An absolutely fantastic game and highly recommended, although only to those with a lot of patience as the learning curve is very steep. However, after a few hours of play you will begin to figure out how the game's various aspects work, such as trading and pirating, and you'll find yourself completely absorbed. Not only does the game look fantastic, but there is so much content available that you could put in 100 hours and not even have scratched the surface. A truly epic experience and a must-buy for fans of simulation games and science fiction.

X3 is not a game that you can just hop in and out of - it does take a fairly considerable amount of patience and time. It's a game that makes you work for your progress, and there is a lot of work to be done, but like anything worth doing, you have to put something in to get something out.

The graphics engine will put a lot of work on your system, old or new: it's a very pretty game. Very pretty. Take a good look at your specs before deciding whether you should buy this. There's also a hell of a lot going on at once - major star systems can frequently have a hundred or more ships flying around in them.

The GOD engine (an affectionate fanbase name for the AI overlord thing that regulates the universal economy) makes sure that the game is never quite the same from one universe to the next, and that the universe you play in will change over time - removing and adding stations and ship where it feels it necessary, which alters the overall direction of trade in the game, and can lead to some very interesting situations.

X3 is a very dynamic and fluid space simulation, and well worth getting into; but you will spend a couple of hours initially being totally lost and unaware of what to do. There is only a cursory tutorial, so you'll probably want to look through the Egosoft forums for answers to any questions you might have, such as "What in the world do I do!?" It is a sandbox and it is a very, very big one, luckily it's not all just sand: there's a lot to do, and the modding scene is amazing - which can only be a good thing - but the game is a massive time sink and, initially, very intimidating in it's lack of direction, and sheer open endedness.

If you've got the time and you like sand-box-space-sims of a truly epic scale; this is pretty much as big as they come.

X3:TC is a very great game, and even in its 2.1 version it's worth playing. However, I really wish that Virtual Programming (the guys who made the Mac port) would port the newer patches. (Though Egosoft, the original developers, release patches rather frequently, thus I can imagine that it's hard to keep up with that speed.)

X3:TC is an AWESOME game. Sadly, the company maintaining the mac port hasn't issued a patch in ages. As of this comment, the PC version is 2.7, with a pile of new content and better performance. The Mac version is still 2.1 or so.

This game is really really worth trying, but if you can, play it on a PC; you'll find it more satisfying.

X3: Terran Conflict is a huge game. All the features might seem daunting at first and it has indeed a steep learning curve. But if you dig into this game and spend some time on it you'll be amply rewarded.

The game consists of sandbox style gameplay, where you can choose which way you like to play. Some parts of the game are not unlike EVE, but there are a lot of differences as wel.

The ultimate goal is to dominate the entire galaxy and to do so you need money. There are a lot of ways to make money and you can choose which way appeals to you most.

There are some major questlines that propel the story forward, but there are a lot of random generated quests as well. If you don't feel like doing quests you can just trade, build or fight without having a quest for it.

All in all, if you like space sims this game is really worth the time investment needed to learn it. It can keep you busy for weeks/months.

There are however some annoying bugs, especially in the AI and autopilot, and some options/features are hard to find. But if you save often you can overcome those and you'll find X3 a really nice game.