Im thinking of buying it off steam, but the reviews talk about it being very buggy, but there have been multiple patches since then so maybe that has improved. Since my dreams of jumpgate evolution have been crushed, i thought this might be a nice alternative

So i suppose that is a no?

ok I bought the game and so far its not buggy .. its patched to 2.1 when you get it from steam

its a massive sandbox / eve offline type game

kinda hard to get into if you don't know what you are doing ... I'm still reading the f'ing manual !

It's an excellent game if you have the patience. The patches have fixed and enhanced a LOT of stuff with this game. I highly recommend it.

If you have a lot of free time then hell yes

  Digging up an old thread is asking for murder in most forums, but GB recently did quick look of Darkstar One and even with the relatively positive reception from the Jeff and Brad I feel it is necessary to defend the space sim genre.  Darkstar One was given a fairly positive reception but that game looks like a horribly mutilated piece of crap when compared to the X series. 

  Steam currently lists my X3: Reunion time at 116 hours with X3: Terran Conflict at 88 hours.  These times shame me because they are far too low.  Every time I leave work I consider loading up X3 and defending my space weed complexes from pirates, or maybe restocking my missile complexes so I can bring the fight to the pirates' home turf.  Maybe I'll spend some more time just exploring the universe and see if I can expand my empire.  No, no.. You know what, I'm gonna take my M2 capital ship with all my fighters and go fuck up some Split sectors!  Yeah! 

  Basically what I'm saying is go buy the X Superbox. Then when you wake up in 2015 and the world has already been destroyed in the Mayan apocalypse?  Look me up and feel free to hug me for making the last couple years of existence awesome... Or punch me in the balls because you lost your job while defending the universe.. You know.. Whatever..