This is an old title I picked up during a steam sale on a "let's give it a go" purchase....

I really enjoyed the game despite it's age and linearity.

The graphics are good but not great. Considering the age of the game they are perfectly fine and give it that nostalgic post Wing Commander feel that I remember from the 90's.
The controls are simple and easy to pick up. i played with a mouse and this was easy to do everything required to win the game.
Audio is really good and best of all it doesn't stand out and overpower the actual gameplay like some games do. Dialogue is good for the main story line, but can get quite repetitive later in the game, particularly when you jump into a system or leave the trade station. I mostly ignored it. The music is often a dead giveaway as you load into a system and the encounter music plays before it fully loads. Oh look, the pirate music, I had best hit "r" on entry and target the closest hostile..... :)

The story is interesting at the beginning and has you flying over the entire galaxy map by the end. For me, there were 2 systems left undiscovered by the final battle and one of the rewards for completing the final battle is a key to one of the systems I missed. In fact you can't upgrade to level 20 until after the final battle as the last artifact is in that system that the key reward unlocks access to..

Dialogue is well done and just enough to move the story along and no more. There is some character development but not much. Fairly vanilla and obvious. As for the actual story and gameplay, it is very linear and the only reason that you do the side quests and bounty board missions is to unlock systems, get artifacts to level up, or to make money to upgrade in the early to mid game.

Despite that, I had a lot of fun and it was quite relaxing. There were a few crashes to desktop which forces you back to the last save, but I have played some other much more recent games that have crashed more than this.

Be careful of any scaling on your desktop as this can wreak havoc with the accuracy of your mouse inputs and prevent you from playing the game. Set scaling to 100% before you load the game. It will save a lot of heartache!

Overall a good game that isn't too difficult and a great blast from the past. Grab it if you see it on sale!