X4: Foundations is the most impressive, ambitious and biggest in scope space sim I've ever played in my life. It is also one of the jankiest video games I've ever played, with a lot of bugs and other things that will test the limits of your patience. Which ever one will end up being the winner for you, I cannot really say since it depends on how much you love the space sim genre, how much time you're willing to devote to learning a complex video game, and how resistant you are to things like bugs, interface labyrinths, and general jank.

There is too much to talk about, the game is just too massive so I will try to give some highlights to have you understand what it is you're getting yourself into.


First off, the scale. You know how Star Citizen has a bad reputation for feature creep and being too ambitious, causing it to still be under development and maybe even never release? Well, X4 is in a lot of ways EVEN MORE ambitious than Star Citizen, but here the game actually exists and you can play it. If that sounds too good to be true, I assure you it is not. X4 is an absolute giant of a video game, there is no other space sim out there that does as much as this game, on this large a scale. Massive fleet battles of ships of all sizes, where you can command your AI pilots to do things? Check. Building your own stations and actually being able to dock them and walk around them? Check. Starting your own empire and playing the game like it's an RTS? Check. A simulated economy where every trader and miner matters? Yup. Don't want all that noise and want to just fly a small ships and do story missions and dogfight? Check. This game truly lets you do just about everything you could want from a space sim, the only thing missing would be flying to actual planets, but let's not be greedy, eh? You can still terraform them though!


That sounds amazing, so where's the catch? The catch is twofold. First part is really simple: the game is rough around the edges. VERY rough. Think Skyrim levels of bugs and weirdness. Yup, that's the level we're operating at. Your autopilot will occasionally crash you with a station and your ship will try to merge with it. AI pilots will sometimes do really stupid things and fly your really expensive ships right into their doom, or refuse to correctly point their guns at the enemy. The game may simply crash (although only had that happen once). Quests will get stuck and you won't be able to complete them. We're talking major issues that have actual in-game consequences, and you will be seeing those fairly often.

Fortunately the worst of them are still very rare, in my 200 hours of playtime I only had one instance of a hard crash and one time where my story quest got stuck and I was not able to complete it. But smaller things like AI being stupid, ship hitboxes interacting weirdly, things like those will happen fairly often. To the point where you stop perceiving them as weird and they just become a part of the game.


Second part of the catch is the sheer amount of time you'll have to put into learning how the game works. The fact that the game is incredibly vast and complex is both it's biggest strength, and also the biggest reason majority of the people who try this game will bounce off it. There are a few games worth of menus here to learn, a wealth of mechanics that are not very well explained or not explained at all, and the game doesn't care you're new. You will be thrown into deep water and expected to figure it out. And since it's a sandbox game primarily, you need to understand what you can do and how you can do it before you can actually start enjoying the game. The game REQUIRES you to devote substantial amount of time in order to understand what it is all about, and then another substantial amount of time to learning how to do all the different things that can be done.

To have you understand better: I have played this game for 200 hours, supplemented my learning process with lots of youtube videos that help teach the game, and I still feel like I am behind in knowledge in terms of the actual veterans of this game. I am still learning things regularly that I didn't know before. Heck, a lot of "issues" people complain about on the Steam discussion boards and reviews (not all of them, but definitely a lot) are simply due to not understanding how a mechanics works or doing something incorrectly (things like boarding for example). That's how much there is to learn here, and how fiddly some of it can be to make work properly.


So, after all of this, what's there at the end of all that hardship? A diamond of a game. At it's current state it's one of a kind video game that will give you an experience you cannot find anywhere else. If you're able to tolerate all the roughness and able to overlook shortcomings that I honestly think are unavoidable in a game of this magnitude, this could easily be considered the greatest space sim to come out to this date. At the same time it's a game that only a small segment of people will actually enjoy, because of a huge barrier of entry. But, if you are able to get through that barrier... there is something truly special on the other side of it.

It's like going to a restaurant where the waiters are rude, cooks are shouting, seats are uncomfortable, and you have to wait 2 hours for your food. But then you get served the best damn meal you've had your whole life. It is one of those rare games that will let you experience things so incredible you might completely forget or simply be willing to dismiss a myriad of it's issues, simply because what is there is so great and full of wonder that even game breaking glitches are not enough to ruin the fun you're having. Don't believe me? Read other reviews, they are full of personal stories of wonder and adventure, only to be found in this game.