and sectors!

All in all, there is no other game like X4 that I have found; if you know of one, please let me know.

Want to play EVE Online but don't want to deal with other players or the fact that, realistically, you will never get to own or fly any of the actual big cool ships? Want to play Star Citizen but sometime this century? This is as close as you'll get.

For those unfamiliar with the X series, I find that this is a game (and series) unlike any other. This is a game that changes genre as you play. For better or worst, this is game is also a capitalist's wet dream (except that it doesn't pay you real money).

You start off with a modest fighter class ship, a modest amount of money, the shirt on your back, the fuel in the tank, and big big dreams for your future. (I should point out that the game doesn't actually have shirts, ship fuel, or big dream mechanics).

From there, the universe is yours, so to speak. What to do and where to go? That's up to you. Legal but ever expanding business ventures, mercenary work, random go-pher contracts, and even less than legal piracy and/or smuggling are all fair. But allow me to expand on my play experience after 183 hours...

Starting out with that pitiful Yugo of a starter ship, did I...?
Upgrade it to a better model? ✔
Upgrade engines, shields, weapons, etc? ✔
Acquire larger ships? ✔
Capital ships? ✔
With a crew? ✔
Can I walk around the ship? ✔
Oh, and how about managing a whole fleet? ✔
Starbases (as in plural)? ✔
All of which is under my command??? ✔✔✔
Wow!

But while this all sounds great on the surface, I need to point out that X4 does not stay the same in gameplay. In fact, gameplay morphed a lot over time. As I had only my star-Yugo to begin the game, gameplay started off a lot like Privateer, Freelancer, or maybe vanilla Elite: Dangerous. I found some work, did some trading, made some money, and got out of that space faring Yugo.

Making money by doing work is great, but do you know what's better? Making money from someone else's work. Once I banked enough money, I bought another ship and a crew. It was a medium mining ship. And I gave it orders to go to work. Every time it delivered a haul of ore to some refinery, I got paid. Do my mindless, hapless employees "meat-drones" get paid? Dunno, because the game doesn't track payroll expenses. But I did pay someone at the shipyard for those poor souls' work contract.

So, my business ventures started out by hauling ore and gasses, followed later with building simple starbase factories, and then expanding those factories to other product ventures. I have no shortage of customers. And each starbase has its own wing of fighters and a medium gunship on patrol. And supposedly, I can go even further and eventually take ownership of entire sectors and become a defacto government with policing powers! 😮

I even once fielded my very own battleship with its own squadron of interceptors. I felt — powerful. 😈 Until those whacky meat-life hating machines fielded an even bigger more awesome battleship, and I lost mine with all meat-drones on board. I no longer felt powerful. 😭 That was an expensive cost of doing business, but business endures...

This portion of ever expanding business is spent far more in a management interface than anywhere else. The cockpit? Bah! My "chauffeur" sits there and takes me wherever I need to go. (until a certain — instantaneous — travel tech is researched.)

I told you this game is a capitalist's wet dream.

But I gotta say that the management interface isn't particularly exciting. But some gamers go for that, and it can be kinda zen. Is there an actual adventure to be found? Technically yes, but the plot is paper thin.

For all of my razzing, I do have a good time. Hence, thumbs up from me. 👍 183 hours (and ongoing) is not a bad deal, especially if you get the game on sale. But there are warnings I need to pass on:

• The management and base design UIs are awful. Pack an extra case of patience. Maybe three.
  
• There is a very steep learning curve, especially to anyone new to the X series. Be prepared to spend a lot of time in online guides.
  
• The tutorials, while actually helpful, don't even begin to cover what you need to know.
  
• The tutorials will also devour your two hour return window, so be aware of the clock if you want a "trial run" with Steam's refund policy.
  
• Technically, nothing says you have to give up the cockpit. But realistically, you will. So if you want a pure flying experience — this is NOT it.
  
• Your meat-drone pilots are dumb as posts, even the high rated ones. My "chauffeur" occasionally gets challenged over solid matter being, well — solid. Shields FTW. (and yet she also can stick this neat sideways slide landing trick... go figure)
  
• Saving and loading games is NOT quick, even over an SSD. To be fair, the game universe is pretty darn big. But this also means that save scumming can be painful.
  
• Pay attention to the reqs before buying. I have a 6-core Core-i7 and an 8GB GTX-1070ti. Granted, not the latest and greatest, but still respectable. At 1080p, I hop all over the place between 30 - 60 fps. Turning off shadows helps immensely, and you probably won't miss them in a game like this.

Edits: multiple rounds of proofreading.

