It's a good game overall, and I am glad I bought it. I'd give it 4.5 if it were possible. The most pressing issue of this game is its middle to late game - there is not enough currently to make these meaningful. The early game is great, maybe it's a bit barebones for now, but I presume devs are actively expanding that. You start out building different additions to your ship and researching technologies, and until you get to some later techs, you'll be struggling for resources, which keeps the game engaging. But eventually you outgrow this resource hunger and start accumulating things (crew, resources, buildings, items, money) and here is the problem - there is nothing to spend these things on. There is some combat (and it is reasonably fun), but you may have to chase it (especially if you want to see other factions fight in your presence). There is some diplomacy, but it's a bit rudimentary and not consequential (you can't help a faction "win"). There is some building (stations/ships for other parties), but these are just for sale as a missing, and also don't affect anything really. So all you can do is to stop caring about resource use, and just hop from star cluster to cluster until you stumble upon Eden - an Earth-like planet, which is the end of the game. When (hopefully) the late-game mechanics are added in the game, it's 5 stars.
The game is beautiful, and in-game stories are quite interesting, and also not pushy in a moral sense - you can be "bad" to an extent. I enjoyed the unusual perspective of the pre-historic people viewing the world as full of spirits, gods, and mystical creatures - all of whom have a real impact on everyday life - which is then combined with a constant struggle against famine and incessant small-scale warfare. The issue I had was with the gameplay experience - it felt like drowning slowly, even on "normal" difficulty. No matter how hard I tried to manage the limited resources, the situation kept on slowly getting worse without a chance of improvement. I guess this can be rebalanced in later releases. A challenge is ok, just give us tools/chance to address it... Future releases might also have a stronger overall narrative - beyond "lore" - weaved into gameplay, so the game feels like it has a direction with some stories told along the way, not just a collection of stories from the same folklore. I guess this was done to increase replayability via the "create your own story" approach, but I'm not sure it works. Overall I don't regret buying the game.
