X4: Foundations

Tried X3 years ago. Hated the tedium. Walked away. Since then, I’ve tried just about every other space game. EVE is 99 percent boring, 1 percent panic. Too social, too expensive. Elite looks great but has no purpose. Star Citizen is still just a tech demo. Space Engineers is a brilliant builder that never becomes the strategy game it promises. A few years back, I bought X4. IMMEDIATELY refunded it. The UI, AI, and controls were a mess. Tried again recently. Glad I did. It’s finally a real stable game. And it’s good. You can play however you want. Builder, pirate, admiral, trader. You make a real impact on the universe. This is EVE without the RL politics, and a Star Citizen that actually works as a game. The UI and controls are still awkward. Weirdly, using a throttle and stick here makes things worse. The devs need to study how other games do things. But Egosoft pulled it off. Respect.

Let me start off by saying that I will keep playing this game, it definitely is for me. But the game has too many fundamental problems for me to recommend it to others. The biggest problem of this game is also what is its most interesting quality - it's a logistics management / RTS game disguised as a first-person Freelancer clone. The part of the game where you just fly around in your personal ship is essentially a tutorial for the larger game, where you're supposed to hire pilots to do a lot of the repeatable tasks for you. Unfortunately, problem no.1 - everything about the UI and fundamental design of the game is fighting against you being able to manage your fleet. There is a lot of menus that are counterintuitive and confusing. I found myself having to constantly pause to look at guides on how to do the most basic things. Yes, there are tutorials in game, but I think that if you have to create an entirely separate tutorial scenario on "how to accept mission" or "how to buy thing...

The UI is the worst I've ever seen. I'm not exaggerating. From any game I can ever remember playing or even looking at, this one stands at the peak of awful UI. I cannot excuse it, and I cannot recommend it. Maybe someday if they do a complete UI revamp, I'll give the game another try. But as it stands, UI is at the top of the list of my problems with this game, and until it is completely changed I would not recommend anyone to try and stomach it.

I've played this game like 600 hours. If you ever want to feel a time warp, play this game, you'll start at 3PM and next thing you know it's 11PM and seconds will have gone by. It's the best blend I've ever found of being able to do what you want - you can be a fighter pilot, capital ship captain, or just armchair admiral while building your own military and economic empire. It basically has the best bits and pieces of all space games wrapped into one.

Grew up watching my dad play this game and then later started playing it myself. Its a great space sim with so many different ways to play and things to do. But Oh man does the ship AI suck. I have to reload a save so often just because my destroyer decided to straight fly into the attack range of a station and not using his long range weapons. Give the command to flee? Welp let me stop to 0 then slowly turn around and not use my boost to get out of range. Pls give us a way to train our personal somehow without them dying in combat 24/7

I can barely stand that people rate this game so poorly because it’s supposedly too complex for them. Yes, the game is complex—and it’s meant to be. It’s not a shooter, nor is it a strategy game where you “win” something. It’s more comparable to games like Crusader Kings or Stellaris, where it’s about your own story and discovery. The difference is that here you’re in the cockpit, roaming the world directly. The graphics aren’t exactly state-of-the-art anymore, but they’re genuinely beautiful. The interface is appropriate too, even if it’s sometimes complex. There are plenty of mods that make life easier. “Foundations” is the right title for this X: it’s a foundation for your own adventure, and the developers keep adding new “extensions” to it. A unique, must-have game—even if you’ll never have enough time to play. You’ll remember your adventures no matter what.

I really really really really wanted to love this game, the scope is incredible, the universe is beautiful, and the idea of building an empire from a single ship is exactly my kind of game. But wow… this game is overwhelming for new players. The learning curve is basically a vertical wall. Even with the tutorial, there are dozens of menus, systems, and mechanics thrown at you right from the start, and almost none of it is explained in a way that feels approachable. With Steam’s 2-hour refund window, you barely have time to get your bearings before you have to decide whether to keep it or not. I spent an hour just trying to figure out navigation, trading, and basic controls, and never got a chance to actually enjoy what makes the game special. Maybe for a few bucks i could justify keeping it. If you’re willing to commit many hours to learning, I can see this being amazing. But for anyone who wants a smoother onboarding or a quick taste of fun before the complexity hits, it’s ...

Torture to play. If I want to mess with boring complex systems that offer zero entertainment I can go to work. Overly complex and for no goof reason. If I burned through all the tutorials I would be past 4 hours with no refund. Flight model is meh. So are graphics. This might be fun if you were unemployed and could spend 8 hours a day mucking with the horrible interface. The map has no distance indicator for some reason. It's true it doesn't and the flight grind is worse than ED. At least ED combat is fun, and the ships are cool. This game has nothing to offer me. Hopefully refund goes through.

5/10 Could be great but is extremely unpolished and buggy This game essentially needs a complete overhaul -The menu's are a joke, there is a whole lot of redundancy and unneccessary confusion You got around 500 keybinds to learn, at least a couple hundred informational windows, each with like 50 different numbers and metrics. Its like they didnt even care.. Just slapping every conceivable information in 1 window and when that is filled to the brim, make another one. We learned how to deal with this on DOS for crying out loud, you have 1 head category and then further and further expanding lists depending on how deep you need to dive into the information. No need to tell me 50 million things when I just want to find a patch of hydrogen on the map. (which without the "local auto mine" finding it for me, i would still not know that hydrogen shows as a purple hexagon on the map... Of course a colorless gas is purple now..) -There is a plethora of bugs From path finding issues where ...

Beware - the system requirements listed on the store page seem to be erroneous. The background simulation in this game requires a much more powerful CPU than what is listed. With an i5-6500 and a GTX 1650 I am getting about 10-15fps, even with all graphics set to the absolute minimum. In fact, adjusting the graphics settings up or down does literally nothing at all. That's because the game is CPU-bound. Here's the thing though. The tutorials do NOT run a background simulation the way the main game mode does, and therefore the tutorials will give you pretty much whatever FPS you might expect on your system for any comparable game in your library. So, you will not be able to anticipate any performance problem right away if you start with the tutorails. ...And, as this is a simulation game, it's likely you may spend more than 2 hours on the tutorials and setting up your HOTAS controls before you finally start a new campaign and discover the problem with the background simulation. ...