Admittedly, there is probably more to the game than is presented in the first mission that has you flying around the sector on a "trading mission" that is apparently little more than an unspecified series of fedex quests. I say "probably" because I'll probably never know. There are upgrades that I can't nearly afford in-game which suggest that you can find things to sell by fighting pirates or mining asteroids, but after four hours of toodling around blindly in that first system, trying to buy and sell the same three goods over and over, I decided to stop and play something fun instead of something that felt so much like a horrible real-world job.
IM games weren't very good when they were the wizz-bang new thing in the mid-90s, which is why the genre went like a bottle rocket. It just feels like another pretentious art-house piece that barely remembered that it's supposed to be a game, but forgot that games are suppsoed to be fun.
