This is one of my favorite games. When it first launched it was rough and borderline unplayable, so I wrote a very bad review. I kept it below.

Today, this game is amazing. Very few game breaking bugs, very few annoyances. And what was there before that made it great is still there. You'll get:
- Several long and interesting storylines
- A persistent universe in which you have total freedom and which is super rich in lore and history
- Dozens of unique and diverse spacecraft that you can fly yourself or command RTS style from the map
- An entire intricate economic simulation from supply/demand to production which you can become a part (and maybe the king/queen) of
- Incredible immersion

If you're the type of person like me whose dream it has been since childhood to play a space game where you can walk around everywhere, you can own many ships, you can land ships inside of each other, you can command a massive space armada or a merchant fleet or a mining concern or a pirate or anything else you want, then X is for you. Not just this one, all of them.

The game is not beginner friendly. Your best bet for getting into it are not really the Timelines missions, as the game suggests. You just have to boot up the persistent universe and have google on your second screen.

There are drawbacks. This is the best Eurojank you can imagine. Game mechanics are brilliant and engaging, graphics are good, sounds are good. But there are bugs. None that will ruin your game anymore (that I have seen) but sometimes it can be a bit annoying. The voice acting, especially in English, is sub par but that's not why you're playing the game.

Overall, this is a string 9/10 now for me and I recommend it to anyone who likes space games!

Old review from the release version:
--------------------

It is a f*cking crime that Egosoft is even allowed to charge money for this broken mess.
I will refuse to even call it a video game as this is a tech demo at best. This product is so chock full of bugs that you will end up cheering when something finally goes the way it's supposed to.

The problems start with the tutorials which are clunky, weird text-popups that only progress if you do exactly what it says in the popup. This doesn't sound too bad except the instructions are so lackluster that you don't know what to do half the time and I've ended up sequence breaking the ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ tutorial several times on accident.

The issues only go on from there. Periodically, you'll find that all your controls just freeze up and stop working altogether until you pause and unpause the game. The navigation system will regularly glitch out, sending you in the exact opposite direction you want to go. Sometimes it even ignores jump gates and highways and tries to send you to your destination in one straight 70.000km line.

I played some of the story missions until I was required to buy a ship and some antimatter cells to progress. To do this, I played missions to make money. Or at least I tried because half the time, missions will break entirely to the point where people you're supposed to pick up simply aren't there or you do all objectives perfectly just for the game to not recognize that you're done and you have to abort the mission.

I took a station building mission that required 6 turrets and some storage, so I built a station, planned a storage module with 6 turrets, spent hours grinding resources to get it built just to realize the game decided to randomly not build the turrets. After half an hour googling the issue, I found out that you have to re-place the module with the turrets planned on another node to work around this bug.

The game regularly just forgets things you did just seconds ago. Upgrades get discarded without reason which you only notice when you need to use them and realize they aren't there.

I managed to make 8 million credits with my station build mission after literal days of grinding the same resources again and again and having to rebuild the station in a different spot because the game doesn't tell you that there is a target area for this mission type. I decided to buy a freighter so I can use my new station to sell things to the galaxy. I invested my 8 million in this ship with medium modules just to wait another literal real life day for it to be built except the station simply refuses to build the f*cking ship. The timer is just stuck with no progress in sight because there are materials missing that aren't being resupplied.

I eventually canceled my ship and wanted to send one of my smaller ships to deploy a satellite but because Egosoft released this utter piece of garbage 4 years too early, something as simple as giving a ship the order to undock and fly somewhere is broken and simply won't work. The ship doesn't budge until I personally hop in, undock and let the captain take back over.

I can't even count how often my ship has clipped through station walls and got stuck on the inside. The encyclopedia in this game is utterly useless as 95% of entries are just empty. No explanation of what anything does, what it's good for or how it works. Not even something as basic as the ingame factions have encyclopedia entries explaining basic backstories which is something that even X2 had.

I could go on for days listing bug after bug after glitch after bug after glitch after unfinished feature. I have been playing the X series ever since I was a little kid. I used to play them with my dad and I've always loved the sheer freedom you have to do whatever you want whenever you want. Hell, I love the series so much that I literally have screenshots from X2 hanging on my walls as posters. These are some of my favorite games ever made. But this game is an unfinished mess with absolutely no redeeming factors whatsoever at this stage. Do not buy, even if you love the X series like I do. Even if you have nerves of steel, don't buy this f*cking sh*t. Words cannot describe the frustration and fury you will feel trying to get literally anything done in this mess.

Trade, fight, build, think? No. Try to trade just to be stumped by the horrible interface. Try to fight just to realize you can't shoot because the keyboard controls are frozen. Try to build until you realize half of your planning got secretly discarded and you now can't hire another builder, no matter how often you select one. Thinking only makes sense if your game works on any kind of logic but this game is not. It's hardly built at all. It feels like an early access title in the earliest of early stages. The fact that this game costs 50 bucks is a crime.

I hope someone at Egosoft reads these reviews and takes them to heart because as an avid fan of these games, I need you to know that I feel personally insulted that you dared lure me in to buy this game because it has the name of the X series just to deliver a broken unfinished steaming pile of dogsh*t. You should be utterly ashamed and I sincerely hope that this garbage gets fixed through updates sooner rather than later.

