X4: Foundations Reviews

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 the auto pilot flies around the entire station before docking, or the auto pilot overshooting highways, disabling and enabling travel mode for no apparent reason, crashing into asteroids/stations/ships making you spin out of control so fast that i got motion sick, to just getting completely stuck inside the floor of the station 100% bricking your game unless you researched teleportation (Nvm teleportation, i havent found research as a whole yet) There are also other things that may or may not be intended like how you can only tell ships to "dock and wait" but then they get stuck on the "wait" part and you need manually "cancel all orders" and make a new one Mission briefings, quest markers, tutorials and in-game encyclopedia can all lie to you. ("Deliver to Stations" actually means "Deliever to anything BUT stations") (Quest markers will sometimes lead to empty space or the middle of highways. I have a couple of these by now) (Either the tutorial or some other pup-up/window/notification told me to "use the scanner and mine the stuff highlighted orange", eventhough i dont have the storage for that, but wouldnt show or tell me about the minerals i actually COULD mine) (Encyclopedia is just completely useless, its just captain obvious telling me everything I dont need to know and gets mostly used to expand the story of items, giving useless fluff information) -Things that should be simple, like mining, finding missions or simply traveling acrross sectors becomes a serious research topic on this game. Take travel for example.. You would think its easy peasy but the controls are horrible. You constanty have to switch between steering the ship and travel mode which means opening a menu and selecting it there (meanwhile you crash your ship into the station, overfly your objective or you deactivated it too early). Its also extremely difficult to see anything from within your ship since everything is extremely far away relative to your size. So in order to see better you must learn more keybinds and execute them mid flight to switch your cabin view around and enable free look so you can finally see the enemies approaching. So just for those basics you have WASD, Shift+Space to steer with your mouse, Enter to enable/disable travel mod, Buttons for your camera, your mouse wheel for accellerating, Backspace for stopping, Spacebar for shooting and 1-3 for weapons. Long story short, you should never fly your own ships. Even in combat you should just let your pilot handle the fighting since he gets perfect aimbot while you have to painstakingly angle the ship onto an enemy thats flying circles around you.. I understand that this game wants to be a first person space sim but everything to do with your character and its controls are horrible and you are better off just staying on the map screen, sending your ships around remotely. Stations are hillariously empty for the amount of space provided and there are next to no npc models. I noticed how there are multiple affro ladies on each station, nvm the alien races that seem to have exactly 1 model each. It feels like just an excuse, implemented to avoid being an idle game. Because thats essentially what this is, an idle game where you will sit on your map screen sending vessels around for trading, miniing and fighting where you occasionally have to talk to a representative to get a new license or to buy new ships (Maybe you can do it remotely but i have yet to find that) Conclusion: Dont buy this game. lol I could go in-depth on the prices here.. but this should make it clear already The base game = 50€ 1 soundtrack = 10€ Just for fun, lets say the acceptable price for a soundtrack is 2.50€, then these devs have pumped their prices up by about x4 and now we all know where the game got its name from. xd (Its the foundation of quadrupling prices)

Maybe the best space game ever made? Somehow feels more alive than an actual mmo (Elite), and the devs (egosoft) seems like they're very competent.

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.

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 things", then something went wrong at the design stage of your game. I have barely touched the automation aspect, I only managed to get my first station, and two AI-controlled ships, but I've already encountered a lot of frustrations. Trying to add my first docking module to the station, first I spent about 20 minutes looking at the menus trying to figure out if I input all information correctly, I deposited credits so that the station can buy the necessary resources automatically and I waited. Another 30 minutes pass with no progress, I got frustrated and bought the stuff myself spending maybe 5 minutes hopping to a neighboring sector. Spent another 20 minutes figuring out how to deposit the resources manually, ended up passing it to an AI pilot because I couldn't dock to the building module. This is the kind of annoyance thta you will be dealing with constantly. And I don't think the game (or at least the range of possible activities) is even that complicated, you do all the standard things you do in a management game - give orders to buy/sell/transport, give orders to offensive/defensive fleets, build things, set up production chains. But the problem is, all of that is awkwardly bolted onto a first-person space shooter game. I feel like there's a ton of design-debt from the previous games that is holding this game back. If I, a dumbass who never made a game, were to give advice to Egosoft, it would be to design it first with the zoomed-out management view in mind - map-first - and then think about how to inject first-person perspetive into that maybe. Which leads me to the next big issue - there are a lot of questionable "immersion" decisions in the first-person gameplay that also actively hold the game back. You can walk around ship and station interiors now - it sucks. There's nothing interesting there at all, it only serves to annoy and pad out the time spent doing repetitive tasks. The stations are empty, lifeless and poinless. The quest NPCs dialog is spoken in a wooden AI voice, I'd honestly just rather read it. Please, stop doing voiceovers if you can't afford to do it well, this is not an RPG. Same with the spaceships - you can walk around them, but why? There's literally nothing to do, as far as I can tell from at least the smaller ships I have access to, there's not even windows to admire the pretty space skyboxes. It literally only adds annoyance for me, because if you have a captain hired on your personal ship (which you probably always should), you have to tell them every time to get off your pilot seat and watch them awkwardly clip through it, before you can get on with the game. If you like space and management games, if you like commanding huge empires but also taking part in the action like in Mount&Blade or Starsector, you might find things to like in this game, but you'll have to fight with the UI to get them out. I DO NOT recommend buying it at full price. If it's at -75% and you're fine with the downsides, yeah, go for it.

