I looked at the reviews on steam and such and if you look at the majority of them, the person has only played a few hours. So you can basically discount those people as either people who do not like the genre or they played when the game was heavily bugged (most egosoft releases are, because they are a very small studio) and did not return.
The game is PC only, as far as I know and looks great and plays great. At this point the bugs are mostly gone and now the game just needs some optimisation.
Yeah there is no multiplayer, but the X universe is about flying around in space, fighting who you wish and actually facing the consequences of being a pirate or attacking only one or two factions. You can build stations and trade with pretty much no limitation. If you wanted you could build ship yards and make your own ships. You could even become self sustainable and sell the end products for considerable profit.
You could build a fleet and sweep through systems destroying space stations and whole factions. At the moment I think the factions slowly rebuild, as they have considerable resources to pull from to rebuild. But I imagine one day some one will release a mod to allow total faction destruction.
Mods are another cool thing about egosoft games, they give people access to the resources pretty much straight away and some times include the mods in the vanilla version of the game if they consider it better than what was there or was not there.
It is a big game that takes a fair few hours of playing to really get into. Basically you have to decide if you want to invest the time and effort to start building an empire, or become a pirate and capture ships to pay for new upgrades and such.
I think many people did not know what the X games were about when they first started playing and left bad reviews because the game was not their game. Kids who think Battlefield and Black Ops are the best are not likely to like this game, but they might have tried it and then left negative reviews.
Basically I like the game because I like the genre and the satisfaction of building an empire or destroying other factions.
Up to you dude. Whew, long post.
Also some of the visuals are jaw droppingly beautiful. Sometimes I just fly around to look at the cool artwork in the game.