I played many hundreds of hours in X3TC and X3AP before registering my old copies onto Steam. I'm now 10 hours into X4 and here's my early impressions -

First, no bugs of any sort. Sometimes I'll get frames drop into the 20s or 30s when I've got a lot going on. I've got a 1080 ti and I'm running with everything on ultra. Had one wonky thing happen in a mission but that was largely due to me not doing what it told me to do and I just restored before I messed it up.

Second, ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ this game is deep and complex. Sure it has some tutorials but even with almost a decade of X3 behind me I still struggled to figure out how to do some stuff. That's because there's a truly stupid amount of stuff to do. If you're someone who gets frustrated easily when everything isn't super clear then take a xanax before you play X4 -

but do play it. This game is what ED wants to be when it grows up. A mile wide AND a mile deep. Newtonian physics, tons of ships each of them customizable in a variety of ways but you can hire NPCs to fly everything with you. Capture enemy ships, repair them and sell them or keep them. Buy/steal/even BUILD ships, hire NPCs and set those NPCs to trading with them. build a network of satellites to track prices in different systems in this living, breathing economy and find good price opportunities to exploit but instead of having to spend your entire day being a space trucker you just pull up your 3D map, pick ships and crews for the task and say:

'Hey. Bucko. Go hook up some space widgets from this system and go sell them at this station over here. Since that station makes Exploding Super Space Widgets when it's got enough regular space widgets, you just hang tight while they whip those up using what you delivered, buy those and sell them over HERE, cuz that guy? Oh man, he really, really, *really* wants Exploding Super Space Widgets."

That's maybe not exactly the menu choices you have to make but close enough.

I can buy, fly, control or fight anything from tiny speedy zippy little fighters of various sorts up to massive carriers. Build fleets. Build space stations and take a direct role in the economy. Why buy space widgets when you can mine the resources and build a facility to make your own?

Maybe because you don't want to play spreadsheets! Know what? Don't have to. Ever. You can start out in a tiny ship and just shoot, murder, pirate, kill loot and thieve your way into better and better ships and huge piles of space bucks because it's a ♥♥♥♥♥♥' sandbox, man. YOU DO YOU.

IN SPACE.

This game isn't a quick fix of dopamine. It's not a Candy Crush click boom get your ego pellet reward Electronic Arts title. It's a massive space sandbox, wide and deep and it's not easy or forgiving or simple but you'll play it for a decade and love it because you, you my friend, you are not the kind of person who gets told 'You've got a phone, don't you' and thinks 'Wow, yeah, I do have a phone! My gosh, I could just play all my nice, simple, dumbed down, microtransaction-riddled games on my phone! GENIUS!'

You're an explorer, a fighter, a cunning trader and the kind of person who get ♥♥♥♥ done - in fact tons of ♥♥♥♥, all over the galaxy, all at the same time. Because this is the right game for you.

Started game without reading instructions. 500 hours on and still learning.
1st hour in and I parked my ship on the back of a massive destroyer and watched the battles unfurl in the skies above me from the safety of a docking bay.
Then I started to venture out in my peashooter and scavenge drops from the battlefield.
Then I docked at a port and realised I could hitch a lift on any other ship. Then I realised I had no way of getting back to my ship still docked and had to ride it out on someone's miner until he returned (thankfully) to the station my captainless ship was docked on!
Forget what this was at launch... X4 is beyond anything out there for depth and open-endedness.
Why not plug the hole where the Xenon are pouring through with a dirty great defence platform and 100 of your fighters?
Why not take a small, fast fighter and help defeat a massive destroyer by sticking up close and taking out it's shields?
Every NPC ship does something and the universe is persistent. Trade routes are BUSY. Wars are BUSY. So much to do and so much fun doing it. With full mod support, I have fallen in love with this game and spent more time on it in 6 months than 4 years in Elite Dangerous. Nothing else comes close.

Step 1: Break up allying factions, make non-allied factions go to war, and in case two factions are already fighting each other, fund a 3rd hostile faction to make it even worse.
Step 2: Make massive space factories that will make Albert Kahn proud. These things will also make your PC smoke but that's not important.
Step 3: Sabotage all shipyards of aforementioned factions so they don't have a choice but to buy warships from you.
Step 4: Sit down at your office and watch dozens of warships streaming out of your factory before blowing each other up because they belongs to 4 or 5 different factions at war.
Step 5: Profit!

10/10 will play as Military Industrial Complex in space.