I live and breathe space sims. I love everything related to sci-fi, complex simulations, and boundless sandboxes. I've got thousands of hours in EVE Online, hundreds in Elite Dangerous, and I've spent more time than I can track dying in Star Citizen's elevators. I am the target audience for this shit. It has everything I've ever wanted, all in one package. Which makes it all the more heartbreaking to say this: I fucking hate this game. It's an ambitious train wreck that promises a limitless sandbox but delivers that universe held together by duct tape. There will be a dozen moments of pure frustration that will make you want to smash your keyboard through your monitor. The whole thing feels completely disjointed, like different teams worked on different parts and never once spoke to each other. It’s a Frankenstein's monster of stapled on features and systems that don't feel like a cohesive product at all. Each new DLC just adds another bolted-on mechanic, making the whole experience feel like a patchwork of conflicting ideas. And good luck trying to get invested in the universe because the story and characters are a total fucking joke. The plot is some of the most generic, forgettable garbage I've ever had the displeasure of playing through, you'll be skipping dialogue in seconds. The NPCs are soulless cardboard cutouts with the personality of a brick, they just spew exposition at you and you won't remember their names five seconds after the conversation ends. It's impossible to care about the fate of this galaxy when everyone in it is so goddamn boring and the lore feels like it was written by a committee that only watches the latest Alex Kurtzman Star Trek series. Oh, and the user interface. It's a complete and utter monstrosity that feels like it was designed by someone who actively hates their consumers. It's some of the most visually unappealing, convoluted UI I have ever seen, Aurora 4x beats it by a slim margin. You will spend your entire refund period just trying to learn this horrid UI, not playing the actual fucking game. Egosoft's solution to all this? Churn out some more DLC for their next half-baked idea. Instead of fixing the core problems that have been there for years, they just keep adding more content on top, often creating new bugs and making the game even more of a jumbled mess. Unless you have the patience of a saint stay the hell away from this.

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'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.

This game is a genre you definitely have to *love* in order to appreciate. its a very slow burn, with barely any handholding in terms of tutorials, and it has layers upon layers of complexity and gameplay mechanics. But! no other game accomplishes what X4 does. This game offers so much, its hard to stuff it all into a single review. From small time trading, lone mining ops or the occasional mercenary job to building large factory stations, managing production lines, running mining fleets and conquering enemy sectors, this game allows you to do it all. Along with the base gameplay mechanics comes unparalleled customisability, every ship you can customise its loadout, and custom modifications. each station you own is built how *you* design it. And visually, the game still holds up, with recent upgrades to many of the old ship designs, bringing them up to par with their newer DLC counterparts. This comes paired with a fantastic soundtrack, with some sectors where you want to simply stay a while just to listen to their themes. And if all that isn't enough it offers mod support from the get go, allowing to even further customize, fine-tune or even expand your gameplay. Of course, this game is not without its flaws, especially in later stages of the game performance starts to suffer because of the immense quantity of things being simulated, and sometimes the ship AI acts like dunces, but overall this game is solid. Would i recommend this to just anyone ? probably not, but if you are patient, like space games, and *really* love space sims you should definitely check it out.

IMO, After having spent over 4k on star citizen, I can tell you I still will pick X4 :Foundations ANY day over ANY other space game out there. EVE online/Star citizen/Elite dangerous and even NMS (regardless of how good it is now)- Doesn't even compare to this absolute GEM. Edit: 4k on star citizen as €4700 to be exact.- Totally not worth it. Further Edit: I was an SC backer from 2015, 4k over 10 years isn't much, Its essentially €39.9/month :p

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.