This is one of my favorite games. When it first launched it was rough and borderline unplayable, so I wrote a very bad review. I kept it below. Today, this game is amazing. Very few game breaking bugs, very few annoyances. And what was there before that made it great is still there. You'll get: - Several long and interesting storylines - A persistent universe in which you have total freedom and which is super rich in lore and history - Dozens of unique and diverse spacecraft that you can fly yourself or command RTS style from the map - An entire intricate economic simulation from supply/demand to production which you can become a part (and maybe the king/queen) of - Incredible immersion If you're the type of person like me whose dream it has been since childhood to play a space game where you can walk around everywhere, you can own many ships, you can land ships inside of each other, you can command a massive space armada or a merchant fleet or a mining concern or a pirate or anything else you want, then X is for you. Not just this one, all of them. The game is not beginner friendly. Your best bet for getting into it are not really the Timelines missions, as the game suggests. You just have to boot up the persistent universe and have google on your second screen. There are drawbacks. This is the best Eurojank you can imagine. Game mechanics are brilliant and engaging, graphics are good, sounds are good. But there are bugs. None that will ruin your game anymore (that I have seen) but sometimes it can be a bit annoying. The voice acting, especially in English, is sub par but that's not why you're playing the game. Overall, this is a string 9/10 now for me and I recommend it to anyone who likes space games! Old review from the release version: -------------------- It is a f*cking crime that Egosoft is even allowed to charge money for this broken mess. I will refuse to even call it a video game as this is a tech demo at best. This product is so chock full of bugs that you will end up cheering when something finally goes the way it's supposed to. The problems start with the tutorials which are clunky, weird text-popups that only progress if you do exactly what it says in the popup. This doesn't sound too bad except the instructions are so lackluster that you don't know what to do half the time and I've ended up sequence breaking the goddamn tutorial several times on accident. The issues only go on from there. Periodically, you'll find that all your controls just freeze up and stop working altogether until you pause and unpause the game. The navigation system will regularly glitch out, sending you in the exact opposite direction you want to go. Sometimes it even ignores jump gates and highways and tries to send you to your destination in one straight 70.000km line. I played some of the story missions until I was required to buy a ship and some antimatter cells to progress. To do this, I played missions to make money. Or at least I tried because half the time, missions will break entirely to the point where people you're supposed to pick up simply aren't there or you do all objectives perfectly just for the game to not recognize that you're done and you have to abort the mission. I took a station building mission that required 6 turrets and some storage, so I built a station, planned a storage module with 6 turrets, spent hours grinding resources to get it built just to realize the game decided to randomly not build the turrets. After half an hour googling the issue, I found out that you have to re-place the module with the turrets planned on another node to work around this bug. The game regularly just forgets things you did just seconds ago. Upgrades get discarded without reason which you only notice when you need to use them and realize they aren't there. I managed to make 8 million credits with my station build mission after literal days of grinding the same resources again and again and having to rebuild the station in a different spot because the game doesn't tell you that there is a target area for this mission type. I decided to buy a freighter so I can use my new station to sell things to the galaxy. I invested my 8 million in this ship with medium modules just to wait another literal real life day for it to be built except the station simply refuses to build the f*cking ship. The timer is just stuck with no progress in sight because there are materials missing that aren't being resupplied. I eventually canceled my ship and wanted to send one of my smaller ships to deploy a satellite but because Egosoft released this utter piece of garbage 4 years too early, something as simple as giving a ship the order to undock and fly somewhere is broken and simply won't work. The ship doesn't budge until I personally hop in, undock and let the captain take back over. I can't even count how often my ship has clipped through station walls and got stuck on the inside. The encyclopedia in this game is utterly useless as 95% of entries are just empty. No explanation of what anything does, what it's good for or how it works. Not even something as basic as the ingame factions have encyclopedia entries explaining basic backstories which is something that even X2 had. I could go on for days listing bug after bug after glitch after bug after glitch after unfinished feature. I have been playing the X series ever since I was a little kid. I used to play them with my dad and I've always loved the sheer freedom you have to do whatever you want whenever you want. Hell, I love the series so much that I literally have screenshots from X2 hanging on my walls as posters. These are some of my favorite games ever made. But this game is an unfinished mess with absolutely no redeeming factors whatsoever at this stage. Do not buy, even if you love the X series like I do. Even if you have nerves of steel, don't buy this f*cking sh*t. Words cannot describe the frustration and fury you will feel trying to get literally anything done in this mess. Trade, fight, build, think? No. Try to trade just to be stumped by the horrible interface. Try to fight just to realize you can't shoot because the keyboard controls are frozen. Try to build until you realize half of your planning got secretly discarded and you now can't hire another builder, no matter how often you select one. Thinking only makes sense if your game works on any kind of logic but this game is not. It's hardly built at all. It feels like an early access title in the earliest of early stages. The fact that this game costs 50 bucks is a crime. I hope someone at Egosoft reads these reviews and takes them to heart because as an avid fan of these games, I need you to know that I feel personally insulted that you dared lure me in to buy this game because it has the name of the X series just to deliver a broken unfinished steaming pile of dogsh*t. You should be utterly ashamed and I sincerely hope that this garbage gets fixed through updates sooner rather than later.