Alright, put 22h into it and I think it's time to put it away and wait for full release. Impressions:
1. The game's presentation of its mechanics is awful. It's really not a complicated game, but it sure does its best to seem that way, while the tutorial is extremely unhelpful. I fully expect large amounts of people to boot it up, go through the tutorial, think "wow, this is some autistic shit for sweaty grognards that you need to put 100+ hours in just to get the basic mechanics down" and go ask for a refund. It's really not, the game is, in some aspects, perhaps even too simple.
2. The game loop is fairly solid, but suffers from excessive repetitiveness. Fly out, dock, strip everything valuable from the wreck, repair, fly back, sell, repeat. There ought to be more variety to break up the monotony, ideally by making the wrecks less same-y. It's also quite grindy, at least at the beginning.
3. Procedural NPCs and the whole dialogue system is terrible. It just is, no matter how many different conditions you slap on it – at the end of the day, you just spam whatever it is you need raised and are done with it.
4. Ship systems and everything connected to it are super fun. So is all the stuff related to equipment, etc. – it's the good kind of autism.
5. Stations and non-salvage aspects of the game in general are very barebones and could use significant expanding upon. There's basically nothing to the OKLG other than a trade and recruitment hub, which is like the bare minimum.
6. Bugs. Usually not gamebreaking ones, but they are there and they're numerous.
7. Despite the game frequently advertising itself as super hardcore etc., I actually haven't died once. You aren't really in any danger if you know what you're doing.
Even though most my points are complaints, the game overall was pretty fun, just feels like it needs more time in the oven. And hopefully some meaty content expansion to break up the grind. Looking forward to 1.0