X4’s store page says 79.9% positive across 30,159 reviews. That single number hides three separate
stories: a playtime cliff in the first ten hours, a second-largest review language most people would
not guess, and a ten-point dip the month a major update shipped. All three come from Steam’s public
appreviews endpoint (appid 392160), re-queried 2026-09-13.
The cliff is between hour two and hour fifty
The 1,200 most recent English-language reviews, read back to 28 March 2026, split by the reviewer’s recorded playtime at the time of writing:
Reviews written under two hours sit at 22.9% positive. The 2–10 hour band improves only to 38.0%. Then it moves fast: 72.8% at 10–50 hours, 88.5% at 50–200, and 90.5% at 200–1,000, flat at 90.0% past 1,000. That is a 68-point spread between the 0–2 hour band and the 200–1,000 band — for contrast, the same method run on Project Zomboid instead produces an arch that peaks around 50–200 hours and then declines past 1,000. X4 does not decline; every band past hour ten is happier than the one below it.
Read plainly, this is a game that loses three out of four people in their first evening and keeps nine out of ten who get past a working weekend.
What the unhappy ones are actually saying
37% of negative reviews mention the UI, menus, tutorial or controls — nearly four times the next topic. Bugs come second at 10%, monetisation at 9%.
UI also appears in 16% of positive reviews, which is the tell: people who recommend the game are still bringing up the interface, usually as the price of entry. It is not a minority complaint that a happy majority disputes. Both sides agree the interface is hard; they disagree on whether it is worth it.
Content depth is the one topic that appears more in positive reviews (9%) than negative (6%) — people who push past the interface tend to praise the systems underneath rather than complain about thinness. Monetisation splits almost evenly (9% neg, 10% pos); for a game with fifteen listed DLC, that is not the pattern you would predict, and expansion pricing does not read as a driver of the negative reviews here.
Method: keyword matching, not human coding. “The UI finally clicked” and “the UI is impenetrable” both land in the UI bucket. One review can match several topics.
What to do with this before you buy
The honest framing is that the store’s 79.9% does not apply to you on day one. The number that applies to your first evening is 22.9–38.0%. Whether you end up past 88% depends almost entirely on whether you push through the interface.
That is a decision you can make deliberately rather than discover:
- Budget the first ten hours as a cost, not as the experience. The data says almost nobody enjoys that stretch.
- The complaint is specifically the interface, not the systems underneath — which means the friction is front-loaded and learnable, unlike a balance problem that persists.
- If you know you will not spend fifty hours on a game, this dataset is a reasonable argument that X4 is not for you, and that is a legitimate conclusion to draw from it.
Our first five hours guide and which start to pick both exist to compress that stretch. This dataset is the reason they do.
Who is reviewing it, by language
X4 has 30,159 reviews across every language, queried per language code on 2026-09-13
(num_per_page=0, purchase_type=all, filter=all):
| Language | Reviews | Positive |
|---|---|---|
| English | 16,355 | 79.2% |
| German | 3,922 | 81.7% |
| Chinese (Simpl.) | 3,094 | 77.9% |
| Russian | 3,000 | 82.0% |
| French | 964 | 81.7% |
| Spanish | 410 | 82.7% |
| Brazilian Portuguese | 332 | 90.4% |
| Polish | 328 | 81.1% |
| Korean | 320 | 74.7% |
| Japanese | 360 | 71.1% |
| Italian | 247 | 85.0% |
| Chinese (Trad.) | 179 | 77.1% |
| Czech | 124 | 90.3% |
| Ukrainian | 107 | 86.0% |
| Dutch | 83 | 86.7% |
| Turkish | 73 | 76.7% |
English is a little over half the pool. The second-largest language is German, 3,922 reviews at 81.7% — ahead of Simplified Chinese (3,094) and Russian (3,000). Egosoft is a German studio, and German reviewers are both the largest non-English audience and a touch more positive than the English one.
Japanese is the lowest-scoring language with a meaningful count, 71.1% of 360, eight points under English. Brazilian Portuguese (90.4%) and Czech (90.3%) sit at the top on much smaller counts.
Reviews from Steam-store purchases run 25,198 at 79.4%; reviews from key activations run 4,961 at 82.5% — key-activated copies review the game three points higher than store buyers do.
June was the worst month, and 9.00 shipped in June
The 1,800 most recent reviews across all languages, pulled 2026-09-13 back to 10 May 2026, cut by the month each review was written:
| Month written | Reviews | Positive |
|---|---|---|
| 2026-05 | 221 | 85.1% |
| 2026-06 | 621 | 73.9% |
| 2026-07 | 483 | 75.8% |
| 2026-08 | 381 | 76.9% |
| 2026-09 | 94 | 72.3% |
May, before the update, reads 85.1%. June, the month 9.00 “Empire Update” shipped (10 June 2026), nearly triples the review count and drops eleven points to 73.9%. July and August recover two to three points without returning to May’s level. A big update brings the crowd it fixed things for and the crowd it broke things for to the review page in the same month.
Reviewers with playtime in the two weeks before writing read 86.9% (n=503); reviewers with none read 72.2% (n=1,297), sixteen points lower on more than twice the count. For a game played in hundred-hour stretches, a review written from outside a current session skews markedly harsher.
What the language and playtime cuts don’t settle
Steam does not expose refund status or which UI element (menus, map, trade interface, tutorial) drove a complaint, so those stay keyword-level. Reviews are written once, so the 200-hour band is a cross-section of different players, not the same players tracked over time. Language here means the language a review was written in, not the reviewer’s country.
Sources
- Steam appreviews endpoint, X4: Foundations (appid 392160) — 1,200 English and 1,800 all-language recent reviews, and per-language
query_summarytotals for sixteen languages, read 2026-09-13 - X4: Foundations on Steam — store listing and DLC count, read 2026-09-13
- X4: Foundations 9.00 “Empire Update” is Out Now! — 2026-06-10, read 2026-09-13
