TL;DR: Looked promising but turned out to be a frustrating disappointment.

After you get over the excitement of playing a new game you get to explore, you come crashing down on facts such as how small the "universe" is, how you're punished for exploring said space in more than one way and how empty the end-game is.

The universe turned out to be what felt like 80 star systems with their own planets and curiosities, ALL of which you explore by pressing X. There are about half a dozen puzzles along the way but majority of planets you go through have literally nothing to offer. And since exploration is actually just flying to the nearest visible star, the exploration itself isn't exactly difficult. The places you do get to explore however rely on skills of your crew. Which basically mean nothing. When you have to roll for an event, you're given two numbers to roll. You roll once "dice" that goes from zero to 9 and another one that goes from 1 to 9. The proficiency of your crewmate gives a bonus to your chance of success, but you'll never get good proficiency bonuses unless you level the stats of your crew like a moron. And none of the dice rolling matters anyway, since you can save-scum your way through almost every single one of them. You then repeat this on every single planet as getting bad rolls screws you out of loot you're desperately going to need.

The actually difficult part of the exploration comes from sudden difficulty spikes in hostile ships. You see a star, fly towards it and whoops, you jumped by a fleet of hostile ships that have way more health, weapons and armor than you, let's hope your last save wasn't too long ago! And as a further insult, the game even tells you that Starcom (the military you work for) already knows a lot about the tech you have to go scrape up yourself. Want some shields? Go destroy ships that have shields themselves (that are quite possibly going to wipe you) and hope you get parts you can scan. Alternatively, you can find a overpowered pompous walrus that charges so much for those parts that you'll be wishing you were grinding levels in any other RPG. Resources which you have to fight for, BTW, Trading isn't exactly lucrative because no-one figured out a unified currency.

But after all that, when you finally reach the point where you feel comfortable in your ship with your shields, plasma guns, lasers, maybe even a warp drive, all the bells and whistles, you'll feel good. But then the game abruptly decides during a story mission that you've won already, And by that I mean the game basically reverts the enemies back to what they were at the start of the game. You'll finally have the ship you want but then you won't have anything to do with it. There just isn't any end-game why you'd want to keep going after you complete the story.

I'm sorry but no. The game looked promising but you can enjoy so many other things for the same amount of money. Which you'll most likely enjoy much more anyway.