Recent reviews by Toonfish

Easily the best space sim I've ever played.

Elite: Dangerous was too dry for me and Avorion is a bit more arcade-y but still has great combat and you can build your own spaceship however detailed or silly you want it.

Trading and building an economy with your fleet has been streamlined a lot in the 2.0 update but still has sufficient depth to be interesting.

The atmosphere is incredible and really gives you that serenity that only space games can give you. On multiple occasions I've spent hours just mining stuff after I lost track of the time.

The balance can be a bit iffy here or there but there's also a ton of mods that you can install to tweak the game to your liking.

Be warned though, if you know that you'll want to build your own detailed spaceships instead of downloading them from the workshop, be prepared to spend 100-200 hours on getting decent at designing and building spaceships (unless you have a background in 3d modeling) and then 5-40 hours per ship design, it can be a real time sink :D