X3: Terran Conflict
Worth it · Action · 2008
Steam Deck PlayableThe verdict
BUY IT.
Worth it at $15.99.
- Length
- 48.4h
- Value
- $0.33/hr
- Reviews
- 86% positive
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Minimum on the Steam store: 1 GB of memory, 10 GB of storage. Runs on Windows, macOS, Linux.
It is the year 2938. The long wished-for encounter of the X Universe and the Earth holds both joy and sorrow for the people. Despite flourishing trade, the clash of the diverse races, cultures and life forms creates new tensions, mistrust and open conflict that need to be overcome!
What drives the score
How to read this
Every input gets a grade, S to D, read from the buyer's side. The score is multiplicative, so an input only counts as raising when it sits near the top of its own scale. Anything with real room left is holding the score back, because that room is the gap to 100. ▲ marks a lift, ▼ a drag or a dock, ? an input we do not have, • a fact this genre's score does not use. The exact weights stay secret.
The value story
The lowest price on record is $1.59, set in July 2025. It has been discounted 83 times in the 14 years tracked here, typically at 70 percent off, with about 6 weeks between sales. Today it is at full price. The last sale was about 2 weeks ago, and on this game's rhythm the next one tends to arrive within 6 weeks.
Value puts it in the top 2 percent of the games it competes with. It is pricier than 87 percent of its genre, and better reviewed than 90 percent. Among the games that feel like it, Endless Sky (free, scores 83) beats it on value, while it beats X4: Foundations ($49.99, scores 60).
Critics scored it 73. Players sit 13 points higher at 86 percent, which usually means a game that plays better than it reviews.
Steam's global achievement data says about 13 percent of players ever finish it. On a 48.4-hour game, that is a lot of paid-for hours most people never see. 1 of the 414 Steam-purchase reviews sampled here comes from a buyer who refunded the game, sampled from reviews written March 2020 to September 2026. Inside the two-hour refund window, 58 percent of the 310 reviews written there were positive, against 86 percent overall, and those are 15 percent of everything written about it.
48.4 hours to finish it, 211 to exhaust it. The completionist tail is 4.4 times the campaign.
The drop-off
28% start to 13% finishA normal fall-off for a game this long. Steam global achievements
Players
32 players at peak in the last day.
The chart appears once this game has been counted more than once.Player counts via SteamSpy.
What players say
I had been searching for a game in which I could relax and chill out, preferably with my own set of music, and I was fed up with my usual go-to games for this purpose. I needed something else entirely. That was the moment when I remembered I had a game exactly for that. Flying in space. That's the stuff! The X3 game for relaxing purposes? Insane, isn't it? Well, I'm not swayed that easily. Yeah, I was in the past...
Always loved this game. one of the better space games, old but definitely good and fun for many many many many hours :)
Compared to X2-The Threat and X3-Reunion, this one is even harder than X3-Reunion, more time consuming before you hardly notice any ranking improvements necessary for buying better goods/stations/ships. In X2 you were settled after the first 4-7 plot missions, had a good view on the universe and the ship speeds and maneuvrability felt better. This one just feels vast and soo very slow to do anything, like a time...
Player reviews from Steam: the most helpful all-time, plus the newest that clear the same quality bar, with the hours each player had put in when they wrote it. The mix of Recommended and Not recommended follows the game's Steam ratio. Rotates daily. Opinions are theirs.
Cite this score
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X3: Terran Conflict scores 72/100 on the BANG Score (worth it). The BANG Score rates what a game is worth for the money. Via Steam BANGERS. https://steambangers.com/game/2820/x3-terran-conflictThe BANG Score is one number for value, 0 to 100: price against how it reviews and how long it was built to be. It answers the money question and stops there; whether the game is for you is still your call.
Reviews set the ceiling and price moves you inside it, so a cheap game that reviews badly cannot climb. Ratings from few reviewers are shrunk toward the middle, so 100 percent from nine people does not outrank 96 percent from ninety thousand. Length comes from HowLongToBeat where it can be matched, measured against a per-genre floor so a five-hour narrative game is judged against other narrative games rather than against a sixty-hour RPG. Where no verified length exists the score says so and carries a dock, because the biggest input is then a guess. The full method, including where it is weak → Steam reviews as of Sep 23, price as of Sep 24.
A number here look wrong? Tell me what it got wrong and I will look at the inputs behind it.