In short, it is boring and overcomplicated.

Longer review. Much of the game is about watching the paint dry. Distances are vast relative to speed of ships. It takes several minutes of real time to travel longer distances even if you speed up the game 20 times (max allowed). You are forced to travel a lot. The game has ship movement system similar with space games. Your ships accelerate to much higher movement speed after a while (cruising). Unlike these other games you cannot steer your ship in the cruise mode without dropping out of the cruise. Also, proximity to hostile ships will terminate the cruise. Hostiles are everywhere. You cannot get rid of them by killing them as new ones seem to be spawned whenever you dock. This means that about 40-50 minutes of every hour played you are forced to watch your ships preparing for cruise, cruising from point A to point B and docking animations without virtually any input from you. Yay! Add an obtuse UI on top of it for fun.

The game has three components: story, manufacturing and ship combat.

Story (main story + stories of your officers) starts strong because of voice acting but only very early game has voice acting. The rest of the game you just read dialogue. The quality of dialogue is mediocre. You have zero choices in the story. The story missions are terrible. They mainly consists in travelling long distances for fetch quests or for no reason at all.

Manufacturing is overcomplicated. There are hundreds of different products and very complex production trees. However, you cannot set up a trade empire. There is no autosell function for example. It just boils down to making money by manually selling some easy to produce stuff, You need money to buy ships and ship components. Alternatively, you have the option to manufacture the ships and components by travelling a lot to gather the required materials.

Ship combat and associated ship customization is the most interesting part. However, the complexity serves no real purpose. You can win most fights by the following method. Build the largest ship available, put all armor and firepower to one side of the ship, turn the side towards the enemy, hold down the fire button until the enemy is dead.