this is not a hidden gem, its just garbage.
egosoft did not keep their promises even like a decade later - i was a early access supporter.
do not support this company and instead play games that are actual fun.
This feels like EvE, but worse. It's another case of a game that wants to be everything and fails at everything too. Flying a spaceship feels like you're manoeuvring around a plastic toy, the sounds are completely lacking any coherence and atmosphere. The first bit of combat outside the tutorial was against some kind of four-sided dice that just shoot lasers that always hit, make an annoying sound, and it's simply about who can soak more damage.
There's apparently also a "walking around" experience that might have been a good experience in 2005, and you get to meet plastic-looking aliens with some of the absolute worst garbage "AI"-generated voices I've heard in a decade.
New players do not gek any kind of "flow", you're thrown into a mess of a game; I was trying to follow the meagre choice of missions and ended up owning a huge base that can do nothing, with instructions to build stuff. How do I build stuff? Where do I get the parts for it? Map filters aren't helping. The base building process is apparently so convoluted that you need to refer to a shoddily written wiki thing on Egosoft's website.
Hardware management beyond keyboard, mouse, and maybe a gamepad is technically there but also a bit of a broken and confusing mess.
All of that is wrapped in a broken UI that's trying---and true to form failing---to wrap around a mess of features, the map has some weirdly broken overlays that manage to always be in the way.
I should just accept that "the space genre" is dead. All that's coming out is drowning in incompetent project management, a lack of a coherent vision, and absolutely no grasp on what a studio could reasonably accomplish. Aim for the sky, fall on your face. I just want to fly a damn spaceship and shoot stuff! Is that SO HARD? Get the basics right, and THEN MAYBE tack on an extra mechanic or two.
I've put years into the X games. Years. Star Wars mod & Battlestar Galactica mod on X3 are hand down the best mods for a game I've ever played. Was really looking forward to this.
So booted it up, looked at the controls, sat there for a while and remembered what vanilla Egosoft is and the design decisions they make...uninstalled, refunded (thanks GOG) and will never touch it again.