I disagree pretty strongly with Golfer above.
The game offers a huge sandbox with a ton of interlocking systems that you can fuck around with. Its actually relatively similar in that regard to a game like Mount & Blade, as in that you are thrown into a world and free to do whatever. I suppose Kenishi is also like that, though I haven't played that yet.
Only it offers way more opportunities than M&B for you to make your fortune and is much heavier on content. You can focus on trading, on pirating, on exploring, on diplomacy and faction politics. And indeed also story missions.
And all of these things interlock in various complex ways. If you focus on exploring but forget to take care of your contacts, good luck finding a way to make a buck from illegal goods you might come across. Even story missions can come to a halt if you have shit reputation with that faction. And those faction politics are constantly changing, so there is a lot to take into account. And the game is actually super stat heavy in that regard and there are tons of different ways to go about your business even if you focus on one thing. Lets say you want to be pirate, will you get a crew of gunners and a heavy cruiser and blast your enemies in space or will you get a small ship and build it toward boarding combat? Will you also need experts crew in case you'll figh Xeno? Smugglers to gain your access to the black market? There are many possibilities and choices to make.
If you are looking for a linear RPG to play through a story from a to b this is indeed the wrong game. If you like free form gameplay and feel like larping immersing yourself in a sandbox this is an excellent game to take a look at.
Fair enough. I suppose I didn't find the different gameplay elements engaging enough in the long run. And leveling up your crew was just confusing as fuck, since I didn't know what most of these skills really do (read: are they as beneficial as the game makes them sound or not?) and nowadays I avoid anything like the plague that makes me trial and error too much.
And I figured that no matter how I play it it still comes down to basically the same gameplay experience since combat, diplomacy, planet exploration etc all seemed very narrow and limited in scope.
The few hours I spent with this game felt like a collection of mini games, and whereas I liked that in Star Control 2 (the minigames were arcadey there so they went by quickly and didn't bore me too much - also the NPCs are quirky and entertaining there and the story is fixed and pretty great) I didn't appreciate it here.
Also trading is boring as fuck.