I have a lot of hours on X4 Foundations and its expansions. I bought X4 when it first released and have watched it grow and evolve into what it is today. By leaving a review I hope to persuade others to try this game. I believe Egosoft deserves praise for supporting their games with patches and listening to player feedback.
I have been playing X games since X3 Reunion.

X4: Foundations is for me the ultimate space sandbox.
You can choose between a few game starts which give you some background information about your character if you wish to roleplay. It is important to note however that you are always free to do whatever you want and however you want, hence the "sandbox" part. These gamestarts merely decide with what ship you start, where in the universe and your diplomatic relations with the races.

Once you start it is easy to get overwelmed by the mere options on what to do and how to do it. I suggest to simply do the tutorials. The game does a decent job of introducing basic mechanics to you. I however still feel it is necessary to search up additional guides and information.
Some useful sources for guidance:
- Egosoft youtube tutorial "What is X4: Foundations?" & other youtubers
- Egosoft website forum - very helpful community and Egosoft staff actively answer and follow forums.
- X4 wiki
- Steam guides

You startout with one ship and slowly amass your wealth and grow your empire however you see fit.
Do different kinds of missions for the various factions, building reputation with different races gives you access to their ships and techology.
Every single ship in X4 has a different interior/cockpit and it has to be said; seamlessly landing your ship and walking around on a spacestation without a single loading screen is simply awesome. From the smallest scout to the biggest capital ship, you can walk around in every single one of them. Once you get some credits you can start buying miners and traders and eventually build your own custom space stations.

You can build your own space stations as you buy blueprints and modules from the different races. These allow you the produce your own wares which in turn supply the dynamic economy in the universe.
Example; Factions are at war and suffer losses, this causes the faction to build many ships and in turn cause a shortage of hull parts (required to build ships and stations). You're free to shape your stations however you want, you're given the tools and pieces to use as you see fit. You're also able to import designs from other players.

The expansions add more races and sectors to explore.
Mod support! Egosoft is a huge supporter of mods and there are alot of them! Steam workshop makes it very easy to look up and activate mods. There is something for everyone.
Manage your space empire and take over the universe.
I recommend looking up X universe lore! What happened in the older X games all connects to X4 Foundations.

I've merely scratched the surface here and there is so much more to talk about. If you feel curious, do look up gameplay and see if it is something for you. I hope i've given some people incentive to try X4, i'm not very good at writing reviews and English is not my native language, sorry for any spelling errors!

I really, really want to like this game. However, despite how enamored I am by its core premise, it has an absolutely fatal flaw that makes me retroactively wish I hadn't even started playing.

The premise is fantastic: Build a space empire. set in a sprawling and dynamic universe full of opposing factions that you can support, fight against, or completely wipe out. If you're interested in flying a dogfighting single-seat spacecraft, it's got content for you. If you're interested in flying a giant carrier that brings those dogfighters into battle, you're in luck. The two best comparisons I can name are single-player eve online, or single-player star citizen.

The most obvious flaw is that, even after years of patches and updates, this game is incredibly buggy. The AI is shockingly bad, your ship detonates for no reason, UIs are janky, the works. If you've played previous games in this franchise though, you're used to that, and maybe you think that the premise and ideas behind the game are cool enough to be worth slogging through the bugs. I thought so too.

For me though, the fatal flaw -- the thing that made me decide i wasn't going to buy the expansions, the thing that made me quit just as i was getting my empire going -- is that the simulation is significantly dumber whenever you're around.

What do I mean by that? Well, when you're flying a spaceship in-person, you have beautiful graphics, very convincing physics, etc. But understandably, they can't support 100+ sectors full of thousands of ships all with full physics, so if you dig into community posts and such, you'll quickly see a distinction between "IS", IE how physics and AI behaves when you're in-sector with them, and "OOS", IE how physics and AI behave when you're not around.

And you'll quickly learn that, for whatever reason, pretty much everything in the game is worse when using IS physics. Some sectors have dangerous electric fields that damage spaceships -- but only if you're IS! So you can completely ignore the danger as long as you just never go there - and if you ever do, everything you've created will instantly start taking damage and will eventually be destroyed. Trading ships take half a second to dock OOS, and a minute to dock IS. Mining ships will hum along nicely OOS, but IS, they'll just park in space starting at an asteroid for hours without mining it.

The end result all of this is that you can build an empire, but you can't actually be around to enjoy it -- because as soon as you go anywhere near a space station you've built, or hop on board a trading ship you've hired, their AI grinds to a halt. Instead, you have to watch little triangles move around on a 2D map while you sit in an empty sector. It's extremely deflating, and as soon as I realized it was happening, I couldn't bring myself to keep playing.