In this game, you're send to a planet to terraform it. When you arrive, the planet is a barren wasteland. The game eases you into it with some simple improvements to you oxygen, inventory size, flashlight, and then building a small base with some power and equipment to terraform the planet.
You gather your resources from around you, add more machinery, collect more and build more. It's simple and rewarding, especially in the beginning when you unlock new, better machinery quite often. You can explore the world, check out shipwrecks (and there is a reason why there are so many shipwrecks), find rarer materials and unlock more schematics.
Later, you no longer need to manually collect all the resources from the ground, but can mine for it. Then you get drones to do the collecting for you and you can focus on... well, whatever you want. As you terraform the planet, it changes, and this is probably the coolest thing about the game, the way the world changes from a desert planet to lush forests and waterfalls.
I love the mix of gameplay elements and the way the world changes around you. I probably finished the game 5 times already, and they keep updating the game, even after the 1.0 release, adding more content to pull me back into the game.
I really love the soundtrack, or rather, loved the soundtrack, because they completely changed it from early access to 1.0, and I really liked the music prior to 1.0, but now it's a just generic background noise, unfortunately.
There are some things not so great, I wouldn't recommend playing it on a laptop without a dedicated GFX card, because performance is not so great on my old laptop. Stuff has a tendency to pop-in and it doesn't bother me on my desktop, but on the slow laptop I had to tone down the graphics a lot and stuff just pops in from a few meters away.
Anyway, the game gets a strong recommendation from me, I love this game.