It has been 9 years, and online continues to be unplayable due to every session being filled with """"modders"""". Rockstar has clearly given up, or never cared.

75 hours into X4: Space Capitalism™, I had some fun times, and some less fun times... I really want to love it, but I don't think I do. It has some of the magic feeling for me that X3 had thanks to the admittedly very pretty universe and improved trade system, but it also has a lot of really frustrating quality of life issues that always make me think, ehhhh this could really be better.

Some AI and physics just plain and simple just do not work when you are watching it in-person and that drives me nuts. I want to watch my empire work in-person like some kind of space Bezos watching his minions box up 40lb bags of cereal marshmallows! But alas, that doesn't always work, and that really ruins some of the magic for me. A specific example that really made me sad was when I saved up enough Terran Bux™ to buy a size L mineral miner. I hopped on the bridge and told the captain "Mine all the things"! The ship moved into position, and then just.... sat there. My cereal marshmallow dreams had been dashed. Millions of credits wasted on a mining ship that couldn't mine (or so I thought). Once I left the sector though, I noticed it started filling up with ore! Why does this only work when I'm not looking at it?

Autopilot is much less reliable than telling the AI to fly somewhere. It has a tendency to just careen my combat space yacht™ into the nearest rock. One time my ship got stuck inside an asteroid somehow (thanks autopilot). The asteroid had no texture on the inside, so it was like being stuck in an invisible space potato with no way out. The physics' collision detection works on the inside of the space potato too for some reason, so I just had to bite the bullet and sit through the unforgivable 3 minute loading screen that you get when reverting to your last save.

The auto-save is miserable also. Whenever the auto-save timer expires you are met with a very sudden, complete halt of the game while it saves for like HALF A MINUTE.

In X3 there was this fun little thing where you could actually control the turrets on your ship. Can't do that in X4. There have been a number of times where I wished I had that ability when opening lockboxes, which are these containers full of usually valuable loot that people leave around in space for reasons, I guess.

Weird loading issues! Sometimes entire space stations wouldn't appear for me until I exit the whole game and re-launched it! Save+Load did not help. So on more than 1 occasion I rammed my ship into an invisible space station. Also, if you get a call on your Space Phone™ from someone like Dal Busta, sometimes it takes like 15 seconds just to load the image of Dal's face for 1 line of dialogue. This causes weird pacing in many conversations with the NPCs, and sometimes causes important messages (like police scans) to queue up behind this weird loading time.

Although interaction with NPCs is vastly improved from X: Rebirth, the voice acting is still only really 3/10, and interactions feel very much like a first script read.

Overall, I'd say this game is a big step up from X: Rebirth, sure. But the completeness of vision just isn't quite there for me.

I did still have fun, and I'll probably keep playing, but I'm gonna give this a thumbs down I think... I definitely believe a newcomer to the X series would be off-put by how unintuitive many things are (I know I hardly mentioned the menu, but wow, it's not great), and how jarring some of the issues are.

Maybe if there was a "meh" option instead of just thumbs up or down I'd pick that.

What is happening? How did I lose? 10/10

I've never reviewed a game before today, but I think this game deserves a positive one.

This game may superficially seem like "just another voxel based constructor", but it's really FAR more than that. It's got fun goals, tower defense, crafting, logistics, exploration, combat, and the single most dedicated developer I've ever heard of. This game has been worth every penny.

Give it a try.