This game is an absolute blast! Well designed, nice level of difficulty, and just all around fun. Just remember to upgrade your ship every chance you get or you WILL get you butt kicked.
This game is great for when you don't know what you want to play and just want to kill some time...until you notice you've been playing for 5 hours straight and you were supposed to leave for work 2 hours ago.
As my review is titled I found this game to be almost a clone or Dark Star One but better in every way. Lets begin the comparison and review. First the game is based on static space stations. In these stations you have text places you can go to. First is your Equipment, these are rated by level and specific to each group. The items to your ship can be upgraded. (assume like DS1 unless stated otherwise.) Hint. Turrets are key and broad sides are fun but stink in comparison. Upgrades in stations from a faction will be the same in a system. Thus all civilian (pirate or neutral) bases sell the same space ship stuff. To go to them you must be neutral. Each faction has different stuff and ships. The next tab. You will accidentally click this. You can buy ships here and you get credit from your current vessel on your next. Thus you can go up or down in size and lose nothing. So play around (this is different from (DS1). Then you have a bar you get news and bounties from and mercenaries.
Then you have missions and market.
The trick in the game is to know trading makes money but buy about 50% below market as you will not sell over the system average much. So the key is items with huge discrepancies and hoping at first. The missions are you you build support and friendship. Choose who you like. Diablo gives you pirate ships and lots of ports. Space cops give you big guns. You can also join mercenaries and traders guilds (do this fast). This is the backbone of the game. Are you a cop or a robber. Then get your mystery alien tech and it helps you to battle the giant evil.
Space battle is great. your kitted out ship vs and armada. As stated previously turrets are best because they auto target and hurt more. Recall money from trading is great. Missions money is sad. Mining is time intensive. If you want better stuff go to the next system and buy it.
Overall: 7/10 Fun game, keeps you busy for a bit, but definitely needs improving mid to late game.
The game is just "deep enough" to keep you interested to see the story's end.
Pros: Great game start, great music, good graphics, good little story, always something to do. Who knew space could be so busy?! :) Ships and equipment variety is nice, and do alter a bit the gameplay. Mission options vary enough so that you can easily switch as soon as you become bored of their individual type repetitive nature.
Cons: Trade becomes mid-game an inefficient way to make money and you will have to join the trader's guild to get high value trade runs and make any money out of it.
Visiting space bases quickly becomes irrelevant other than to shop or repair or mission related.
Combat also becomes simple mid-game, and half of the weapons seem inefficient. Pulse laser turrets are much better overall than the dedicated turrets, even with setting the AI to only shoot at specific targets. You can't really tell if the flak secondaries do anything, and the dumb missiles do to little DPS even after armor is down. (would be nice to have them lunch as torpedoes and be devastating as the description says).
Secondary weapons emplacements are always lateral, which is just like the broadsides, this makes it hard to target since they are not manually targeted.
Enemy encounters become simple, either you farmed missions and have good defenses so that you can stay there and pound anything, or you'll get overrun and shot down in a few salvos.
There a few little bugs but nothing critical, like: escort missions are really annoying, the other ships keep missing the track and sometime even double back to regain their proper initial path.