Recent reviews by Dunnlang

I really wanted to like this game. I waited for a year and a half after it came out, and the 3.0 patch, before I jumped in to give it a try. There are a lot of good ideas for a game here, but unfortunately none of them really come together into a real game. The UI is inconsistent and difficult to use. AI path finding is beyond awful. Both those issues make the game essentially unplayable.

I played for about 70 hours. I'd say 30 of those hours were my active involvement and the rest were the game running in the background while my traders earned money. I was earning ~1-2 Million per hour, which gave me a good cushion of cash to try out ships and mechanics. I spent those days watching YouTube guides. My recent playlist is full of easily 20 hours of X4 content now.

The biggest issue for me came after I finally got a pair of Destroyers and escorts. I made a small fleet and sent them to look for trouble. Unfortunately the trouble they found was path finding to the gate. Apparently to fix collision issues with large ships coming in and out of gates, they made it so large ships must go around gates and enter from behind. The AI tends to get stuck doing this and you might find half of your fleet several systems back while one ship just sits there. The fix for this would be to have an incoming and outgoing gate. Done. Just the same as they do for the highways in the game. I've had this game for 4 days and figured that out. This has been a problem since X3 and is still not resolved.

If you do micromanage every ship and effectively get them to a battle, the fleet management UI is still very bad, even after 3.0 updates. Ships won't control their orientation effectively or engagement range. It quickly becomes a mess as smaller ships tend to rush in and get destroyed. If you have them on defense instead, they tend to do nothing while their parent ship is attacked. There is nothing to do with a mid sized fleet anyways. You really need an absurdly overwhelming number of battleships to spam in and hope for the best.

The game really hinges on the economy, trade and building. Again, these are the areas where the UI is weakest. Systems do not interact well with each other. There are too many hidden submenus in different areas. Want to know how much each ship is earning per hour? This game never considered that.

These issues with this game impact its most basic functionality. I wish that it were a smoother game play experience. As it is, I still can not recommend this game.