12 hours of gameplay in, only 1 restart. Still haven't gone very far in the story due to a few nagging issues.

- Responsive controls
- Deep mechanics
- Always something going on
- UPDATE: Amazing turnaround. Devs are actively fixing these things. This game is NOT dead in the water just because it hit EA.

- Same SPAZ humor/tone. I personally love it, but it's not for everyone.

- Minmax dropped the ball on a few design elements which I'm hoping are an early access gripe and not a real one.
- As it is currently, the Reputation system is arcane and misleading at best, and downright broken at worst. Characters that are friendly (50 personal rep, 20 faction rep) will gladly ignore the fact you just got double-teamed by a faction you both hate. At the same time, the game stresses that "every captain remembers everything", while not actually holding grudges or acting according to events.
- Plenty of early access unpolished bits. No key prompts on the fail-gates leading to a trip to the input screen during a firefight. HORRIBLE conveyance on things like goon requirements and how progression of a starbase works.
- Battlewagon mode is buggy as all hell. About 3 hours in I started "Wagon-dancing" by hitting the battlewagon key to have it issue orders to strike craft and missile systems, then immediately overriding it to manual-fire weapons according to their cooldowns. The reason I started doing this was primarily a sense of frustration with its targeting priorities. Lock onto a ship and the gun turrets totally ignore it in favor of a different ship that happens to be just outside of your firing angle, which is blows your cooldowns trying ineffectually to hit (I know WHY it does it: The thing I want to hit isn't quite in range, so it goes for something that WAS in range at the moment I locked on, but it's too slow to realize that the thing isn't even on that side of my ship anymore)

- Unclear choice of aesthetics. SPAZ2 is at its heart an exploration and growth game, so why does my ship look equally ♥♥♥♥♥♥ 12 hours in as it did when I was scrounging for junk? There is already a 0-5 star quality system for parts in place, use it to determine how "closely" a piece sticks to the ship or something. 0 star and junk parts? Float those suckers next to the ship like they are currently. 5 star? Break out a blend tool and stick that component ON the ship. It doesn't have to look amazing. It just has to look like I'm not using scrapyard material.
- Certain voice assets are VERY out of place and/or disturbing. Random bandits will scream "PLEASE DON'T MAKE ME TAKE MY MEDICINE NO PLEASE", seemingly without provocation. Coming from games like Borderlands, disturbed bandit characters and their meatbicycles usually don't bother me in the least, but this is just...upsetting. Some of the lines here just feel raw and uncomfortable, not based on a particular headspace or characterization. Wearing my flesh as a suit? Works for me. Paint your ship with my blood? Great! Complaining that your hands look like balloons? Sure! It's like the airlock humor in SPAZ. Why add this other line that is nothing like the rest, is very emotionally voice-acted, and has no bearing whatsoever on the game or the bandits as characters?

All-in-all, a beautiful and playable early access that FEELS like development was stalled to throw a ton of polish on it so it would catch people's eyes during early access. You can tell that there aren't any broken underlying systems here though...just unfinished ones. Early Access done right.