more content than no mans sky!

For someone who doesn't want to read the whole review, here's a short version. The game is fun whilst being hard, but it's easy reloading makes it the fun hard rather than hard hard. There's so much customisation for your ship and fleet that you'll never want to stop trying to upgrade and there's the option to conquer the entire human race.

Recommend this game? Yes, because there's few games where it can be fun farming aliens, stealing their FTL Drives, Computers, Power Reactors, Cooling systems, and pretty much anything they have that you want. Or other things such as taking over the entire human race, meeting friendly aliens and then giving the warmongering members of their race Jump drives and profiting of off their raids, or building a fleet capable of destroying anything.

The game is astoundingly fun, but hard at the same times, see below for more on this. The controls are hard to master, I recommend you turn on auto-aiming before you even start the game, given than your going to be dog fighting other fighters at the start, and your hard-point lasers don't track targets. Once you get past the difficulty of the start and have your starting debt paid off, the game starts to get going, with player able to amass a massive fleet, if they can afford it. I personally took great fun in a smaller fleet equipped with the best equipment I could find. Buy a ship from one part of the galaxy and equip it with the best weapons there, then head ealsewhere to upgrade the reactor and engines, then elsewhere to upgrade it's shields.

Eventually you'll end up in an "upgrade triangle" as you end up earning enough cash on one lap to buy a new ship and have to do the whole thing again.

When you finally break out of the loop by starting the main story line, you end up fighting for the rebellion and attacking the Republic. This immediately breaks your upgrade loop as everyone now hates you, apart from the shield guys, but to get to them you have to go all the way through the heart of the Republic and carries the feeling of complete suicide. So you have to hope that you can keep your best ships alive, while only losing the cannon fodder ones. Realistic? Yes. Fun to play as you watch the last of your Osprey medium warships blows up? Noooooo. That's one of the three issues with the story, heres the other two:

The missions themselves are more varied than just fetch, deliver, or escort quests. Theres still a lot of those, but at least the main quest line is somewhat different. Though the scouting missions are absolute torture. They should be renamed "Destroy every ship at this star system by yourself, as there's no way any ship can sneak through the enemy forces there and we're to lazy to even try and help you."

The other issue is the narrative combat missions at the start of the mainline story line. At this point the game wants to paint the image of the player in a small ship still, say a fighter or a light warship. Me? I showed up in the Bactrian, the best human ship in the game and a small fleet, after previous play throughs had taught me that showing up to the rebellion in a light warship was a one-way ticket to suicide-ville. As it stands, the player has to have about 50mil credits invested in ships otherwise they get steam-rolled by republic ships. And then it's a coin toss as to whether you survive the mission as chances are the enemy will focus fire on you, your shields go down in two seconds and a minute later your now a gaseous vapor in orbit of the star. So I would say that needs rebalancing.

After the main story line ends, the player is turfed back out onto the galaxy, and can now go about building a giant fleet to subjugate all of humanity. I know there's some story beyond this, but then it becomes a hunt for clues as to where the next fragment begins.

All in all a very enjoyable game, that can be played on a laptop or Macbook without a proper mouse.

How is this game free??? I would of happilly paid...9.99...14.99?
Commodity trading? yes
Escorting? yes
Ship capturing? yes
Hauling jobs (freight and peeps)? job
Lots of Pirates? Yes
Bounty Hunting? Yes
Decent Ship customization? Yes...but not awesome...just decent...which is still fairly good..(7/10)
Simple fleet management? Yes...like follow, stay, group, focus fire for entire fleet (thats all the commands unless im missing something). useful and very easy to use..but simple
Lots of fun refences? yes

Plot? Sort of, i haven't really explored but there seems to be a fairly minimal one

bugs? no not even a single crash, glitch, issue, oopsie, or snafu

Its free, you'd be a fool not get it. I would buy it up to 14.99 happily, 19.99 hesitantly, and not over 20.00.

Also i'm unsure why it says only 8.5 hours, ive been playing it straight for days...maybe like 20+ hours? idk

Whats better then getting blown to bits, smelly fish, and hauling miners across the galaxy.

Its like no mans sky but free and better.

Amazing! I just love this game. I absolutely recommend this game

Game is not finished and is still great.

good stil being worked on

Amazingly awesome blast from the past, lose yourself for hours in this game, just like the original. lacking on storylines for now but the main one is pretty good. There are pros and cons compared to the original but mostly they balance out well.
Why not charge for this? I'd buy it.

very fun