X4: Foundations

X4's most-upvoted negative review opens with four words: "I like this game."

It's from a player with 722 hours. Their objection isn't the simulation — it's that they can't recommend it to anyone, because they once told friends to buy X3 and watched them quit ten minutes in. "The game is not very approachable," they write, which is the politest possible framing of a problem this series has had for two decades.

That review is the whole game: something genuinely remarkable, guarded by a door most people can't open.

What's remarkable

X4 simulates its galaxy properly. Not "there's an economy" in the abstract sense most space games mean, but actual ships flying actual cargo between actual stations, with prices moving because supply moved. Blow up a freighter and the station it supplied runs short. Build a factory and you change the market.

You start in one small ship with no special destiny, and the arc from there — buy a second ship, hire a pilot, set a trade route, build a station, command a fleet — is the finest expression of start-small-end-huge in the genre. People log hundreds of hours because at some point they stop flying and start administering, and the game supports that transition better than anything else.

The support record is remarkable too. Eight years on, version 9.00 "Empire Update" landed in June 2026 as a free update, preceded by public release candidates that players tested and fed back on across weeks. Egosoft run a player feedback survey, publish developer interviews, and are open about raising minimum system requirements as the game grows. That's an unusually honest way to run a long-tail project.

At NZ$14.29 on the current 80% discount, the value is not seriously arguable.

Your empire is staffed by idiots

Now the complaint that dominates everything else. Across the hundred most-helpful English negatives: ship 82, station 70, AI 61. The subject is your own fleet.

The sharpest version comes from a 580-hour player: this is "a good economy simulator, and if you are just interested designing stations and seeing numbers go up this might be the perfect game for you. But for me it is utterly ruined by having the most useless, suicidal, stupid and frustrating AI I have ever witnessed in my ~30 years" of playing games.

This is the third game I've reviewed recently where the headline feature and the headline complaint are the same thing. Soulmask sells you tribespeople who work while you're away, and its top complaint is that they don't. Songs of Conquest is a strategy game whose opponent AI is cited in 87 of a hundred negatives. X4's entire late game is delegation — you cannot personally fly two hundred ships — so every pathfinding failure and every freighter that flies into a hostile sector is a failure of the thing you were promised.

It's worth being fair about the difficulty here: simulating thousands of autonomous agents in real time is genuinely hard, and X4 attempts more of it than its competitors. But "hard to do" and "doesn't work well enough" can both be true, and 61 of 100 is not a fringe opinion.

The other two

Approachability. UI appears in 29 negatives, tutorial in 24, manual in 19. The recent reviews show what that costs: newcomers with 2.5, 5.4 and 13.2 hours describing "infuriating controls," "convoluted missions," and a learning curve they gave up on. Note the split — the historic negatives are veterans complaining about AI, the recent ones are newcomers who never got that far.

The memory leak. A 434-hour reviewer in December 2025, who owns the game twice over on two storefronts, reports that "the game has a memory leak, and has had one for years," making saving and exiting a chore after a few hours. Performance complaints are only 9 of 100, so this isn't universal — but it's the kind of long-lived defect that sits badly next to eight years of otherwise diligent patching.

There's also a quieter aesthetic criticism worth relaying, from a 458-vote reviewer: the galaxy "FEELS dead. It may be technically functional" but it doesn't feel inhabited. A perfectly simulated economy is not automatically a place with atmosphere.

The verdict

X4: Foundations earns a 7.5. What it builds is close to unique — a living, self-consistent economy you can insert yourself into at any level from smuggler to industrialist — and Egosoft have supported it for eight years with free updates and open development in a way that shames larger studios.

It doesn't score higher because two of its three pillars wobble. The door is too hard to open, and plenty of people who would love this game never get in. And once you're in, the empire you build is run by subordinates its own veterans describe as suicidal, which is a strange flaw in a game whose whole second half is trusting them.

Buy it on discount, accept that your first ten hours are homework, and keep the wiki open. If you want the same become-an-industrialist satisfaction with systems that behave predictably, Factorio and Captain of Industry are both easier recommendations — they just won't give you a galaxy.